ENVS 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Gross National Product, Environmental Protection, Forego
1 May 2015
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Healthy environment is essential for sustained economic growth: environment is seldom a consideration when setting economic policies. Environmental objectives and programs designed to meet them must be tailored to more important economic objectives. Economy: where everything gets produced, where jobs are created, where people seek satisfaction. Environment: what we try to protect ourselves from: some parts of it are considered essential. All of the materials processed come from and are disposed off in the environment. Economy depends on the environment and what we do to the environment depends on the economy. Humans benefit directly from sharing the planet with other species: need to balance what we can obtain through economic activity and what we seek from the environment through direct interactions with it. We must work towards fulfillment of goals expressed as stocks, not flows. There should be a shift from maximizing gnp to stock maintenance at least cost.
