Nature’s Economy and the Human Economy

Human beings and the human economy are entirely integrated into nature’s economy—the biosphere and the ecosystems that comprise it. Society is therefore utterly dependent on the free services provided by ecosystems. But population growth, rising per capita consumption, and the use of environmentally malign technologies are steadily eroding those services. Projecting how long that process can continue without a global calamity depends on numerous uncertainties, many created by the existence of nonlinearities, thresholds, and lag times in ecological systems. A major problem is to determine how to allocate resources in various ways to solve the human predicament. Scientists have much of the information necessary for making those decisions, so the biggest problem is in the purview of social scientists. They must help to determine how best to move society from knowledge to action.