All of us

Wee see our society in the grip of a severe but curable illness. It is not unlike the disease our grandparents called 'consumption' because it made its victims waste away. Today's economic tuberculosis consumes neither our bodies nor our resources (used energy and resources stay behind as unproductive pollution), but its effect on people, nations and the planet is just as deadly, costly and contagious.

We have been told that industrialisation has resulted from increasing levels of efficiency and productivity. Human productivity has certainly multiplied manyfold since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We have increased our productive capacities by substituting resources for human labour. Yet that substitution has now gone too far, over-using such resources as energy, materials, water, soil and air. Gains in 'productivity' pursued in this way are thus overwhelming the living systems that provide our resource base and must also assimilate the detritus of our civilisation.

Yet the wasting disease is curable. The cure comes from the laboratories, workbenches and production lines of skilled scientists and technologists, from the policies and designs of city planners and architects, from the ingenuity of engineers, chemists and farmers, and from the intelligence of every person. It is based on sound science, good economics and common sense. The cure is using resources efficiently; doing more with less. It is not a question of going backward or 'returning' to prior means. It is the beginning of a new industrial revolution in which we shall achieve dramatic increases in resource productivity.


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