Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
own specific commercial ends at the cost of both the environment and the democratic
process. The ecosystem services of the planet have been exploited for commercial
corporate ends and have often been despoiled in the processes - sometimes irreparably
so. For Korten, corporations have also done to people (human capital) what they
have done to the environment (natural capital), and society as a whole has turned
in one seamless series of commercialized and commoditized relationships. Big, for
Korten, is far from being beautiful, and writers and activists like Colin Hines (2000)
and Walden Bello (2002, 2004) argue that 'localization', small-scale production with
local producers meeting local needs, and the 'deconstruction' of the present system
of global economic governance, including the World Trade Organization, the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, is the only true path of sustainable
development.
On economic growth and sustainable development
Herman Daly (1996, 1999, 2002) has significantly influenced the debate on the
relationship between economics and the environment. He believes that as
critical
natural capital
is not readily substitutable by
human-made capital
, it should be
preserved and conserved as a top priority. Daly argues that economic growth is not
a cure-all for unemployment, inequality, environmental protection and excessive
population growth. There is such a thing as
uneconomic growth
- that is to say,
when the level of economic activity continues to use up precious natural resources
and provides no tangible benefit to human well-being and welfare. The notion that
uneconomic growth is making us poorer has informed the work of a number of
think-tanks and pressure groups, such as the New Economics Foundation in the UK,
particularly in the attempt to measure sustainable economic well-being and to replace
the crude indices of economic growth such as gross national product. Daly also
suggests that the global integration of the world economies will probably militate
against opportunities for taking the radical political action necessary to combat
contemporary socio-economic and environmental problems. Individual nation-states
and a world 'community of communities' is the proper site for such action to
develop. Only with this will his 'pre-analytic vision' of a fully functioning sustainable
economy be realized and the planet's ecological limits respected:
Ecological limits are rapidly converting 'economic growth' into 'uneconomic
growth' - growth which increases costs by more than it increases benefits, thus
making us poorer not richer. The macro-economy is not the whole - it is part
of a larger whole, the ecosystem. As the macro-economy grows in its physical
dimensions (population and per capita resource use), it does not grow into a
void. It grows into and encroaches on the larger ecosystem, thereby incurring
an opportunity cost of pre-empted natural capital and services. These opportunity
costs of sacrificed natural services can be, and often are, worth more than the
extra production benefits of growth. We cannot be absolutely sure, because we
measure only the benefits, not the costs. And even if we measure the costs, we
add rather than subtract them. But whatever the true benefits of economic growth,
it is clear that they cannot apply to uneconomic growth.
Even if growth were still economic, much of what we mean by poverty is a
function of relative rather than absolute income, that is of social conditions of
