The terrible environmental problems that confront us today, and those that threaten the very survival of our species on this planet, are the inevitable consequence of economic development, which is ironically identified with progress, an overriding concern of almost every government throughout the world today. This is not generally realized, partly because neither the nature nor the implications of this fatal process are clearly understood. To do so requires that we first realize the fact that economic development has become the overriding goal of governments throughout the world only in the last fifty years. U.S. President Harry Truman is one of the first to suggest that it should become so. Previously, economic development was the priority in but a very small area of our planet, mainly in parts of western Europe and North America. And, that period was insignificant in comparison to man’s total existence on this planet.
Economic development consists of the continuous year-to-year increase in the production, distribution, sale and consumption of food, artifacts and services. This is taken to be the only means of increasing wealth, and thereby, human welfare. However, this notion would have been totally incomprehensible to the traditional man for whom material goods were not seen as desirable in themselves. The acquiring of food, clothing, house-hold goods and of things had practical purposes and served social interests. Wealth, for him, was basically social wealth and also ecological wealth. He saw his welfare as being predominantly determined by his ability to maintain the integrity and stability of the social and ecological systems of which he was a part. That is because it was only by maintaining the balance of the systems that they could be counted upon to dispense their inestimable benefits; which he was not willing to forgo merely in order to acquire material goods, that played little part in the strategy of his life.
The goal of the ever-increasing of goods and services is a relatively new phenomenon and incompatible with the survival of social and ecological systems and is rapidly destroying the environment and the eco-system. It is for this reason alone that economic development can only lead to social and ecological disruption.
Why, we might ask, is economic activity out of control in this way? The answer is that instead of being conducted at the level of the family and the community, the original units of economic activity, they are now being created by specialized, purely economic, surrogate social groupings, i.e. corporations (private or government-owned) that by their very nature can have no social, ecological, religious or moral conscience or concerns of any kind.
Unfortunately, large corporations view nature is nothing more than a source of raw-materials for the economic process and a sink for disposing of its evermore voluminous and toxic wastes. In such conditions, the fate of both society and nature are virtually sealed. It is but a question of time before they are both cashed-in, and, in this way, transformed into economic wealth.
At the same time, as economic development systematically annihilates the natural world, so does it replace it with a very different man-made or artificial world—the world of houses, factories, office blocks, warehouses, gas containers, power stations, and parking lots, i.e. the physical infrastructure of economic development. As this process continues the physical infrastructure must necessarily expand. So has it expanded in mainland China, since economic development has got under way some ten years ago, as a result of which some ten percent of that grossly overpopulated country’s agricultural land has already been paved-over.
It is not just the man-made world that, must be substituted for the natural world or the biosphere, but the environment also has to cope with the even more voluminous and toxic waste products. In the natural world, life processes are cyclic. They must be for two reasons. The first is that though the natural world is an open system from the point of view of energy, it is, to all extents and purposes, a closed system from the point of view of materials. This means that to avoid resource shortages, they must continually be recycled, the waste products of one process serving as the raw materials of the next. They must be recycled too in order to avoid the accumulation of un-recycled materials that would interfere with the processes.
In more general terms, they must be recycled so as to maintain the critical structure of the biosphere and of its constituent ecosystems.
Traditional man felt morally committed to returning all organic wastes to the soil from which they were derived. It was an essential part of his religious commitment to maintaining the harmony and balance of the natural world, so this essential ecological principle was closely adhered to. With the breakdown of traditional cultural patterns, this principle was rapidly lost. As economic development continues, the recycling of materials becomes more and more impossible because an increasingly degraded biosphere becomes incapable of coping with the ever more massive amount of unnecessary and non-biodegradable materials and junk.
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Pictures of Man-Made Environmental Disasters
Environmental Destruction Caused by Fires
