Whispers in a Whirlwind

The final chapter opens with a brief critique of tech evangelism as it relates to sustainability, innovation, product life cycles, demand management, and social/political governance. I argue that many of the expectations surrounding green technology, cultivated across the ideological spectrum, are inconsistent with genuine ecological sustainability. I then set out some general criteria for a scale of economic production respecting the earth’s biocapacity. Key to this agenda, I assert, is an absolute reduction in the matter-energy throughput of economic processes. This reduction, guided by a variety of ecological (as opposed to economic) sustainability measures, should be the guiding framework for determining an appropriate scale for resource extraction, manufacturing, distribution (logistics), consumption, and waste disposal.