Beyond Green’s Executive Chairman, Jonathan Smales, will today chair the annual William Pitt the Younger seminar at Pembroke College, Cambridge. The title of the event is, ‘What’s so good about growth?’. There will be four speakers: Andrew Hill from the Financial Times,  Human Geographer Prof. Susan Smith from Girton College, former monk, Satish Kumar of Resurgence and the Ecologist and a teacher of voluntary simplicity, and IT entrepreneur, government adviser and founder of Amadeus Capital Partners, Dr Hermann Hauser.

It’s a great and, of course, very topical theme for such a seminar. Growth has become a mantra, an idea that towers over politics, left and right; unequivocally a ‘good thing’. ‘It’s the economy stupid!’

But is all growth equal? Do we want it at any cost? What kind of growth best reconciles human needs and well-being with increasingly challenging environmental constraints? Is there such a thing as transformative growth – that which enable us to move rapidly or more rapidly towards a truly sustainable economy and/or, say, built environment?

Jonathan will blog about the seminar next week.