A HUMAN ECOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT OF ECONOMIC AND POPULATION HEALTH

摘要

This paper starts from the premise that the current sustainability dilemma is at least partly rooted in gross popular ignorance of basic human ecology. Indeed, it is a deep irony of the human-induced environmental crisis that people have a dismally ill-developed understanding of themselves as ecological beings. The Cartesian dualism that underpins western scientific culture has created a wide psychological barrier between humans and the rest of nature, a barrier that prevents people from fully understanding their biophysical selves. The problem for both ecological integrity and economic sustainability is, that "no amount of ethical axiology, or legal, policy, and technological engineering, is going to solve problems that are misunderstood" (Drengson, 1989). My purpose in this paper therefore, is to reanalyze the so-called 'environmental crisis' ― the loss of global ecological integrity ― as a problem of human ecological dysfunction. This requires acceptance of two unconventional interpretations of human material reality. First, I adopt a human ecological perspective that sees people as a totally dependent component of, and participant in, most of the world's major ecosystems. In this light, material economic activity is really the expression of human ecological relationships and the economy itself is an inextricably integrated, completely contained, and wholly dependent growing subsystem of a non-growing ecosphere. Second, we must recognize that whatever else it implies, human economic 'production' is actually consumption. At best, economic 'production' is a transformation process requiring continuous inputs of energy and material extracted from nature and all this material is ultimately returned to nature in degraded form as waste. All such transformations are irreversible and ultimately governed by the second law of thermodynamics. For this reason, and because the economy is a dependent subsystem of the ecosphere, material growth is limited by the productive capacity and the waste assimilation capacity of nature (Rees, 1995a, 1999b). This perspective contrasts sharply with the dominant worldview. The latter assumes that 'man' is the great producer and that the human enterprise is more or less independent of nature. From this perspective: "The tendency to technical progress is viewed as the most critical economic law..." Adherents believe that "Human ingenuity has been remarkable at advancing the real standard of living and warding off the pressures of resource depletion...", and that "the immediate need... for avoiding depletion is nil..." (Gordon, 1994). The most extreme technological optimists believe that the 'environment' poses no constraints whatever on economic growth: "Technology exists now to produce in virtually inexhaustible quantities just about all the products made by nature...", and: "We have in our hands now... the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next seven billion years..." (Simon, 1995). Conventional economic theory thus sees humans as free to act as if economic production and consumption were somehow exempt from thermodynamic and other critical natural laws. I argue here that it is this ecologically empty vision that has generated the sustainability conundrum. The ecological crisis ultimately springs from the nature of humans as consumer organisms that have become parasitic on the world's ecosystems through growth in numbers and material demand. The following sections develop the argument that understanding humanity's ecological niche is a prerequisite for achieving both ecological integrity/health and economic viability/sustainability.