Partha Dasgupta told EarthSky that, in the developing world, natural resources aren’t just amenities. Instead, they’re economic necessities.
Partha Dasgupta is Professor of Economics at Cambridge University in England.
He told us that developed countries often don’t recognize the value of natural capital – the goods and services nature provides.
Partha Dasgupta: The environment gets thought of or perceived as an amenity. The beach gets polluted, or a beautiful wetland where you can watch birds gets damaged, so the birds don’t come any more, or come less.
And in that case, Dasgupta said, we in the U.S. might decide to take our vacations elsewhere. But in the developing world, he said, it’s different.
Partha Dasgupta: These resources are the mainstay of their household income. And if things go wrong there, it’s their livelihood. They’re not just amenities – they’re economic necessities.
Environmental resources such as wetlands, beaches and forests are now known to provide essential ecosystem services – clean air and water, healthy fisheries, protection from coastal erosion, and so on. Sixty percent of all of Earth’s ecosystem services are degraded, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment released earlier this year.
Dasgupta wants us to understand that nature’s services are key to the health and wealth of all nations.
Our thanks to:
Partha Dasgupta
Cambridge University
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
One day soon I trust that a HIGH LEVEL DISCUSSION of extant scientific evidence of human population dynamics and human overpopulation of the Earth happens in many places. Sooner or later discussions of this kind have to occur, I suppose, despite the fact that free and open speech of what looks to me like the very last of the last taboos is forbidden by the masters of the universe among us, the ones who value money, power and position before all else and exclaim their dishonest and duplicitous ‘work’ is, of all things, “God’s work”.
My concern for children everywhere is this. If children in our time are “sold” the aberrant idea that economic success is what really matters, that arrogance and avarice actually rule this world, then from now here I expect those who are still young will follow a clearly marked and soon to become patently unsustainable primrose path to perdition and destruction, a path that has been adamantly advocated and religiously pursued by self-proclaimed masters of the universe.
Let us not allow the ‘economic success’ that is derived from “bigger is better” and “the biggest business is the best”, and from insider trading, hedging, dark pools of capital, CDOs and other financial instruments, market and currency manipulations, Ponzi schemes and economic globalization by the masters of the universe to be confused with the works of God, as given to us in The Creation and disclosed to us in science.
Despite all the efforts to foment confusion and uncertainty by economic theologians, demographers and other minions of the wealthy and powerful, I trust we can agree that The Creation and science itself are utterly different from the artificially designed, ideologically flawed, manmade global economy that is organized and managed by the masters of the universe for their benefit primarily. Regarding this single thing, can there be even so much as a shadow of doubt? As for demography, it provides a politically useful and economically attractive platform for looking at “the growth rate decreases” of human population numbers in one place after another and then perniciously broadcasting this ‘scientific’ evidence everywhere as if these data provide actual assurance of the end of global population growth soon. All the while the demographers willfully ignore the skyrocketing increase of absolute global human population numbers. Demography is not the practice of science; it is a ruse. Demography is dangerous because it is so very misleading. The ‘empirical’ evidence derived from demography serves the selfish interests of the wealthy and powerful among us by disguising rather than disclosing the actual challenges posed to humanity in our time by the unbridled growth of the human population by approximately 75 to 80 million annually as well as by the gigantic scale of the global population that is projected to reach 9+ billion, likely during the lifetime of my children.
If the human family chooses not to make a new way of life for ourselves, perhaps you can see what visible through my eyes.
Can you see in the offing, there on the far horizon within sight of every human being with feet of clay on Earth, the first slouching trillionaire in the universe lumbering toward Bethlehem to be born?
Sincerely,
Steve