Ecological Collapse and the GDP

Here's a link to an article calling for a new way to measure the economy: "Perpetual Growth Myth leading world to meltdown:experts"

In the face of an "absolutely unprecedented emergency", say the [...] past winners of the Blue Planet prize – the unofficial Nobel for the environment – society has "no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us".

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Watson's comments accompanied a new paper released today by 20 past winners of the Blue Planet Prize - often called the Nobel Prize for the environment, and comes ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Rio+20 conference – which takes place in June this year – where world leaders will (it is hoped) seize the opportunity to set human development on a new, more sustainable path.

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The paper urges governments to:

• Replace GDP as a measure of wealth with metrics for natural, built, human and social capital - and how they intersect.
• Eliminate subsidies in sectors such as energy, transport and agriculture that create environmental and social costs, which currently go unpaid.
• Tackle over-consumption, and address population pressure by empowering women, improving education and making contraception accessible to all.
• Transform decision making processes to empower marginalized groups, and integrate economic, social and environmental policies instead of having them compete.
• Conserve and value biodiversity and ecosystem services, and create markets for them that can form the basis of green economies.
• Invest in knowledge - both in creating and in sharing it - through research and training that will enable governments, business, and society at large to understand and move towards a sustainable future.

The GDP is a concept. It's a way of measuring economic activity. It doesn't measure everything and some of the stuff it measures is economic activity caused by rebuilding from disasters or managing things like disease or crime that we'd rather not have to experience.

The thing to realize is that people can live full, healthy lives without having to increase their incomes and consumption by 3.5 to 5% per year. It's past time that we stopped poisoning our planet in the pursuit of a crude abstraction.