The history of human progress, like the historical development of Earth’s biosphere, has demonstrated a steady increase in what Lyndon LaRouche has termed energy flux density. The margin of difference between the energy flux density requirements of the system as a whole, and the actual energy flux density expressed by given living organisms and human societies, is the determining factor in all extinction events of both living organisms and human societies. This energy flux density requirement is constantly increasing with the development of the galaxy, and of larger systems, as a whole.

These requirements correspond to what we might call the structure of physical economic time, and thus, there is no simple collapse to an “earlier” point in economic time. We are not simply sliding up and down the hill of economic progress. The only way to recover from a dark age, is to force the sorts of increases in energy flux density that will make up for the attrition of the intervening period. During all of that time, we were not “standing still.” A zero-growth society is a collapsing one. “Standing still” can only be accomplished by increasing the margin of physical economic productivity in tandem with the steady increase of physical economic consumption.

In other words, human progress is not measured against some fixed backdrop called absolute time, of the sort posited by Newton and taken to absurd extremes by Laplace. Human progress is measured against the constant evolutionary development of the universe as a whole. It is a relative time, defined by the relationship among physical processes of anti-entropic development. The kind of so-called “zero growth” or “sustainable development policies” proposed by the lunatics known as environmentalists, is in reality a policy of collapse. The attempt to stop human development will result — by their own admission — in the rapid death of 5 to 6 billions of people on this planet over the course of the coming decades.