The ideology of the cancer cell

The ability of the industrial economy to provide jobs and homes depends on prosperity, and on a very shaky kind of prosperity too. It depends on "growth" of the wrong things, such as roads and dumps and poisons--on what Edward Abbey called "the ideology of the cancer cell"--and on greed with purchasing power. In the absence of growth, greed, and affluence, the dependents of an industrial economy too easily suffer the consequences of having no land: joblessness, homelessness, and want. This is not a theory. We have seen it happen.

Wendell Berry
"The Agrarian Standard" in The Essential Agrarian Reader