And yet, just last week, I got a call from someone attempting to see me distribution to the US, who was flabbergasted at the notion that we wouldn’t want to keep growing. I tried to explain, to show him that constant growth is the definition of cancer. He, in turn, was shocked that I would compare such a horrible disease to the basis of our economy.

The comparison, however, is valid. Cancer eats our bodies’ cells, warping them to its own goal of limitless growth. Eventually, it kills the host. Our economic philosophy devours our planet in the name of constant growth, leaving disease, malnourishment and environmental destruction in its wake. We throw huge amounts of money at cancer research, but our primary method of fighting cancer remains to bring the host as close to death as possible, in the hopes of killing the cancer cells before the host person actually keels over. Out attempts to stop either illness by throwing money and more toxins at it have already proven fruitless. Yet we are unwilling as a society to examine the root causes, or to take the steps that would create a healthier environment and stop the disease. Interestingly, some of the causes of cancer – environmental toxicity would be a catch-all for exposure to toxins in the air, water, land, food, buildings and workplaces – are the by-products of constant growth. To cure our dominant disease, I suggest, we will have to look closely at our dominant economic paradigm.

Industrialization relies on cheap fuel and cheap labour to make “stuff” – whether the eventual price tag for that stuff is cheap or expensive. But cheap labour means people can’t afford to buy anything except the cheapest products – those created with maximum exploitation of human and natural resources, with the greatest amount of offloading of long-term costs (ie. water use and pollution). But industrialization, which produces ever more stuff, needs consumers to purchase all that stuff. Without consumers, there is no profit in production. The answer has been to make more cheap products more shoddily, selling the same thing to people repeatedly over their lives, as products’ lifespans get shorter and shorter.

In other words, industrialization by its very nature depends on waste to function – for without throwing stuff away, even the most dedicated consumer simply won’t have room to buy more. So products break, cannot be repaired, and get thrown out and replaced over and over again. Waste is a constant product. Increasingly, that waste is made of plastics and circuit boards containing a multitude of toxins.

The question we seem to be asking ourselves at parties now is not “How much did you make last year?”, but “ how much did you waste?”, as consumption becomes the marker of wealth even more than actual dollars earned. But consumption doesn’t express individualism, it only exploits your function as an economic cog. So we don’t build our furniture, we buy our self-expression at The Brick – and then buy it again in a few years, tossing out the broken fiberboard and melamine. Consumption requires waste to continue, and increased waste leads directly to environmental degradation.

Economic growth is the stated goal of industrialization, the mantra of our society. We worship growth as the only meaningful indicator of success and vitality for our cities, our businesses, our countries. So far, we have stopped short of worshipping such constant growth in our children or our cells. Economic growth, though, requires population growth to provide cheap labour and more consumers. We panic when we hear the words “negative birth rate”. But that increased population is not the beneficiary of industrialization and capitalism: the owners receive the profits, not the workers.

Population growth is also, interestingly, an outcome of poverty. As education and income increase, the number of children per family decreases. So industrialization requires poverty to assist in maintaining population as workers and consumers.

Increasing production demands increased consumption, and despite population growth, waste and built-in obsolescence are necessary tools to increase consumption. The more we shop, the more we throw away. The more we grow, the more we pollute. The more we insist on economic growth, the more we deepen poverty and the destruction of the ecosystem.

Again, our capacity for destruction must not exceed the capacity of the biosphere to regenerate. To assume that somehow, it will all be OK, and that we’ll somehow get away with our current course of heedless growth, consumption and waste, is pure wishful thinking and wilful blindness.

Unlike the cancer in our bodies, we have the ability to amend our behaviour and seek a balance. Constant growth is a disease, and by choosing sustainability, we are on the side of the white blood cells.