When millions of caterpillars chew away at cultivated plants they are seen as pests. But, when heavy equipment chews away at wilderness it's called "economic growth." It "creates jobs" but what does it really accomplish?
Minus the pretext of housing-starts and construction jobs, the main impetus is to flatten nature and accommodate endless numbers of people. This is all happening on a planet that isn't getting any larger. People keep buying into the fable of endless greener pastures. Many of them are actually brown, with so much desert construction despite shrinking water supplies.
There are roughly 3,000,000 more people in the U.S. each year and
75,000,000 more on the planet annually. This growth would automatically be treated as a crisis if other species were perpetrating it. We would expect them to live in balance with their surroundings. But humans are supposedly of supernatural origin, so it's OK to obliterate wilderness as long as we "plan" for constant crowding.The wide open spaces that lured people to America are being chipped away daily. With the potential for a BILLION people by 2100, imagine America with far less open space, and industrial blight (like wind farms) on much of it. Even if people are corralled in denser housing, they will spread out on vacation and crowds will grow everywhere. This scourge on the land is welcomed by the construction industry and logged as GDP growth.
There's much talk of living efficiently and reducing the human footprint, but when it actually happens it's called a recession. In many ways, a recession is based on the expectation of endless population growth. The GDP has shrunk, but why must it keep growing in the first place? Without more people, we wouldn't constantly need to create more jobs; more of them funded by government loans now. In a steady-state system, we could refine the economy instead of just fattening it all the time.
Housing starts should be dropped as a leading economic indicator since they indicate bloat, not health. People buy fat homes with money they don't really have, which enables slick operators to do the same. Investors get involved and the whole sham collapses. Endlessly-growing resource consumption is the disease, not the cure, for our economic woes. But more growth is being peddled as the answer. People are still playing games with money while pretending the physical size of the economy is irrelevant.
In a sane world with a stable population and steady-state economy, the construction industry could scale back and finally operate in balance. Its main focus would be repairing old structures or replacing them with new ones. Since the Earth is FINITE, the entire economy should stop trying to grow all the time to pay off increasing debts. Global replacement-level birth control is the first step on the road to equilibrium.
E.A.