The economists say,
"If you clear cut the forest,
take the money, and put it in the bank
you can make six seven percent."
"If you clear cut the forest and put it into Malaysia or Papua New Guinea,
you can make thirty or forty percent."
"So who cares whether you keep the forest. Cut it down."
"Put the money somewhere else. When those forests are gone, put in fish."
"When the fish are gone, put it in computers."
Money doesn't stand for anything and money now grows faster than the real world.
Conventional economics is a form of brain damage.
Economics is so fundamentally disconnected from the real world it is destructive.
If you take a an introductory course in economics,
the professor in the first lecturewill show a slide of the economy
and it looks very impressive - raw materials, extraction process, manufacturer, wholesale, retail
with arrows going back and forth
And they try to impress you because they know damn well
economics is not a science but they're trying to fool us into thinking that its a real science.
It's not.
Economics is a set of values that they then try to use mathematical equations
and all that stuff and pretend it's science.
But if you ask the economist,
"In that that equation, where do you put the ozone layer?"
"Where do you put the deep underground aquifers of fossil water?"
"Where do you put top soil or biodiversity?"
Their answer is, "oh, those are externalities."
Well then you might as well be on Mars.
That economy is not based in anything like the real world.
It is the web of life that filters water in the hydrologic cycle.
It is microorganisms in the soil that create the soil that we can grow our food in.
Nature performs all kinds of services -
insects fertilize all of the flowering plants.
These services are vital to the health of the planet.
Economists call these "externalities."
That's nuts!
We're told over and over, "the economy is a bottom line."
I don't think so.
What kind of world would I like to see our species generations from now?
I hope it will be a creature that understands what the real bottom line is.