The Money Disease is eating away at the British economy, and it’s eating away at the environment, too.
In an economy that’s hooked on money, a healthy, sustainable environment has no value in itself. It’s only worth what can be extracted from it, such as timber, minerals and oil.
And polluting the environment doesn’t count as a cost, either. In fact, it’s an opportunity to make more money by trying to fix the problem.
The threat to the environment is real, however. We are polluting our air, soil and water, and causing major climate change. It’s not a threat to the planet, nor to lower order species who are quick to adapt. The threat is to the larger, less adaptable species, particularly ourselves.
In terms of value, therefore, the environment is the most precious thing that we have. It has created the conditions for human life, and now human activity has the capacity to destroy those conditions. So an economy that doesn’t factor that in makes no sense at all.
When less is more…
The mistake in all this is to suppose that economic progress and a sustainable environment are somehow opposed.
The money-fixated economy is bad for the environment but it doesn’t work well for people either. Real economic progress means less money activity and more of the real value that improves the quality of people’s lives.