Toward Economies that Sustain Nature and Human Dignity: An Ecological Economic Reformulation

Modern economies have successfully rallied human and community potentials to the production and consumption of material goods but are having increasing difficulty creating meaningful lives, assuring social justice, and protecting the environment for future generations. To redress these imbalances, we invoke economic language and reasoning ever more insistently and incessantly, and move away from solutions rather than toward them. This is because economics evolved with the larger assumptions of modernity that brought us to where we are. Reformulating economics, along with the on-going reformulation of our environmental and social consciousness, will be necessary to build a durable and endurable future.