People think “economy” is only about money. This is why everybody feeds only this aspect by the promotion and practice of consumerism.
It's true that consumerism helps create jobs, capture international investors' attention, etc. All this money movement is what economists call “to activate the economy,” considering this positive in all cases.
This purely quantitative approach has another direct consequence, the today widely assumed “more is better.”
In the long term, as a result, this approach focused on money will exhaust the actual resources. We depend mainly on nature, the only source of all our goods. Like it or not, nature ignores everything related to our conventions and sooner or later will end waking us up from our fantasy of dominance: money is not a real resource, not even a material good, but only another abstraction of ours.
This is the issue. Focused, specialized, unable to see the whole picture, human mind is lost in its own abstractions. Our greatest challenge and survival requirement is to learn, over and over again and in ascending order of difficulty, to put our feet on the ground.
Real economy is about the intelligent use of real resources.
We can state that true economy is ecology but also that true ecology is economy. Can we reduce the environmental impact by changing our production techniques? At small scale probably, at large I doubt; they want to make us believe we can maintain our level of production and consume and reducing their foot print at the same time by just using “green technology.” Lies. The only effective action to reduce contamination is moderation. Economy and ecology are synonyms.
©2013 - Walter Alejandro Iglesias