Achieving Sustainability: Reform or Transformation?

Abstract

The main argument is that many of our so-called 'environmental problems' stem from flaws in the prevailing expansionist paradigm that can be remedied only by a global shift toward the ecological steady state. Like all such processes in nature, economic transformations are subject to the Second Law: every energy/material transformation produces an increase in net entropy a permanent degradation of available energy and the dissipation of matter. In particular, product-life extension activities 'are a substitution of the transformation and service activities of extractive industries and base material production and thus a replacement of large-scale, energy- and capital-intensive units by smaller-scale, labour- and skill-intensive, independent, locally integrated work units'. Global change has accelerated throughout the period of reform, energy and material throughput has expanded, and the ecological footprint of the human economy now spans the entire Earth. Prevailing economic rationality relies heavily on the assumed simple mechanics of free and open markets to ensure sustainability.

Topics & Concepts