…we don’t need to keep making brand new things from brand new materials to keep growing.

That we will (must?) keep growing remains implicit in this quote from the Hannah Thomas article, as nearly everywhere in our culture.

Yet our cultural belief in endless growth, and in endless growth as in fact essential, seems a primary root of damage our culture does to ecologies that would otherwise sustain us.

“Circular economy” means nothing but business as usual, if the circle only includes birth and not death.

As Permaculture co-originator David Holmgren has suggested, an industrial culture cannot keep toxins from its industrial processes, even “circular” ones, walled off from the rest of the world.

And as Natural Step principles indicate, living systems cannot forever tolerate our industrial culture’s violation of those principles.

Ever more products and services, no matter how clever and ‘innovative’ and ‘green’ we might imagine them to be, is not a paradigm shift for a culture obsessed with products and services as ‘solutions’ to all our problems.

In our addiction to endless growth, we damage not just other living systems — we also damage our own spirits, our souls, our psyches. “Products and services” cannot substitute for actual human connection and interdependence — with each other and with all living systems. Commodification and monetization of every aspect of our lives remains pathological, no matter how clever we think we are at doing it.