Daily Inspiration Quote by Susan George

It lands like a slap at the altar of productivity: more capacity is not the same as more possibility. Susan George takes a familiar industrial brag - bigger, faster, more efficient - and exposes the childish logic underneath. The sentence is built on an almost nursery-simple conditional ("If you... it doesn't matter...") that makes the punchline feel inevitable. You can argue with forecasts, you can't argue with zero.

The intent is activist and surgical: to shift the debate from managing growth to confronting limits. "How many sawmills you have" stands in for every shiny metric that gets mistaken for progress: GDP, quarterly output, "jobs created", even greenwashed upgrades that make extraction smoother. The subtext is that modern economies love to optimize the blade while refusing to talk about the tree. It's not anti-technology; it's anti-denial. Efficiency becomes a moral alibi, a way to keep doing harm with better machinery and cleaner branding.

Context matters: George is known for critiquing global capitalism, debt regimes, and the institutional habits that treat nature as an infinite input. Read that way, the forest isn't only a literal ecosystem; it's a proxy for fisheries, soil, labor, attention, public trust - anything that can be depleted while spreadsheets still show "growth". The line is also a quiet jab at policy incrementalism: you can subsidize innovation, streamline supply chains, celebrate "resilience", but if the underlying stock is collapsing, the system is just accelerating toward its own shutdown.