Nature can't take unrestrained growth: Prince Charles

By Peter Griffiths

LONDON (Reuters) - The quest for unlimited economic growth is unsustainable and could bankrupt the environment through climate change and depleted natural resources, Britain's Prince Charles said on Wednesday.

Charles, next-in-line to succeed Queen Elizabeth, said a new economic model must be found because the Earth can no longer support the demands of a growing "consumerist society" where growth is an end in itself.

People must realize they are not "the masters of creation," rather just one part of a fragile natural world, he added.

"Just as our banking sector is struggling with its debts... so Nature's life-support systems are failing to cope with the debts we have built up there too," Charles said at a BBC lecture at St James's Palace in central London.

"If we don't face up to this, then Nature, the biggest bank of all, could go bust.

"That is the challenge we face, it seems to me -- to see Nature's capital and her processes as the very basis of a new form of economics."

Charles, the former husband of the late Princess Diana, has long campaigned on the environment.

His own farm went organic in the 1980s, he publishes details of his estate's annual carbon emissions and has developed a sustainable village in western England called Poundbury.