The limits of sustainable design are reducing. Whole earth impacts are
beginning to be considered because growth in goods and services is
consistently outpacing gains in efficiency. As a result, the net effect
of sustainable design to date has been to simply improve the efficiency
of rapidly increasing impacts. The present approach, which focuses on
the efficiency of delivering individual goods and services, does not
solve this problem. The basic dilemmas include: the increasing
complexity of efficiency improvements; the difficulty of implementing
new technologies in societies built around old ones; that physical
impacts of delivering goods and services are not localized, but are
distributed throughout the economies; and that the scale of resource use
is growing and not stabilizing.