Ecological economics: the entropic vision

“Every fool confuses value and price”.  Antonio Machado

The orthodox economic vision tends to ignore the limited nature of natural resources and the vulnerability of the environment.

Every time a substance, material or organism of nature is extracted, there are traces of some kind in the natural systems: quarry and mine holes, deforested landscapes, numerous species eliminated. Many of these changes are irreversible. Minerals extracted, eroded soils, overexploited aquifers, extinct species, often disappear forever.

At the same time, the elements of nature that are used in increasing volumes by industrial processes are transformed into products and waste. The products are used or consumed, generating in turn more waste. At the end of the day, all natural resources become waste.

According to the models of the industrialist economists, it would seem that these wastes that are dumped in the environment are recycled in some way to reappear in the productive chain as natural resources.

In fact, this occurs naturally, albeit partially, thanks to the transforming action of solar radiation. Artificially recycling is possible only in some cases, through the use of appropriate technology and a certain energy consumption. In others, this reconstitution is not feasible or impracticable, either due to high costs, or to mere physical or technological impossibility. In one way or another, a growing and cumulative portion of waste-resources remains in the environment indefinitely as degraded matter.

This phenomenon of the final irreversibility of industrial processes was ignored for a long time by politicians and economists. The visible result of this indifference has been an increasing dilapidation of the "natural resources" and the deterioration of the ecological systems of the planet.

From the first half of the twentieth century, thinkers appeared who questioned the principles and physical bases of the industrial economy. The writings and statements of these authors were ignored, and even ridiculed. However, as the decades have passed, it has become more evident that orthodox economics is wrong. Faced with the accumulated evidence, a new vision has begun to develop: the ecological economy.

Despite the irrefutable nature of their position, ecological economists are still a tiny minority and have not managed to occupy positions of power in global or national economic systems.

In any case, it is in this new approach that we find the seeds of a new way of seeing the natural world and of imagining the role that societies can play in their own preservation or destruction. (to be continued)

From the book "Drought in a waterworld ", D.Antón, Piriguazú Ediciones