How do we value the environment – natural wealth or collateral damage?
The present global financial crisis has thrown everything up in the air in terms of what we value and what we can rely on as indicators of economic stability. Banking institutions and global corporations that seemed relatively impervious to market fluctuations are, as it turns out, more fragile and susceptible to change than we thought. If we want to see a silver lining in this darkest of clouds, we might examine how we measure a country’s wealth – does GDP really reflect how well-off and how happy we really are? Does our pursuit of economic growth through the traditional model really work in the long term, or can we use the current crisis to learn lessons about what truly makes for a sustainable economy? The ripples caused by a recession are many, and the costs are huge. The risk now is that we try to revert to normal practice and see the environment as collateral damage. Indeed, recent EU talks on climate change have seen pressure from some countries to water down commitments to redu
