Note that a business usually care about both its income statement and its balance sheet. Society now optimizes everything for the income (GDP growth), recklessly, and does not care at all about the very thing that makes this possible (the ecosystem on which the economy relies). The sad irony is that those who force government to mostly care about profits will pretend they want society to be managed like a business (they're dishonest, they don't care about society but their individual means).
If you have to make something yourself and it takes you real time and effort, are you going to be likely to destroy it on purpose? People destroy things they don't value because it was given to them or required relatively little work.
For example, how many of the short sighted CEOs rose through the ranks of the company to that level? How many participate in the same communities as their workers? It's more likely they joined the company as some sort of executive, live in a mansion, etc. They have no connection to the workers or the company.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-fanta...
Hominids’ use of fire is historically deep and pervasive. Evidence for human fires is at least 400,000 years old, long before our species appeared on the scene. Thanks to hominids, much of the world’s flora and fauna consist of fire-adapted species (pyrophytes) that have been encouraged by burning. The effects of anthropogenic fire are so massive that they might be judged, in an evenhanded account of the human impact on the natural world, to overwhelm crop and livestock domestications. Why human fire as landscape architect doesn’t register as it ought to in our historical accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and were accomplished by “precivilized” peoples also known as “savages.” In our age of dynamite and bulldozers, it was a very slow-motion sort of environmental landscaping. But its aggregate effects were momentous.
...The evidence suggests that long before the bow and arrow appeared, roughly twenty thousand years ago, hominids were using fire to drive herd animals off precipices and to drive elephants into bogs where, immobilized, they could more easily be killed.
From Against the Grain, A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017)
But there's really no reason to believe that even a major loss of biodiversity would have any significant economic implications. Certainly not more than 10% of global GDP. That doesn't mean that it might not be something worth caring about for other reasons, but the economy definitely doesn't rely on it.
But biodiversity is less of a means to me, and more of the end. Humans ARE biodiversity. We exist because of the long, complex and ever moving evolutionary chain. We haven't found life any where else in the universe like it exists on earth. It is a wonderous experiment and it is something we have a responsibility to foster. Without it, it feels like humans are but a finger lamenting at the death of the body it extends from.
A world without biodiversity is inflexible, therefore fragile. We already recreated it in minimally-diverse production systems, which have all been majorly screwed over as soon as covid required adaptation.
More realistically, we do not understand the impacts of biodiversity well enough to be confident about the economic impacts of biodiversity loss.
These are complex systems, and we very typically overestimate our understanding and mastery of complex systems.
People who have to make individual choices _do_ care about the consequence of their choices. They care about biodiversity. Family farmers and family businesses do care and are stewards of the environment and their land. There are more and more people buying local, supporting small business, and making sustainable choices on a personal level. They do care.
It is faceless corporations controlled by narcissists and sociopaths that tend to maximize their prestige and profits over conscience. They can push off the consequences to other people, evade legal consequences, pay the little fines, lobby the government to give them special privileges, and run roughshod over the environment. Investors can say they aren't personally making the decisions, and the officers can say they are just trying to maximize profits for investors.
Eliminate corporations and return to a society with more a conscience, more connection to the land, and more personal responsibility.
I think this specific part of the system is most responsible for how our society chooses growth over all our other values.
Karl Marx was a disciple of Feuerbach, and in the innermost core of his analysis there is an analogous idea. Humanity created the logic of capital, but then that logic became somewhat independent of humans, and we now take that logic as granted and as part of our nature. So, we are controlled by capital logic just as a religious person is controlled by the idea of God. I think behind the ecosystem destruction in our very-rational-and-scientific society there are the appetites of that big Moloch who control our behaviors, Capital.
This goes beyond any conspiracy theory, because when we put these googles on, we see the hidden controller of humanity not as a secret goverment or an Illuminati sect. Is not even human, and is more alien to us as the most weird biological alien you can imagine. Is to see our controller as an inhuman logic emerged from our own minds/history but becoming somewhat an independent "entitiy" who can order us to burn the entire planet for profits, and we are going to obey.
Common economic opinion seems to be that if an entity can consume some resource without immediate negative consequences for that entity, it's not only ok if does so, but it is "rational" to consume as much of it as possible, regardless of how much was actually needed - because "what is free does not have a value".
This is why, with climate change looming, the smartest minds of tech are designing a technology based on systematically wasting computing capacity and power.
