Reconciling Entrepreneurial Resourcefulness with Sustainable Development: A Reply to “Surviving to Long-Term Thriving through Augmented Entrepreneurial Resourcefulness”

McMullen (2022) offers a model of entrepreneurial resourcefulness in which humanity must seek to grow its way out of an ostensible deficit of resources while having to account for everything used in production, including the human and natural resources typically excluded from financial statements on Earth. Clark and Tietz (2023) propose three adaptations which, they claim, transform the model from an end-point model of survival to an open-ended one of enrichment. After explaining the motivation behind the Mars model and how it can incorporate each adaptation without modification, I discuss the more fundamental issues of (1) whether a change in motive from survival to enrichment alters the nature of entrepreneurial resourcefulness and the decision-making logic exercised when investing in uncertain outcomes associated with knowledge creation and (2) whether the growth that entrepreneurial resourcefulness creates can truly be considered wealth if it is not ecologically sustainable. I conclude with a call for scholars to unpack the boundary conditions of the model in hope that doing so might enable reconciliation of the seemingly incompatible human desires for increasing returns and ecological sustainability here on Earth.