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Causes of Unsustainability |
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Written by joezou88
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Wednesday, 30 January 2008 |
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Page 2 of 3 Goodland
[1] notes when the human economic subsystem was small, the regenerative and
assimilative capacities of the environment appeared infinite.
- But we are now
painfully learning that environmental sources and sinks are finite. Originally,
these capacities were very large, but the scale of the human economy has
exceeded them. Since
1950, real gross world product has multiplied almost sevenfold, growing from
$6.6 trillion to $45.9 trillion [2]. From 1850 to 1987 the population multiplied
fivefold to 5 billion, and between 1987 and 1999 another 1 billion souls were
added. The planet now houses 6.2 billion people and is currently growing at an
annual rate of 1.1 percent. Source and sink capacities have now become limited.
As economics deals only with scarcities, in the past source and sink capacities
of the environment did not have to be taken into account. Now the consequences
of unsustainable economic development are starting to unfold. Global warming,
air and water pollution, rapid extinction of species and depletion of oil have serious
impacts on economic development. Although conventional economists still hope or
claim that economic growth can be infinite or at least that we are not yet
reaching limits to growth, theoretical calculation and practical evidences do
not support the claim.
- [1] Goodland, R., 2002, Encyclopedia of Global
Environmental Change. Copyright 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
- [2] Stead, W.E., Stead, J.,
G., and Starik, M., 2004, Sustainable Strategic Management, M. E. Sharpe,
Inc. © 2004
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Sustainability ABC 