Saturday, November 07, 2009

The place of Environmental Development

After reading the first bit of Paul Hawken's "Blessed Unrest" I find myself wondering about how we view the environment and why it is different from how we view economics. Having grown up in a home where environmental awareness has always been an important issue, and environmental activism has been important, I find myself wondering if various mainstream thoughts surrounding economics and science have been unduly influenced by the environmental movement. The increasingly evident necessity of incorporating our surroundings into our accounting is something that may have been actually hindered by the view of the environment as the cause of a movement, rather than an increasingly well understood aspect of our daily lives.
For example, rather than hugging a tree, understanding it's part in creating the air we breathe, leads us to weigh the cost of cutting down the tree against the benefits.
Arguably though, we would not be in a position to have investigated the costs of cutting down the tree without the environmental movement... Chicken or the egg?

Anyway, will probably develop this more later.