How well do you understand about relationship between the economy and the environment?
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In 1992, World Bank officials handed renowned economist Herman Daly a draft of its “Sustainable Development Report” to review. Daly had written Steady-State Economics in 1977, proposing that economists consider the requirements of ecology.

Traditionally, economists presume a continuous cycle of production and consumption that can grow forever without regard to the environment. However, events in the real world - pollution, global warming, declining fish populations - had exposed this fallacy, so the World Bank took a bold step in its report by amending the traditional diagram of economic cycles. It added two arrows, one entering the economic cycle, labelled “inputs,” and another exiting, called “outputs.” Daly suggested the Bank illustrate the source of these inputs and destination of the outputs - our waste and pollution - with a circle around the diagram labelled “ecosystem.”

World Bank managers considered his suggestion, but when the final report emerged, the bankers had deleted the diagram entirely. Apparently, acknowledging an ecosystem proved too unsettling for the brilliant minds at the pinnacle of global economics.
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Read this article, written by Rex Weyler, writer, journalist, ecologist and historian. It was originally published on Greenpeace.org.