Forum Post: Sustainability

Greetings fellow humans

While it might be hard to see, the current financial crisis is the result of a debt-fuelled economy being unable to cope with an equilibrium-based planetary ecological system.

In a system where debt is created before actual value, those who are indebted are forced to try to create the wealth in order to be able to pay off their debts with interest. That is fundamentally what drives the growth paradigm in the economy.

Since the amount of debt is growing at the second, while the inability to generate wealth is stifled by an increased scarcity of resources, banks, corporations and nations are growing increasingly desperate to gain access to new markets on which they could throw money in order to receive a revenue in the form of interest and investment gains. That will of course lead to bubbles emerging - bubbles which threaten to undo the system.

The other side of the coin is that exponential growth will exhaust the natural systems on which all lifeforms on this Earth are dependent. An exhaustion of said natural systems will lead to a reduction of human life standards in general to the level of pre-industrial societies, but with even less capacity to feed the surviving population of the planet.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8530

The main question is: How can we move from this current, unsustainable system into a system that is able to both guarantee contemporary human well-being and the well-being of future generations.

Even if you don't agree with the conclusions, I would heartily recommend that you look into propositions for alternative socio-economic systems.

http://www.eoslife.eu/forum/everything-else/16574-are-we-reaching-limits-of-growth#16575

With kind regards