Every day we are told whether the economy has grown.

Governments celebrate it. Markets react to it. Economists analyse it. News presenters report it as though it were the ultimate measure of a nation’s success. Gross Domestic Product has become the scoreboard by which countries judge themselves, and the public has been encouraged to believe that a rising GDP is synonymous with a better future.

Yet there is a question that rarely enters the conversation.

What did it cost to achieve that growth?

Not in pounds or dollars, but in forests, rivers, minerals, energy, biodiversity and the stability of our climate.

Modern economics has become exceptionally good at measuring what we produce, but remarkably poor at measuring what we consume in the process. We celebrate outputs while ignoring depletion. We count transactions but rarely account for consequences.

This is not merely an accounting oversight. It has become one of the defining flaws of modern civilisation.

GDP was never intended to measure happiness, sustainability or human wellbeing. It was created to measure economic activity. Somewhere along the way, however, we confused activity with progress.

If an oil spill devastates a coastline, the clean-up contributes to GDP. If polluted air causes respiratory illness, healthcare spending increases GDP. If floods destroy homes, rebuilding those homes strengthens economic statistics. From an economic perspective, destruction and recovery are often counted in exactly the same way as genuine prosperity.

The figures improve while reality deteriorates.

That should concern every one of us.

The same illusion exists in the digital world.

Many people imagine the internet as something intangible, existing somewhere in an invisible cloud. We upload photographs, send emails, stream films and increasingly ask artificial intelligence to answer our questions without giving much thought to what happens behind the screen.

Yet nothing about the digital economy is weightless.

Every search, every cloud backup, every video call and every AI request relies upon enormous physical infrastructure. Thousands of data centres operate around the clock, consuming vast quantities of electricity, cooling water and sophisticated hardware manufactured from finite natural resources.

The cloud, despite its comforting name, is built from steel, concrete, copper, silicon and rare earth minerals extracted from the earth.

Recent estimates suggest that data centres already consume hundreds of terawatt-hours of electricity each year, and demand is expected to grow rapidly as artificial intelligence becomes embedded in almost every aspect of modern life. Water consumption is increasing alongside it, while discarded servers contribute to an expanding mountain of electronic waste.

None of this suggests that technology is the enemy.

Technology has transformed medicine, education, communication and scientific discovery. Artificial intelligence has the potential to improve productivity, accelerate research and solve problems that once appeared impossible.

The real issue is not innovation itself.

The problem arises when innovation is celebrated without acknowledging its environmental cost.

Progress without responsibility is simply consumption wearing a more attractive disguise.

This raises a deeper philosophical question.

What exactly are we trying to maximise?

If economic success depends upon extracting more resources every year, consuming more energy every decade and generating ever larger volumes of waste, can that success genuinely be described as sustainable?

Nature operates according to balance.

Human economies increasingly operate according to expansion.

These two systems cannot continue indefinitely on a finite planet.

History offers repeated warnings. Great civilisations have disappeared not because they lacked intelligence but because they exhausted the very resources upon which their prosperity depended. Forests disappeared, soils became infertile, water became scarce and societies that once appeared invincible gradually declined.

Our civilisation possesses something previous generations did not.

Knowledge.

We understand climate science. We can calculate carbon emissions. We know how much energy data centres require. We recognise the environmental impact of manufacturing, transportation and resource extraction. Never before has humanity possessed such detailed knowledge about the consequences of its own actions.

The question is no longer whether we know enough.

The question is whether we are willing to act upon what we already know.

This is where the public conversation must change.

Economic reports should not merely tell us how much wealth has been created. They should also reveal how much natural capital has been consumed to create it.

Technology companies should be transparent about their energy use, water consumption and environmental impact.

Governments should encourage innovation that improves efficiency rather than rewarding endless consumption.

Most importantly, we as individuals should reconsider our relationship with digital convenience.

Every unnecessary file stored forever, every forgotten email, every automatic upload and every habitual use of technology carries a small environmental cost. Individually these actions appear insignificant. Collectively, across billions of people, they become enormous.

This is not an argument for abandoning technology.

It is an argument for using it wisely.

The future does not require us to choose between innovation and environmental responsibility. That is a false choice.

The real challenge is learning to develop technology within ecological limits rather than pretending those limits do not exist.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of modern economics is that it values almost everything except the conditions that make life itself possible.

Clean air rarely appears on a balance sheet.

Healthy rivers have no share price.

Stable climates generate no quarterly earnings reports.

Yet without them, no economy can survive.

If we continue measuring success only by what we produce, we may eventually discover that we have become wealthier on paper while becoming poorer in every way that truly matters.

Economic growth is valuable only when it strengthens the foundations upon which future generations depend.

Otherwise, it is simply borrowing prosperity from tomorrow to finance comfort today.

Perhaps it is time to ask a different question whenever we hear that the economy has grown.

Not how much did we gain?

But what did we leave behind?

The answer to that question may prove far more important than GDP itself.