What Determines a Limit to Growth?

Amidst the constant barrage of modern apocalyptic fear porn masquerading behind a pseudo-scientific veneer, we are told day in and day out that the world is racing to an ecological disaster that will undoubtedly destroy all life under floods and heat caused by human activity. If global warming doesn’t kill us, then certainly terrible new pandemics will do the job, and unless we don’t radically alter all of our belief structures, value systems and behavior according to a Great Reset or “Great Carbonization” then we are doomed.

The assumptions we are expected to adopt about human nature, ecosystems and the universe itself by those social engineers promoting this supposed reform of civilization presupposes absolute limits. We are told that nature is characterized by limits to growth. We are told there are limits to the universe (outside of which the universe apparently ceases to exist and before which there was no universe). We are told that natural ecosystems as they are found today whether desert or forest are in natural states of “homeostasis” defined by perfect balance and that all disruptions caused by human activities into such supposed states of “balance” are also un-natural. In this cynical narrative of reality, human life is the most un-natural thing as our species alone has risen in numbers, quality of life and life expectancy in ways that no other species has yet done.

This quality of change characteristic to our species can either be considered a cancerous tumor killing mother nature as some neo-Malthusians do… OR we can take a healthier approach by looking at the quality of creative reason which gives our species the power to not only conceptualize the various boundary conditions to nature… but then to supersede them by making fundamental discoveries which translate into leaps in scientific and technological progress.

In this Rising Tide Foundation lecture, Cynthia Chung tackles the question of “limits to growth” from a variety of levels in order to demonstrate that the only fundamental limit to humanity’s capacity to grow, create, share and discover within a constantly growing, creating universe, is found in 1) our lack of imagination, 2) our lack of political will and 3) our lack of understanding.

Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and a writer at Strategic Culture Foundation, consider supporting her work by subscribing to her substack page.