Let me explain why I think The International Society for Ecological Economics is on the wrong track and its efforts are harmful to humanity. 1. Eventually humanity on earth has to reach a steady state in population, energy use, and flow of materials. However, this goal should be postponed for at least 50 to 100 years for the following reasons. 2. Steady state will be facilitated by the whole world reaching an advanced level of prosperity, perhaps corresponding to that of the U.S.A. today or perhaps somewhat higher. Prosperous people take more trouble with the environment and look further into the future than poor people. The same applies to prosperous nations vs. poor nations. 3. There are enough resources, except for petroleum, for the whole world to reach and maintain U.S. standards with a population considerably larger than present world population, say 15 billion. There are substitutes for petroleum at a cost that will not damage our standard of living provided technological progress is allowed to continue. 4. The present all out development process in much of the Third World is just right for reaching an appropriate level of prosperity as quickly as possible and at a lower population level than if the process is dragged out. The process should be accelerated if possible and extended to the remaining static countries. Its downside is that replacing petroleum as a supplier of energy for transportation will have to be undertaken sooner than if the present advanced countries remained the main users. Also if it turns out to be necessary to do something about CO2, this will come sooner. 5. Cost-effective reductions in pollution and other side-effects are welcome. Reducing CFC use by 90 percent or even 99 percent would have been cost-effective. The total ban is not cost-effective and will delay the achievement of sustainable prosperity. 6. The organizations that prosper by promoting panic, e.g. Greenpeace are delaying the achievement of sustainable prosperity. The success of the American anti-nukes is delaying it. ***** These are the contentions. What about the evidence? I have personally looked at the literature relating to many kinds of sustainability. I see no unsolvable problems in mineral resources, agricultural production including soil loss, energy supply, pollution of many kinds, crowdedness resulting from increased population. Purely qualitative thinking about these problems can only be suggestive rather than serve as a sufficient justification for action. The mathematics required is mostly just the use of arithmetic applied to statistics obtained from readily available references, e.g. _The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics_, the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ and the _Statistical Abstract of the United States_. Thus you can only show that a shortage of copper is extremely unlikely if you look up production and can say something about reserves and resources. You cannot show that nuclear waste can be sufficiently isolated unless you know how much there is and how much radioactivity humanity experiences today. Neither can you justify action based on the opposites of these propositions without numerical computations. Alas, I haven't written a book, but others have written books. I have offered to discuss any two specific problems that anyone wants to raise on sci.environment. Alas, the panic mongers on sci.environment refuse "to fall into the trap" of mentioning specific problems. ***** Since I wrote this, I have started a page with many satellites elaborating the points made here. It is http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/.