A jungle is generally stable and doesn't grow in the sense that we say that GDP grows - definitely for large periods of time, with occasional exceptions. The fact that individuals grow in this jungle doesn't mean that the jungle itself grows. By whatever metric you look at it (mass, CO2 consumption, O2 emission, etc) the jungle doesn't grow, at least not for the majority of its lifetime (obviously, at some point it grew from an original small size to its current size, and it will occasionally experience waxing and waning as the climate and other geographical features change).
By contrast, when people talk about sustained growth in economics, they do actually mean growth, an increase in the amount of goods and services consumed by the totality of individuals.
> jungle is generally stable and doesn't grow in the sense that we say that GDP grows
Jungles today are fantastically more complicated than they were a billion years ago. They can be so because life literally changed Earth’s atmosphere and geology to make it more conducive to more life.
Appeals to nature don’t assist your argument.
> By contrast, when people talk about sustained growth in economics, they do actually mean growth, an increase in the amount of goods and services consumed
This is not how this fucking paper defines growth. Nor is gross consumption how most models define growth—the word production is right there in GDP.
It's an extinction project, growth or sustained growth, you're describing mathematical politics, which is arbitrary. All animals reach a homeostasis/allostasis with the environment. Humans don't require synthetic categories ie "goods and services" we require functional relationships to resources that become streamlined into ecological categories in order to survive.