Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) was an American novelist and essayist closely associated with the modern environmental movement and the defense of the U.S. desert Southwest. The line is widely circulated as a succinct expression of Abbey’s critique of industrial expansion, consumerism, and pro-growth politics—ideas he developed across his nonfiction and polemical writing in the 1970s–1980s, when debates over energy development, public lands, and “Sunbelt” growth were intensifying. Abbey frequently framed unchecked economic and population growth as a pathological process that damages ecosystems and erodes human-scale community life, aligning him with strands of ecological thought skeptical of “growth” as an unquestioned social good.

Abbey uses a biological analogy to attack the notion that growth is inherently virtuous. In healthy organisms, growth is bounded and integrated into a larger purpose; in cancer, growth becomes self-justifying, indifferent to the host it consumes. By equating “growth for the sake of growth” with a cancer cell’s “ideology,” Abbey suggests that economies or societies that pursue expansion as an end in itself are ultimately self-destructive, because they depend on exhausting the very ecological and social systems that sustain them. The aphorism compresses a moral argument (ends matter) into an ecological one (limits are real), making it a staple of anti-consumerist and steady-state economic critiques.