For most of its history, mankind constituted a relatively insignificant category of life on Earth. Our abilities and activities were few, and the space and resources beyond our local dealings appeared infinite. In recent history, this has changed at an accelerated pace. The human-nature relation is basically determined by an interplay between technology, the economy, and our numbers, and we can take the latter as an indication of the massive change in our ecological equation. Signs of a shrinking resource base and ecosystem capacity become increasingly plentiful. The economic language, with its theories, models, and claims, normally gives a completely different story from the one above. It is a story about a continued, perpetual drive along the illuminated highway of development, which has growing economic value and consumption as its main ingredients. This myth of victory, for our technology, organization and production, and for us as a species, is on the front cover of the human story on Earth. The competing story is that a pyrrhic victory has been won at the cost of the future. Not only have we consumed the Earth’s non-renewable stock and marginalized other species, we have also chewed from the processes that enable life, the ones that produce what we see as ‘natural resources’ and silently absorb the residual waste of human activities. Conflicts between these two stories are the subject of Bonnedhal’s chapter. One explanation as to why conflicts still exist, in spite of the knowledge we possess, is that the economic language, way of thinking and field of science originate in times when an increased exploitation of nature and expansion of societies were possible – due to available space, capacity in the ecosystems and immense quantities of stored fossil energy. Hence, a planet without the capacity for further exploitation and expansion is in radical need of new ways of thinking. It needs an economy built on realistic scientific assumptions and active ethical standpoints. The conclusion is that it is time to accept that our success the human expansion and almost complete dominance of Earth, as manifested in the term Anthropocene − is a threat and that the causes of this threat are found in our own understandings and priorities. Present levels of control, domestication, and exploitation contradict ecological balance, and a crucial part of the necessary change is the subordination of economic activities and systems under a realistic and ethically generous model for sustainability. Evolutionary coexistence forms such a model and could become a framework for sustainable human decision-making. Within this framework, the suggested changes in economic conceptualization and practice would form the basis for an economy which would serve the planet and its inhabitants over many generations instead of maximizing output and consumption for a temporary human elite. The smaller role of human societies in terms of sheer size and dominance would be well compensated also with anthropocentric points of departure. When economic activity focuses on basic needs, quality of life and profound relations, well-being could be improved on material levels somewhere in-between today’s extremes. Finally, contrary to conventional ‘sustainable development’, the strategy of evolutionary coexistence gives human society a chance to survive and prosper in a just and peaceful way.
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