[inglor_cz]

I love UKL's prose, but her clinging to a metaphor between biological and economic growth seems to me too desperate. Those two things aren't the same, even if they accidentally use the same word. (And I think that is the root of the inaccuracy: writers love words and are enthralled to them.)

Biological growth is always physical. Economic is not, there is a large virtual component (maybe too large!). It is possible to generate a lot more economic growth through clever ideas such as invention of e-mail than through deforesting the entire Amazon. A lot of inventions that generate economic growth actually save the environment. For example, modern production of electricity is probably less destructive than the traditional logging of forests for wood to burn, which was the preferred way from minus infinity to 1800.