Economic systems, or social institution that facilitates the production and transfer of goods and services, utilize three types of capital, including human capital (services and labor of humans), manufactured capital (machinery and equipment), and natural capital (natural resources). To meet the growing needs of people, the economic systems wants economic growth, increasing the amount of goods and services production and transfer. Market systems are the most popular of economic systems and free market systems function on the basis of supply and demand, hoping to achieve market equilibrium by where the buyer agrees to buy a certain quantity for the seller’s price.
Many economists differ about the relationship between the humanity’s growing economic systems and the natural world. Neoclassical economists believe there are always new resource substitutes and that natural resources are a subset of the human economic system. Ecological economists disagree, viewing the human economic system as a subsystem of the Biosphere and considering natural resources to be limited and irreplaceable. Another branch of economists, environmental economists, have values somewhat between the two, seeking to encourage sustainable business and discourage environmentally destructive business.
Determining the value of ecological resources and services is tricky and the most operative system to designate resource value is the discount rate. The discount rate estimates a resource’s future value and assumes that today’s value for the resource might be higher than it will be in the future. For example, Miller’s Living in the Environment says that at a zero discount rate, one million dollars worth of timber from a redwood forest loses 10 percent of its value every year (a commonly applied rate for resources in business), which values at only 10,000 dollars in 50 years. This system of discount rates ignores most any of the ecological values a resource like redwoods can provide for earth cycling systems and habitat formation and has a tendency to encourage rapid resource exploitation because of it.
Under the assumption that ecological systems and resource can have measurable value for human welfare, many environmental specialists and organizations have accessed the value of 17 ecosystem service for 16 biomes and published their findings in the article “The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital”, accessing the value of the entire biosphere to be a minimum estimate of US $16-54 trillion dollars annually. This estimation of the natural world’s collective resources and services value hopes to assert the monetary value of the environment to stop environmental degradation and emphasize sustainable business, business that has little to no adverse effects on the environment.
There is an increased push to discover ways of implementing environmentally sustainable economies that meet humanity’s needs and development as well as protect the planet’s natural resources. Proponents of sustainable economies argue for a more environmentally honest market system that clearly labels the full cost of its products, including both the internal costs of production and marketing as well as the external costs of effect on human health and the environment. Product eco-labeling and certification is another means of sustainable business by helping the consumer identify which product are manufactured with the highest sustainability available.
A long term effort to phase out environmentally harmful products is also underway. Phasing out these harmful products is most often facilitated by subsidies and tax breaks for companies who practice sustainable business practices in the harvesting, manufacturing, and delivering of their products. Currently, these subsidies are tax breaks are heavily distributed to environmentally destructive companies and encourage environmental waste and resource depletion (very often via lobbyists), but some environmental regulation efforts are being made to transfer this government aid to sustainable companies. Other efforts include propositions for an economic model that focuses on a service-flow economy, as opposed to the current material-flow economy.
For the most part, the world’s current economy operates as a high-throughput economy, or an economy that boosts economic growth by increasing the flow of natural resources though the production and consumption process. While the linear nature of a high-throughput economy hasn’t shown to be very sustainable, a more circular matter and resource recycling and reuse economy, one that employs methods of biomimicry, and recycling the economy’s outputs, is a more sustainable option and gets closer to a low-throughput economy. This could possibly call for an economy succession, or the replacement of older companies with new ones that are better adapted to thrive in our changing world conditions (aka: that are more sustainable).
This kind of economy is called an eco-economy, full of green jobs, companies built on sustainable technologies, organizations that educate and implement sustainable services, and an overall system that works in an interconnected way to follow the three main laws of sustainability. There are many jobs, services, industries, and live style changes that come with an eco-economy, including (but by far NOT limited to): biodiversity protection, environmental chemistry, environmental education, geothermal technologies, sustainable agriculture, eco-villages, water conservation, solar cell systems, etc.
In many ways, governments can have a powerful role in curbing environmentally destructive economies. A government’s power to rule and regulate are put into place via policies, and environmental policy (as determined by Miller) are laws and regulations concerning the environment that are designed, implemented and enforced, as well as government sponsored/run programs that deal with environmental issues. These policies are the product of many voices in a democratic government, and in democracies like the United States’ constitutional democracy, the system of government allows for gradual changes over time. This means environmental policies will be the product of citizen input and will be constantly evaluated and changed/terminated if need be over time.
US Dept. of Agriculture
According to analyst suggestions, people should evaluate environmental laws under the guidance of a few foundational principles, including (but not limited to): the humility principle, that humans don’t and won’t fully understand the natural world, the reversibility principle, that irreversible decisions shouldn’t be made in case the decision backfires, and the polluter pays principle, that regulations and economic tools make polluters pay for the pollution they create.
