Life after growth 

Gordon Clay here. Richard Heinberg in a March 3, 2010 article, Life After Growth: What If the Economy Doesn’t Recover said that "...one of the tenets of our modern industrial society has been that the economy is cyclic. There may be a few down years, but they will always be followed by an upswing. People may lose their jobs, but there will always be newer, better, more interesting jobs we can be trained to occupy. Although the growth of the economy may go through stagnant periods, it will always rebound.

"But what if the rules have changed? What if we are living in a period where the trend is downwards not upwards? What if employment as we know it is a thing of the past? What if the goal posts have been moved, the rules rewritten, the game changed? What if the decades-long era of economic growth based on ever-increasing rates of resource extraction, manufacturing, and consumption is over, finished, and done? What if the economic conditions that all of us grew up expecting to continue practically forever were merely a blip on history's timeline?

"We may be going through the most difficult transition that humans have ever experienced on earth. The truth is that we have been living out an addictive fantasy for some time and we must change if we are going to survive. We can not continue to have an economy that takes more and more of the earth’s resources and turns them into garbage. We have to live more sustainably if we are going to live at all.

"If we make sound choices as families and communities, life can actually be better for us in the decades ahead."