On his book Endangered Economies: How the Neglect of Nature Threatens Our Prosperity
Cover Interview of May 02, 2017
Lastly
Conserving the environment is crucial to our prosperity and
the continued well-being of our children and grandchildren. There should be no
conflict between the environment and the economy because the economy needs the
natural world. But our institutions as currently configured give the appearance
of conflict for the four reasons I summarized: external costs which do not
figure in the calculations of firms and consumers, the abuse of important
resources for lack of ownership, the great but unrecognized value of natural
capital, and our obsession with the inadequate performance measure GDP.
All of these problems can be fixed. It is easy to bring
external costs home to those who generate them, to find ways of managing
natural capital that is not owned by anyone, to account properly for the value
of the natural world, and to find a better measure of economic performance than
GDP. We know how to do all of these things, and most of them are already being
done successfully in some societies. We just need to do all of them at scale.
The obstacles to conservation are not economic or
technological – they are political. We are not doing what we need to accomplish
because powerful vested interests, would be required to pay for their sins,
starting with the fossil fuel industry.
The world faces serious environmental problems. Maps are
already being redrawn to reflect loss of landmass to rising seas, and nations
are beginning to fail because of water shortages. The natural world is
critically threatened by mismanaged human activity, imperiling not only human
populations but thousands of other species that call the forests and the oceans
home. Now is the time to use the tools readily at hand to manage natural
resources wisely. We need to use these tools broadly and boldly to rebuild a
prosperous and sustainable world and end the threats to our prosperity
engendered by our neglect of nature.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
Lastly
Conserving the environment is crucial to our prosperity and the continued well-being of our children and grandchildren. There should be no conflict between the environment and the economy because the economy needs the natural world. But our institutions as currently configured give the appearance of conflict for the four reasons I summarized: external costs which do not figure in the calculations of firms and consumers, the abuse of important resources for lack of ownership, the great but unrecognized value of natural capital, and our obsession with the inadequate performance measure GDP.
All of these problems can be fixed. It is easy to bring external costs home to those who generate them, to find ways of managing natural capital that is not owned by anyone, to account properly for the value of the natural world, and to find a better measure of economic performance than GDP. We know how to do all of these things, and most of them are already being done successfully in some societies. We just need to do all of them at scale.
The obstacles to conservation are not economic or technological – they are political. We are not doing what we need to accomplish because powerful vested interests, would be required to pay for their sins, starting with the fossil fuel industry.
The world faces serious environmental problems. Maps are already being redrawn to reflect loss of landmass to rising seas, and nations are beginning to fail because of water shortages. The natural world is critically threatened by mismanaged human activity, imperiling not only human populations but thousands of other species that call the forests and the oceans home. Now is the time to use the tools readily at hand to manage natural resources wisely. We need to use these tools broadly and boldly to rebuild a prosperous and sustainable world and end the threats to our prosperity engendered by our neglect of nature.