The Culture of Stopping

Our culture has no concept of stopping. We continue to build motorways and airports for a future in which cars and planes may no longer exist. We-re converting our planet from a natural one to an artificial one in which the quantity of man-made objects - houses, asphalt, cars, plastic, computers and so on - now exceeds the totality of living matter. And while biomass continues to decline due to deforestation and species extinction, the mass of man-made objects is growing faster than ever. We-re on a treadmill to disaster.

To get off this treadmill, argues Harald Welzer, we need to learn how to stop: as individuals and as societies, we need to stop doing what we-re doing and say -enough-. We find it hard to do this because our culture has trained us to regard endless escalation as desirable, and we-re reluctant to surrender the material benefits of growth. But as long as the expansive cultural model continues to prevail, there will be no change of course in favour of sustainabl