Sustainable Retreat?

I was recently reading an interview of James Lovelock and I ran across an idea you might find relevant to our work with Daly and Cobb:

"Q. You say in the book that sustainable development is a fantasy, essentially, and you have a different notion for what needs to happen, of “sustainable retreat.”

A. At six-going-on-eight-billion people, the idea of any further development is almost obscene. We’ve got to learn how to retreat from the world that we’re in. Planning a good retreat is always a good measure of generalship."