So we can rephrase the fundamental question: can modern capitalism sustain the environment, and can the environment sustain modern capitalism? I use “modern capitalism” here in a broad sense as a system of political economy. Modern capitalism is the powerful engine of this growth. The world economy is poised to double and then double again in the lifetime of today’s college students.
It took all of history to build the $7 trillion world economy of 1950 today we add that amount of economic activity every decade. Just continue to release greenhouse gases at current rates, just continue to impoverish ecosystems at current rates, and the world in the latter part of this century won’t be fit to live in.īut human activities are of course not holding at current levels – they are growing, dramatically. Here is one measure of the problem: all we have to do to destroy the planet’s climate and its biota is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today, with no growth in the human population or the world economy. Recently, major international assessments of climate change and declining ecosystem services have added new weight to this conclusion.
Almost universally, even governments agree that the environmental impacts of today’s economic activity are unacceptably large and must be reduced. There is ample evidence that it is not so tamed today. I believe that a central question facing societies today - perhaps the central question - is whether the world economy can be tamed to operate within constraints that protect and restore the natural world.
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