Policies in these democratic systems of government must jump through a series of hoops to be implemented. Policies have to be made by politicians who are voted into office, who then must pass the law, get the appropriate funding (via Congress in the United States), and implement the contents of that law with more restrictions within the government organization that does the implementation. One major environmentally beneficial thing the United States has managed since the 1800s is the nation’s conservation of public lands, facilitated by the National Park System, National Forrest System, and the National Wilderness Preservation System.
Miller also emphasizes the important influence individuals can have on environmental policy. Grassroots efforts can be exceedingly powerful and the growth of technology and the internet has made it easier than ever for individuals to raise their voice. Outside of individual/grassroots activism, individuals have the power to lead an environmentally conscientious lifestyle, recycling their waste, consuming less, and leaving a smaller carbon footprint. Individuals have the power to support environmentally friendly organizations and companies monetarily (choosing to buy a company’s products/stock) and have the ability to become influential leaders on a local to national level and be an active source of inspiration for the wider community. The idea is that each action of an individual collected on a national (or even local) scale, even the smallest ones, can collectively aggregate into a great deal of change.
Also believing that change begins with the individual, Ernest Partridge criticizes Americans of becoming mindless consumers and forgetting what it originally meant to be a true American citizen. Citizens, he argues, must have engendered within them, a “lifelong sense of compassion and of justice… educated to a condition of knowledge and critical intelligence sufficient to assume the personal responsibility of conducting one’s own life and the civic responsibility of participating in the governance of a free and democratic society” (Partridge 4). Partridge argues that to be a citizen, someone who is free and rational thinkers of a functioning democracy, cannot be today’s standardly isolated, ignorant, and consumerist civilian. Instead of examining the full, environmental cost of the United States’ developed lifestyle, these consumers (not ‘true citizens’ under his definition) are chained to corporate and consumerist America and should develop a higher code of ethics that embody the true nature of an American citizen.
Although many environmental laws have been subject to attack, many organizations including NGOs, global public policy networks, and grassroots communities continue to fight for environmentally sustainable legislation. These groups (depending on the type of organization) will lobby, fight for the creation and maintenance of laws, conserve tracks of land, educate civilians, and peacefully protest (like Julia Butterfly Hill, who lived in a Redwood tree for 2 years to prevent loggers from clear cutting it down).
Environmental security is increasingly gaining international traction as well as the recognition of being an interrelated issue with national and economy security. NGOs, the United Nations, and many others are doing a great deal of work to make environmental security an international priority, understanding environmental security as an essential and underlying measure for protecting the world’s various economic and national securities.
Two things become very clear for me as I read these chapters; the poor need to achieve some higher level of sustainable development and the wealthy need to cut back on high energy and resource usage (both of these things unchecked would cause extreme environmental degradation). Poor people of developing nations are ecologically unsustainable by their rapid population growth, their propensity to place economic profit over environmental care (our of a need to survive) when developing. As the Core Case Study of Chapter 23 emphasized, microloans are wonderful tools to bring people above the poverty line, which has shown to lower the birth rate, increase the quality of life, and bring a large section of people out of survival mode. This paired with environmental education and guidance (so people pursue jobs that contribute to helping the earth) can do a lot of good work, especially in countries where their civilians dump chemicals and waste into their waterways, strip their land of trees, and overuse agricultural soils.
Developed nations need to consume a lot less and make the transition to environmentally beneficial goods, services, laws, programs, and companies. This isn’t a dream, it’s already starting to take place. According to the Environmental News Network, the coal industry is failing to compete with other types of energy technologies on the sole basis of merit. Only one new coal plant opened in 2012 and “over the past six years that share has fallen from 50 percent to 38 percent. Plans for more than 150 new coal-fired power plants have been canceled since the mid-2000s” (ENN). As Denis Hayes says in the Core Case Study for Chapter 24, “Democracy works when people are paying attentions to the facts” (Miller 637), or when people (as Partridge would say) become citizens instead of consumers. People are becoming increasingly aware about how the economies and lifestyles of developed nations are causing serious environmental detriment (just take a look at the largest Climate Rally in United States history on February 17th 2013) and many new industries that are environmentally beneficial, like the restoration of wetlands and clam beds for depolluting waters or solar energy companies to harvest the sun’s power are happening. 
Certainly there is a long way to go, but the small and strong efforts of today can magnify in the coming years. There is no one, single way to approach climate change, the world will have to employ many means and methods of spreading awareness, changing policies, and reversing ecological degradation. This means eco-labeling (without green-washing), this means including the full cost of products, this means business must compete for environmental sustainability, this means consumers must buy less and ask for a service-based economy instead of a material-based economy. The issues at hand are much more complicated than what I have described, but essentially speaking, change for the better is possible if enough people have the willpower to take well-intentioned and educated action.
Question One: I imagine that part of the new, green economy that is supposed to develop will include the demolition of factories, businesses, homes, and infrastructure (scaling back the economy…). In what other ways could humans participate in the industry of “scaling back”? Hence, in what other ways can people gain money/their livelihood in an industry that dismantles the industries of the past?
Question Two: At what point would we have to reach to make green technologies the most cost effective option in the mass media/industry?
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