Earth Day was started 40 years ago by former U. S. Senator of Wisconsin Gaylord Nelson as an educational “teach-in” for students. Now, in its many forms, Earth Day is celebrated by one billion people in more than 190 countries.

Over the years, the environmental movement has also gained strength, introducing initially controversial programs and ideas such as recycling, conservation, reuse, organic food, green roofs and sustainability. These practices have become embedded in our lifestyles. But despite these successful programs, we remain faced with an environmental day of reckoning because we are afraid to confront our own culpability in destroying the planet.

Western economies have become too dependent on consumers to prop up profits. The recent economic crisis revealed that when people don’t buy stuff, our economy suffers.

In 1972, the Club of Rome published Limits to Growth, which at the time was ridiculed for calling for a curb on our economy. Its theme was that exponential growth would eventually lead to economic and environmental collapse.

Nearly 40 years later, its predictors have come true.

York University economics professor Peter Victor takes up the idea, writing Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster. He argues that growth isn’t achieving expected goals: eliminating or reducing poverty, protecting the environment and providing full employment.

Instead, poverty remains a continuing scourge, unemployment is a nagging problem, the gap between the wealthy and poor grows ever wider and the earth’s resources are quickly being depleted. The idea of peak oil, for instance, where the extraction of oil is slowing down, was once laughed at. Now it has become accepted government policy. Climate change has become a matter of public debate, the oceans are turning more acidic, there are more chemicals in the air, water and land, and plant and animal species are dying off in record numbers every year. Canadians have seen firsthand the limits of growth with the social dislocation caused by the collapse of cod fishing. What happens when all the fish in the seas are gone?

“Our economic system is causing this,” said Victor. “We are sold a bill of goods that growth reduces poverty.”

If the world’s poorer countries eventually achieve their own industrial and agrarian revolutions, the world’s finite resources will be put under even more stress, creating what would be an environmental and societal conflagration. The idea of a no-growth economy would begin with establishing new measures of success and the elimination of “status goods.” It means placing limits on the Earth’s materials, energy and land use, such as imposing a carbon tax to make the price of goods more meaningful, encouraging recycling and reusing. Other ideas include promoting local economies, cutting resource use and waste emissions through taxes, and cap and trade.

Victor also promotes full employment, where people would receive a guaranteed annual income, while working less, but having more leisure time to enjoy.

Even Prof. Robert Solow, the Nobel laureate for economic growth, stated in Harper’s Magazine that “I think it’s perfectly possible that economic growth cannot go on at its current rate forever.”

But at the moment, the idea of changing our capitalist system is only talk and a far-off idea that no person or institution wants to think about. But the day will come when our blue planet will revolt and impose a harsher penalty to our profligate material needs than anything we as a society could impose on ourselves.