The Seven Principles of a Sustainable Global Economy -- The Missing Insight

[Rough Draft, 2-24-08]

In a recent World Watch Institute e-mail, Tom Prugh, State of the World (SOW) 2008 Project Co-director and Editor of World Watch, describes seven principles for a sustainable global economy (see  "Green Economics": Turning Mainstream Thinking on Its Head and Chapter 1 of SOW 2008 for a more detailed discussion).  He leads with the statement that "Ideas about how the world works that don't accord with reality can be unhelpful" and goes on to say that it "is especially true about mainstream economics. But in recent decades, economists and researchers have suggested a variety of reforms that would make economics truer, greener, and more sustainable." 

Although the seven principles are likely to be characteristics of a sustainable global economy, there is no discussion of how these reforms would be implemented or how the principles would actually be incorporated into dynamics of economic commerce, either as drivers or results.  In addition, although correctly noting that the human economy resides within and receives many inputs from the environment, the discussion still resides within the traditional paradigm of most discussions of the economy and environment, that the environment is somehow non-economic, and secondary in value to economics. Thus, when push comes to shove, and hard decisions need to be made between "environmental" values vs. "economic" values, the environment always loses, because, after all, economics is about core bread and butter human needs whereas the environment is simply about secondary (at best) aesthetic values and no true import, or none that can be afforded, for human life and society. 

The key and truly transformational insight that ecology and ecological economics have been pointing towards, but as yet not illuminating (either fully or sufficiently), is that the environment IS the economy. Damage to the environment is not simply environmental, it is economic in it's truest sense of wealth (read life support) production or destruction.  Without reforming the accounting system of economics, let alone the tools and processes, all reforms to date will not produce an ecologically sustainable global economy.  Current accounting actually values much economic activity as wealth production when it is in fact wealth destruction.  This fact is only revealed when the environment is seen for what it really is, the planet's economy. Correcting the accounting system would be the key change that would drive the current economy towards sustainability.  Of course there are many other aspects of the transition, but those are topics for other journal entries, papers, and books, some of which have already been written.