The Innate Nature of Economics - Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World - page 36

more with the misapplication or misinterpretation of economic principles,
whether intentional or unintentional. We are concerned with both, because
actions are being taken that threaten socioeconomic sustainability.
At this point of our admittedly ambitious and far-reaching task, it is useful
to restate our purpose and the major arguments that support it. The discipline
of economics and its corollary economic practices have been used to create and
support a modern world that threatens the very health of the planet and has
human society on clearly unsustainable paths. One way of framing this situa-
tion is that economics and economic practices have violated the immutable bio-
physical laws. This section of the topic, beginning with Chapter 3, addresses
the nature of this violation under the premise that the first step in bringing
economics and ecology into harmony is a clear understanding of the problem.
Economics as a field of study began as a necessity. Consequently, it is some-
what misleading to call it a discipline or field of study. These terms carry an
academic overtone, which suggests the pursuit of economics might be the
choice of an aspiring college student or perhaps a leisure-class intellectual.
Moreover, it suggests the categories into which human knowledge has been
organized over the centuries, as if taxonomic choices could have been made
almost at the whim of some scholar.
The imperative for economics left no such choices. It was a pursuit that
addressed human survival. How do humans wrest a living from a bounti-
ful but occasionally begrudging planet? How do people and their collective
communities insure their physical survival through good times and bad,
vagaries of seasonal change, natural disasters, and the extremes of weather
and climatic change? In other words, economics stemmed from the impera-
tive to survive, which is a precondition to everything else—nothing more,
nothing less. As such, it was a means to an end, not philosophy, religion, or
the arts, despite the rather unfortunate pedestal to which economics and
economic life have been elevated in modern times.
Scarcity and Human Survival
The generic term assigned to the situation faced by human populations in
this quest to perpetuate their existence was scarcity . Scarcity, as a term in
economic jargon, means the wherewithal to support life is not superabun-
dant. In other words, the resources, assets, or whatever they might be called
require time and effort on the part of people to extract a “living.” If a large
part of human effort is required to survive, but just barely, that person or
those people (family, tribe, community, or nation) may be considered near
the subsistence level of income or, in more modern terms, to be poor .
On the other hand, a person is clearly better off materially if little of their
time and effort is required to survive. In the earliest context, such a person