The Environment is an Asset, Why Capitalism Fails the Planet: The Urgent Need for Natural Capital Accounting

The problem with capitalism is that it sees the environment as a resource to be exploited instead of an asset to be maintained! 

The global environment (i.e., the biosphere) is being degraded at an astonishing rate by human malfeasance, as attributed to the globalized capitalist economic model.  The free market works, at least to a degree. However, there is a problem in how we approach the environment as a part of markets (especially manufacturing). Rethinking the environment and how it's used must be realized and discussed if it is to be maintained instead of exploited.

In any real sense, to business, the environment is not an asset to maintain but a resource to be exploited! The problem is that we don't assign any value to what the environment does for humanity and business for free! There is no accounting of how billions of plant forms around the world turn carbon into oxygen through the natural process of photosynthesis. We take it for granted that these plants do a job that is irreplaceable (like bees and pollination). We don't assign a numerical monetary value to nature and its processes, which would explain why humans treat our habitat the way we do.

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Our ecological footprint as a species is gigantic and so large it would take the resources of more than 6 Earths for everyone in the world to have the living standard of those in the U.S. In a real sense, instead of paying the true costs of living, we have externalized our environmental malfeasance upon future generations, who will have to deal with the immense amount of waste we have created and distributed around the world.

It's self-evident that we don't respect Mother Nature and our environment because (big) business (which runs the American government and world economy) doesn't see it as having any real value due to our economic model. If there is any hope of our species having a prosperous future where we leave the world in a better state than we received it, then the economic model must change.

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Other Related blog(s): The SocioEconomic Market, Sociology of Love