"Full World" Economics Demands a Global Approach

An article by environmental scientist Herman E. Daly, "Economics in a Full World," published in Scientific American magazine in 2005, was one of the first to mote that, "The economic status quo cannot be maintained long into the future. If radical changes are not made, we face loss of well-being and possible ecological catastrophe."

The tripling of the human population in the past seventy years, as well as the rapid expansion of resource extraction and manufacturing to all points of the globe, has put the earth's ecosystem at risk. Daly, trained initially as an economist, maintains that resource usage must be limited to rates that can be absorbed into the ecosystem safely, that such resource exploitation must be sustainable, and the usage of nonrenewable must be limited as much as  possible to rates that do "not exceed the rate of development of renewable alternatives."

Daly believes that adjustments must be made to economic policy, with special attention to product lifetimes. He suggests that perhaps one step in this direction would be for consumption to be carried out by service contracts for leased commodities, wherein the "vendor, owns, maintains, reclaims, and recycles the product at the end of its useful life."

Clearly this is a concept that should be made part of our political and social dialogue as soon as possible, preferably not in the white-hot partisan environment of partisan politics.