
Growth Growth Growth
Human History and the Planetary Catastrophe
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Growth Growth Growth retells history as a succession of pivotal crises linked to economic growth. Beginning with agriculture ten thousand years ago, each crisis led to an impasse until human ingenuity devised a technical 'solution' to fix it. These solutions included the alphabet, paper, clocks, guns, the printing press, the steam engine, the petrol engine, electricity, nitrogen fertilizer, and the computer. Each solution, however, played a part in the next crisis.Growth-driven crises led to the world wars of the first half of the twentieth century, including the atrocities of Stalin, Hitler and Hiroshima. The brief 'golden age' of capitalism of the 1950s and 1960s gave way to the ultra-corporate capitalism that, in one variant or another, is now the global economic system. Julian Cobbing's lively account exposes the historical roots of our converging problems - the destruction of the environment, the massacre of other species, the running down of oil reserves, global heating, and the nuclear threat to all of us. This time there is no technical solution, since we are devouring the Earth's finite resources. Cobbing reminds us that we are just one species in a planetary life system which could dispense with us if we are not needed
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Information
Table of contents
- Front cover
- Title page
- Copyright
- Contents
- 1. Growth and the Human Crisis
- 2. Our Relationship with Everything Else
- 3. Humans Emerge within the Gaian System
- 4. Agriculture
- 5. Why Europe?
- 6. Imperialism
- 7. Steam Engines and City Pox
- 8. Electricity and Oil
- 9. Capitalism
- 10. War, 1914-45
- 11. Stalin and the Terror
- 12. Auschwitz
- 13. Hiroshima
- 14. The Golden Age and its Breakdown
- 15. The Corporate (Neoliberal) World Order
- 16. The Post-Gutenberg Age
- 17. Population Growth and Environmental Destruction
- 18. Heating the Planet with Oil
- 19. The Current Mass Extinction
- 20. Genocides
- 21. The Nuclear Shadow
- 22. Financial Crises
- 23. The Gathering Storm
- 24. Will our Species Survive?
- Endnotes
- Acknowledgements
- Back cover