/Some of/ the smartest minds in tech are working on transportation technologies and renewable technologies which will make our communities safer and more sustainable.
See it from the perspective of the glass. There might be 5 adults who don't smash it with a hammer, but 1 child who does. At the end of the day, it has been smashed. Not smashing glass yourself is not enough as long as there is someone around who might smash it in the future. If you want to protect the glass, you need to prevent others from smashing it as well (or laying fire to the rainforest, overfishing, etc).
Also, yes, we are quite young as an industrial species. Personally it feels to me that we are very smart when it comes to exploiting this planet, but are extremely immature when it comes to the question of its protection.
It's that everyone, EVERYONE is an individual cell responding to incentives, and in fact, if you were in their shoes you'd behave similarly.
We need to do things like implement a carbon tax to push incentives in the right direction, but easier said than done.
Consider too that your proposal about a carbon tax is doomed under your approach, since incentives exist for politicians to ignore the problem.
The paper doesn't have any insight. It would have an insight if they took people's souls and gave them hundreds of lives with different genetics, socioeconomic backgrounds, parents, and friend groups, and measured the impact that each had on how likely someone was to become a jerk, optimist, etc.
"Individuals have mildly consistent behaviors" is the only observation the paper makes, and it isn't particularly interesting.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strate...
Also as a child you are mindful after you break something - as an adult you let others do the breaking for you so you don't have to see it. Let it be someone's job to kill or dig the earth and extract minerals or cut down trees or pollute the sky - then support them instead of having mommy yell and berate them.
Because in that universe, we eventually grew beyond trying to acquire wealth.
Somewhat ironic given our current phase of ever-increasing divides between rich and poor.
But it's also worth remembering, that version of humanity saw the worst things that some of our current paths are or may lead us towards (Genetically Engineered Dictators, Nuclear war, putting economically challenged people in a compound so the rest of society doesn't have to think about them).
It's what we do with our choices that determine whether we pass or fail.
And yes, it's important to remember our mortality, as individuals and as a species. In fact, I'm increasingly realizing much of what humans do -- and much of what individuals are fundamentally anxious about -- comes down to mortality. Why do we build careers? Civilizations? To create something that lasts beyond us.
But facing that directly leads you to make more rational choices and perhaps find more peace. Knowing that life is temporary, what do you do? How do you make best use of your time on this planet?
It's not surprising that people feel stress from this and "walking it off" is not all that effective of a treatment.
Solar, geothermal, wave and other forms of energy will surely continue to allow complex systems to thrive on this planet, but our particular system arose out of access to an abundant, but ultimately limited source of high energy density fuels. We could essentially view our civilizations work as assisting in breaking down the energy gradient caused by having very rich stores of energy locked in the bonds of hydro carbons beneath the surface. As this source of energy is exploited and depleted too will our civilization and possibly species begin to break down.
"Life is merely an orderly decay of energy states, and survival requires the continual discovery of new energy to pump into the system. He who controls the sources of energy controls the means of survival."
CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly"
Pretty much sums up the extreme capitalist view for me.
The book "Into the Cool" explores this is away you might find very interesting. It spends a lot of time exploring the question of how the complexity of life emerges given the second law of thermodynamics. It argues pretty strongly that the second law still rules everything but we have to look at larger non-equilibrium energy flows to really understand it.
Energy fuels the complexity of our society, species and world. That wood you see burning is a solar battery in which complex life converted energy into hyrdocarbons over the period of many years.
Energy shapes everything about our society and will determine everything about our future. We life in a technical wonderland as a direct consequence of our species discovering extremely high energy density fossil fuels not all that long ago.
But in the end all of this complexity serves the second law in helping reduce energy gradients. All of that stored up potential energy in fossil fuels is being released into the environment, and we are the tools of nature to help. Thing of all of the energy we have spend freeing resources and energy from the grown. When we grow beyond the means of the energy supporting that system, all of it will break down.
We're starting to see this now not just in climate but the ecosystem, our economy etc etc.
The greatest illusion we've had as a species is that we are anything other than an expression of the second law in action.
That being said, That makes MY head hurt.
But after all that, with the right perspective, what you describe can almost be seen as describing a fundamental law of nature (entropy). An ordered system will naturally trend towards disorder given no external input and its much easier to have an unordered system than an ordered system.
It builds itself...