Economic growth creates poverty by destroying nature
Infinite growth - a dream of economists, businessmen and politicians. Economic growth is considered to be a measure of progress. As a result of the GDP, which is designed to reflect the level of wealth of nations, became the most influential and dominant figure of the concept of our time.
The concept of economic growth has been put forward during the Second World War as a criterion designed to mobilize resources. The concept of GDP is based on a fictitious, artificially drawn borders - on the idea that if you make just as much as you consume, then you do not produce. As a result, GDP growth began to reflect the rate of transformation in the nature of money, and the common ground - in the feed.
Thus, the amazing natural cycles of renewal of water and nutrients fall into the category of non-production. Farmers all over the world, which produce 72% of the food, as it turns out, really do not produce anything, the women who work on farms or at home, too, do not fit into this paradigm of growth. Living Forest ceased to contribute to economic growth, but if the trees are cut down and sell the timber, our economy will grow.
Healthy community not promote growth, while diseases create excellent growth conditions for, for example, by selling proprietary medicines.
Water belongs equally to all, is designed to ensure the needs of all people. But it does not create the conditions for growth. If Coca-Cola Company will build a plant, will begin pumping water out of the ground and pour it into the bottle, the economy will grow. However, at the heart of this growth is poverty - poverty of nature and local communities. If in the process of extraction of water does not take into account the nature of the opportunities for renewal, it will inevitably lead to an acute shortage of drinking water.
Women have to go through a much longer way to go to get drinking water. In the village of Plachimada in Kerala, where the distance to the nearest source of drinking water increased to 10 kilometers, one local woman named Mayilamma said she'd had enough. We can go even further, so the Coca-Cola plant to close.
The movement of local Indian women finally achieved closure of the plant.
Evolution has given us the seed. Farmers to select for and crossed it by pursuing diversity. The seed was the basis of our food production. The seed that updates itself and multiplies, giving people not only food, but also the seed for the next season.
However, farmers cultivated and stored seeds do not contribute to the growth of the economy. These seeds produce and update the life, but they do not bring income. Economic growth begins where the company is modified patent seeds and introduce them to the genetic lock, forcing farmers to buy seeds every season.
Impoverished nature, biodiversity is destroyed, and free and available to all resources have turned to proprietary raw materials. The annual purchase of seeds production was a direct path to a debt to the poor Indian farmers. And when the seed of India's monopoly, rose and debts of farmers.
Since 1995, more than 270,000 Indian farmers caught in a debt trap, committed suicide.
Poverty continues to expand its borders, when the state privatized system. The privatization of water, electricity, health and education leads to economic growth, as incomes grow businesses. But it also leads to the impoverishment of the people, causing them to spend huge amounts of money on something that should be available to all at a low price.
When all aspects of life become a source of profit and commercial goods, life becomes more expensive, and people - poorer.
Terms of ecology and economy have the same roots: both come from the Greek word «oikos», indicating the household. While the focus of the economy was the household, it is recognized and respected by his close relationship with natural resources and environmental renewal of the border. Its main task was to provide people with all the necessary within those boundaries. The economy, which was at the center of the household, was largely focused on women.
The modern economy as opposed to separate and ecological processes, and the basic needs of the people. Today, the destruction of nature is justified by the need to achieve economic growth, whereas the number of poor people who lost their property continues to grow. Besides the fact that it leads to instability, it is also unfair in the economic sense.
The dominant model of economic development has actually become protivozhiznennoy. When the level of development of the economy is measured only cash flow, the rich get richer and the poor - poorer. Moreover, the rich are rich only in terms of money - they are poor in the broader context of what it means to be human.
Meanwhile, the needs of the modern model of the economy led to the outbreak of war for resources, oil and food wars. In today's development can be divided into three levels of violence. The first level - is violence against nature, which is expressed in the form of environmental crisis. The second - the violence against the people, as expressed in poverty, poverty and evictions.
The third level - this is war and conflict, in which powerful actors seek to get to the resources found in other communities and countries to satisfy their boundless appetite.
The increase in cash flow is now no longer associated with the true value, but those who are accumulating financial resources, can then assert their rights to the resources of other people - their land and water, forests and crops. This hunger drives them to take away people last drop of water, and the last inch of land. This is not the end of poverty.
This is the end of human rights and justice.
Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz (Joseph Stiglitz) and Amartya Sen (Amartya Sen) recognized that VVR does not reflect the real conditions of life, and called for the establishment of other tools to assess the well-being of nations. That is why in countries such as Bhutan, to assess the progress of GDP instead put into circulation indicators such as the gross national happiness. To restore the true wealth, we need to develop other evaluation criteria, in addition to GDP and create the economy that would be placed outside of the global supermarket.
We must remember that the true currency of life - it is life itself.
Progress.org
Liquid Lunch with Hugh Reilly: Earthsharing Canada spokesperson Frank de Jong argues that government collect economic rent (income without a corresponding cost of production) in lieu of taxes on business, incomes or sales. Economic rent refers to the societal surplus that flows to desirable assets like land, resources like oil, trees, water, and the right to pollute. Other sources of economic rent are billboards, the stock market, the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum, agricultural quotas, taxi medallions, etc. Although this wealth rightfully belongs to the community -- which created it in the first place -- it presently flows to private asset owners, forcing governments to damage the economy by taxing businesses, jobs and sales. Taxing incomes makes people more expensive to hire, taxing capital increases the cost of borrowing, taxing profits pushes companies closer to bankruptcy, and taxing consumption raises prices. Economists call these dead weight taxes that stifle economic vitality and cause unemployment and poverty. On the other hand, funding government programs by capturing the community-generated, unearned income that accrues to desirable finite assets increases economic efficiency, reduces poverty and unemployment, halts sprawl, conserves resources and reduces pollution. Untaxing the productive economy creates wealth while taxing nature conserves the planet.
