Ecologically Sustainable World

If we care for the welfare of current and future generations, humans need to have a viable relationship with the earth's ecosystems that form the basis for our wellbeing. This requires us to ensure that the earth will continue to provide for human needs both now and in the future.

The ecological sustainability challenge in a nutshell

• Over hundreds of millions of years, nature has built up an enormous store of plant and animal life, soil, minerals, fossil fuels and life-supporting ecosystems that provide air, water, climate and the raw materials for human food and artifacts;

• Until relatively recently, humans met their material needs primarily from the ‘interest’ flowing from this store of ‘natural capital’;

• The advent of industrial society powered by vast stores of fossilised energy enabled an explosion in population and consumption over the past 200 years – humanity has transitioned from ‘living off the interest’ to liquidating the natural capital basis of that ‘interest’, using up natural capital much faster than it can be regenerated;

• This rapid liquidation of natural capital has resulted in crises such as global warming, destruction of ecosystems and rapid depletion of natural resources – begging the question, “what will future generations live off?”;

• Ecological sustainability is fundamentally about human welfare - not only for those alive today but also for those still to be born who do not have a voice in decisions taken today that affect the future;

• The ecological sustainability challenge is therefore to ‘live off the interest’ (a relative ‘trickle’) from the remaining natural capital, and to restore it wherever possible in order to maintain sufficient natural capital for future generations;

• The only way this can be achieved indefinitely into the future is by humans urgently inventing a new mode of social organisation consistent with living off the ‘interest’ from natural capital rather than consuming the natural capital base itself.