A acbei de ler i livro do E. O. Wilson, "Consilience", onde o autor examina os progressos feitos (sempre á luz da biologia que é a sua área) desde o Ilumismo com vita ao que chama "Consiliência" que define como união dos conhecimentso.
O livro revela uma erudição colossal, mas o ultimo capitulo "Para que fim acaba num tom bastante pessimista", no que respeita à sustenatbilidade ambiental.
Já houve um tópico que teve pouco sucesso acerca da neo-liberalismo e psicopatia, mas num aspecto mais geral a discussão entre os imponderáveis ambientias e a visão dos economistas pode ser interessante (devo dizer que o autor no meio de várias criticas que faz ao afastamento do conhecimento e principios cientificos por parte dos cientistas sociais é particularmente generos com a econmia que considera ser a que está no melhor caminho para proporcioanr alguma unidade com ciencias naturais).
Deixo aqui o excerto do ulimo capitulo para quem quiser comentar a relação entre a adequação da versão economicista á realidade ambiental
.. the overriding environmental goal is to
shrink the ecological footprint to a level that can be sustained by
Earth's fragile environment.
Much of the technology required to reach that goal can be summarized
in two concepts. Decarbonization is the shift from the burning of
coal, petroleum, and wood to essentially unlimited, environmentally
light energy sources such as fuel cells, nuclear fusion, and solar and
wind power. Dematerialization, the second concept, is the reduction
in bulk of hardware and the energy it consumes. All the microchips in
the world, to take the most encouraging contemporary example, can
be fitted into the room that housed the Harvard Mark 1 electromagnetic
computer at the dawn of the information revolution.
The single greatest intellectual obstacle to environmental realism,
as opposed to practical difficulty, is the myopia of most professional
economists. In Chapter 9 I described the insular nature of neoclassical
economic theory. Its models, while elegant cabinet specimens of applied
mathematics, largely ignore human behavior as understood by
contemporary psychology and biology. Lacking such a foundation, the
conclusions often describe abstract worlds that do not exist. The flaw is
especially noticeable in microeconomics, which treats the patterns of
choices made by individual consumers.
The weakness of economics is most worrisome, however, in its general
failure to incorporate the environment. After the Earth Summit,
and after veritable encyclopedias of data compiled by scientists and resource
experts have shown clearly the dangerous trends of population
size and planetary health, the most influential economists still make
recommendations as though there is no environment. Their assessments
read like the annual reports of successful brokerage firms.
...
In national balance sheets economists seldom use full-cost accounting,
which includes the loss of natural resources. A country can
cut down all its trees, mine out its most profitable minerals, exhaust its
fisheries, erode most of its soil, draw down its underground water, and
count all the proceeds as income and none of the depletion as cost. It
can pollute the environment and promote policies that crowd its populace
into urban slums, without charging the result to overhead.
Full-cost accounting is gaining some credibility within the councils
of economists and the finance ministers they advise. Ecological
economics, a new subdiscipline, has been formed to put a green
thumb on the invisible hand of economics. But it is still only marginally
influential. Competitive indexes and gross domestic products
(GDPs) remain seductive, not to be messed up in conventional economic
theory by adding the tricky complexities of environment and social
cost. The time has come for economists and business leaders, who
so haughtily pride themselves as masters of the real world, to acknowledge
the existence of the real real world. New indicators of progress are
needed to monitor the economy, wherein the natural world and
human well-being, not just economic production, are awarded full
measure.
PS O livro é de 98 mas a erudição e capacidade de pensar do autor é tal que se vai manter actual durante varias décadas, e a leitura é estimulante, e sempre interessante mesmo que por vezes não se concorde
