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| How the global economy works today |
Today, economics rules supreme as the ‘master discipline’,
with all other subjects and values subordinated to it. Critically,
ecology has come to be seen as a sub-system of economy rather than
vice versa. Consequently, the ‘environment’ has
come to be seen primarily as a bank of resources for the undertaking
of human economic activities.
This is all a very long way from the etymological root of the word ‘economy’, derived from the Greek, ‘Oikos’, meaning, literally, ‘management of the household’. Rather than managing our global household responsibly and well, we have today created economic systems in which it is more profitable to cut down trees than to grow forests, to displace communities than to nurture them.
The advent of the Fossil Fuel Age over the last couple of centuries has made available unprecedented levels of energy that humanity has harnessed to satisfy its needs: we probably expended more energy during the twentieth century than in all preceding human history.
This has permitted a prodigious leap in economic output as well as important and beneficial breakthroughs in areas such as diet, medical and dental care and greater physical comfort for many within the global family.
However, these gains have come at an enormous cost. The human population has grown by a factor of more than ten since the beginning of the industrial age in the mid-eighteenth century to more than 6.5 billion today. We are currently eating into natural capital and eroding the ability of natural systems to self-regenerate, most critically apparent in the inability of the atmosphere to absorb the level of greenhouse gases we are emitting.
This is all a very long way from the etymological root of the word ‘economy’, derived from the Greek, ‘Oikos’, meaning, literally, ‘management of the household’. Rather than managing our global household responsibly and well, we have today created economic systems in which it is more profitable to cut down trees than to grow forests, to displace communities than to nurture them.
The advent of the Fossil Fuel Age over the last couple of centuries has made available unprecedented levels of energy that humanity has harnessed to satisfy its needs: we probably expended more energy during the twentieth century than in all preceding human history.
This has permitted a prodigious leap in economic output as well as important and beneficial breakthroughs in areas such as diet, medical and dental care and greater physical comfort for many within the global family.
However, these gains have come at an enormous cost. The human population has grown by a factor of more than ten since the beginning of the industrial age in the mid-eighteenth century to more than 6.5 billion today. We are currently eating into natural capital and eroding the ability of natural systems to self-regenerate, most critically apparent in the inability of the atmosphere to absorb the level of greenhouse gases we are emitting.
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