the time has come to accept decreased growth in some parts of the world, in order to provide resources
for other places to experience healthy growth. Benedict XVI has said that “technologically advanced
societiesmust be prepared to encouragemore sober lifestyles, while reducing their energy consumption
and improving its efficiency”.
135
194. For new models of progress to arise, there is a need to change “models of global
development”;
136
this will entail a responsible reflection on “themeaning of the economy and its goals
with an eye to correcting its malfunctions and misapplications”.
137
It is not enough to balance, in the
medium term, the protection of nature with financial gain, or the preservation of the environment with
progress. Halfway measures simply delay the inevitable disaster. Put simply, it is a matter of
redefining our notion of progress. A technological and economic development which does not leave in
its wake a better world and an integrally higher quality of life cannot be considered progress.
Frequently, in fact, people’s quality of life actually diminishes – by the deterioration of the
environment, the low quality of food or the depletion of resources – in the midst of economic growth.
In this context, talk of sustainable growth usually becomes a way of distracting attention and offering
excuses. It absorbs the language and values of ecology into the categories of finance and technocracy,
and the social and environmental responsibility of businesses often gets reduced to a series of
marketing and image-enhancingmeasures.
195. The principle of the maximization of profits, frequently isolated from other considerations,
reflects a misunderstanding of the very concept of the economy. As long as production is increased,
little concern is given towhether it is at the cost of future resources or the health of the environment; as
long as the clearing of a forest increases production, no one calculates the losses entailed in the
desertification of the land, the harm done to biodiversity or the increased pollution. In a word,
businesses profit by calculating and paying only a fraction of the costs involved. Yet onlywhen “the
economic and social costs of using up shared environmental resources are recognized with
transparency and fully borne by those who incur them, not by other peoples or future generations”,
138
can those actions be considered ethical. An instrumental way of reasoning, which provides a purely
135
Message for the2010WorldDayof Peace
, 9:AAS 102 (2010), 46.
136
Ibid.
137
Ibid., 5: p. 43.
138
BENEDICTXVI,Encyclical Letter
Caritas inVeritate
(29 June 2009), 50:AAS
101 (2009), 686.
