Presumably, technology has made man increasingly independent of his environment. But, in fact, technology has merely substituted nonrenewable resources for renewables, which is more an increase than a decrease in dependence.

We say we need to clean up the environment; to clean up the environment, we need to be richer. But maybe getting richer is actually making us poorer.

There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the Earth as if it were a business in liquidation.

Even if we could grow our way out of the crisis and delay the inevitable and painful reconciliation of virtual and real wealth, there is the question of whether this would be a wise thing to do. Marginal costs of additional growth in rich countries, such as global warming, biodiversity loss and roadways choked with cars, now likely exceed marginal benefits of a little extra consumption. The end result is that promoting further economic growth makes us poorer, not richer.

The problem with the World Bank has to do with development - the spreading of Western over-consumption worldwide.

Malthus has been buried many times, and Malthusian scarcity with him. But as Garrett Hardin remarked, anyone who has to be reburied so often cannot be entirely dead.

We need an economics fit for purpose in a finite and entropic world.