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Shifting the global economy towards sustainability
How the Global Economy Works Today	Why the Global Economy Behaves As It Does	Turning the Global Economy Towards Sustainability

‘The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse’. – Herman Daly

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 (MacNeill 2000).

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.

In parallel, concentrations of power and wealth are leading to unprecedented disparities in economic wealth; and communities are buckling under the strain of an economic system oriented towards consumerism and global concentrations of wealth and power.

Moreover, the various social and economic systems we have built on the assumption of continuing cheap energy are highly vulnerable as we approach the half-way point in the availability of fossil fuels – Peak Oil, as it is commonly known.

Complementary Text

Historian JR McNeill draws a contrast between rats and sharks. Rats, he says, are master improvisers, able to find a niche and adapt themselves to every environment on Earth, from the equator to research stations at the South Pole. Sharks, by contrast, are master predators and head of their food chain. However, if the temperature of the water in which they swim changes by just a couple of degrees, they are doomed to extinction.

Human societies, he asserts, have made the transition over the last couple of centuries from being rat-like to shark-like. We have, he suggests, traded increased ‘efficiency’ (narrowly defined in terms of throughput) for reduced resilience.

Fruit salad – How the global economy works today
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World population development
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Industrial pollution

Shark