"Ironically, most analyses of the environmental problem today are concerned less with saving the planet or life or humanity than saving capitalism -- the system at the root of our environmental problems."
The authors offer this criticism of western culture after devoting significant time to an analysis of leftist ideas in economics. They feel that environmental initiatives are instituted only when they are advantageous to a political agenda and helpful to the persistence of capitalism. The authors see status quo as a problem because of the argument they trace in this book link environmental decline with the consumeristic, nearly frontier attitude which capitalism promotes.
"This fatal flaw of received economics can be traced back to its conceptual foundations. The rise of neoclassical economics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is commonly associated with the rejection of the labor theory of value of classical political economy and its replacement by notions of marginal utility/productivity. What is seldom recognized, however, is that another critical perspective was abandoned at the same time: the distinction between wealth and value (use value and exchange value). With this was lost the possibility of a broader ecological and social conception of wealth."
In this excerpt the authors outline the history of the development of economic theory in order to make readers aware of a blindspot which rests in this history. People have forgotten that we arbitrarily agreed to equate wealth with value and thus to ignore other values when determining economic standard. As the authors point out, this wealth-value equation neglects any social or biological estimations of value. Perhaps money does not need to be the only standard which determines value.
"In this year’s report there are no chapters on the developing environmental problem. Instead the entire report, aside from a six-page chart on the historical chronology of the ecological threat, is devoted to what would previously have been consigned to the conclusion: a strategy of change, focusing on sustainable consumption. Moreover, this reflects a larger transformation in the basic thrust of Worldwatch that has been going on for some time: a shift from its previous demographic Malthusianism, emphasizing the mass population problem, to its current economic Malthusianism, emphasizing the mass consumption problem."
The authors advocate for a responsible recognition of our compulsive consumption. As the latest trends in sustainability and environmental advocacy suggest, a shift in how scientists and sociologists consider environmental crises is occurring. Rather than focusing on population, now the discussion seems to revolve around sustainable consumption.
