I’ve spent a significant part of my career exploring and documenting how ecosystems function, and the profound impact humanity has on nature. Over time, I’ve come to recognize that not only is the way we treat the environment critically flawed, but so too is our current economic system. Conventional economic theories, like Keynesian economics, focus on transactions — the buying and selling of goods — as the primary measure of wealth. They insist that to prosper, societies must continually extract more resources, manufacture more products, and engage in more commercial activities — it’s all about ‘growth.’ However, there’s a fundamental problem with this approach: it overlooks the intrinsic value of nature. True wealth is not found in the commodities we trade, but in the functionality and health of our ecosystems. These provide us with “services” like clean air, water and fertile soil, which are the real foundations of our economy and very survival. Unlike the limited and often destructive traditional economic model, we must foster an economy that places higher value on natural systems and benefits all life — not just the interests of the 1%. Climate breakdown and biodiversity loss affect us all in the end. No one will be immune if we run out of soil to produce food, or clean water to drink. Ecological restoration work on Redonda Island, Antigua and Barbuda. Image courtesy of Olivier Raynaud/Environmental Awareness Group. Whose responsibility is it to make change? When I was setting up a CBS news bureau in China…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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