We should act like the animals we are

摘要

What makes us fool ourselves that things have never been better? Why do we fail to live within the constraints that our planet and biology have set for us, when future generations will pay the price? As Canadian campaigner and activist David Suzuki tells Jo Merchant, those are the questions that keep him awake nights. Is anything more important than the environment? I can't imagine anything more important than air, water, soil, energy and biodiversity. These are the things that keep us alive. So why do we put the economy first, and use it to define progress? You would have thought that our first priority would be to ask what the ecologists are finding out, because we have to live within the conditions and principles they define. Instead, we've elevated the economy above ecology. After all, ecology and economics have the same root - "eco", from the Greek oikos, for "home". Ecology is the study of home, economics is the management of home, and of course, our home is the biosphere. How do the economists answeryou? They believe humans are so creative and productive that the sky's the limit, that if we run out of resources, we'll find substitutes. If the substitutes run out, we'll go to the moon, mine asteroids or harvest sunlight in space and microwave it to Earth. They think the whole universe is there as a potential resource.