Those of us who take ecology seriously, and know something about it, are generally dismayed by the thoughtless decisions of those all around us who never seem to seriously take into account the damage their actions have on the land-base. Indeed, speaking for myself, I am often completely bemused at the apparent lack of concern with which most policy makers, for instance, take the genuine ecological cliff to which we are all accelerating daily. The German writer Herve Kempf suggests that one of the reasons for this lack of concern has to do with the dominant model for the representation of reality under which most policy makers function. Heres his explanation for what that model leaves out: The dominant framework for explaining the world today is the economic representation of things. Thus, the world enjoys an apparent prosperity marked by the growth in gross domestic product (GDP) and international trade. This description, however, is intrinsically distorted by the fact that this economic growth does not defray the cost of environmental destruction. In accounting terms, a company must reduce the profits from its activities by putting aside sums called depreciation that represent the wear and tear on capital goods used; thus, when these capital goods are worn out, the company has a reserve available to replace them. But the global economy company does not pay for the depreciation of the biosphere, that is, the replacement cost for the natural capital that it uses. Admissible when the biospheres absorption capacities were great, this conduct becomes criminal when those possibilities have reached their limit. Global opinion and decision makers are in the same situation as the head of a business whose accountant has forgotten to count depreciation. They think that the company is doing well when it is actually courting bankruptcy. - Herve Kempf _How the Rich are Destroying the Planet_, p 22-23.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Aug 2014 20:31:41 +0000
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