Mr. G. A. Norris wrote Systematic/holistic Application of Environmental Life Cycle Assessment to Building Material Selection in a research report submitted to BNIM Architects by Sylvatica, July 1999:

Two outstanding must read books are to be quoted from here on out to help wake you up to the reality of our current situation and just how important our forests are: Lester Brown, who the Washington Post says is "One of the world's most influential thinkers", has authored a book Eco-Economy (W. W. Norton & Company and website: earth-policy.org) and The Worldwatch Institute's book State of the World 2002 (W. W. Norton & Company website: worldwatch.org).

People know that a stable relationship between the economy and the earth's ecosystem is essential if economic progress is to be sustained. We have created an economy that cannot sustain economic progress, an economy that cannot take us where we want to go. Just as Copernicus had to formulate a new astronomical worldview after several decades of celestial observations and mathematical Calculations (that the earth was not the center of the universe, but rather the sun is which is knowledge we all take for granted to today but sharing this truth almost cost Copernicus his lifer back then because it really rocked the boat!), we too must formulate a new economic worldview based on several decades of environmental observations and analysis.

Although the idea that economics must be integrated into ecology may seem radical to many, evidence is mounting that it is the only approach that reflects reality. When observations no longer support theory, it is time to change the theory-what science historian Thomas Kuhn calls a paradigm shift. If the economy is a subset of the earth's ecosystem, as this book contends, the only formulation of economic policy that will succeed is one that respects the principles of ecology.

This initially may seem difficult to understand, unless you look at the ecological indicators. Here, virtually every global indicator was headed in the wrong direction. The economic policies that have yielded the extraordinary growth in the world economy are the same ones that are destroying its support systems. By any conceivable ecological yardstick, these are failed policies. Mismanagement is destroying forests, rangelands, fisheries, and croplands-the four ecosystems that supply our food and, except for minerals, all our raw materials as well.

Although many of us live in a high-tech urbanized society, we are as dependent on the earth's natural systems as our hunter-gatherer forebears were. Evidence that the economy is in conflict with the earth's natural systems can be seen in the daily news reports of collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, eroding soils, deteriorating rangelands, expanding deserts, rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, failing water tables, rising temperatures, more destructive storms, melting glaciers, rising sea level, dying coral reefs, and disappearing species.

These trends, which mark an increasingly stressed relationship between the economy and the earth's ecosystem, are taking a growing economic toll- At some point, this could overwhelm the world wide forces of progress, leading to economic decline. The challenge for our generation is to reverse these trends before environmental deterioration leads to long-term economic decline, as it did for so many earlier civilizations.

During the later centuries of the Mayan civilization, a new society was evolving on Easter Island, some 166 square kilometers of land in the South Pacific roughly 3,200 kilometers west of South America and 2,200 kilometers from Pitcairn Island, the nearest habitation. Settled around AD 400, this civilization flourished on a volcanic island with rich soils and lush vegetation, including trees that grew 25 meters tall with trunks 2 meters in diameter. Archeological records indicate that the islanders ate mainly seafood, principally dolphins-a mammal that could only be caught by harpoon from large sea-going canoes since it was not locally available in large numbers.

The Easter Island society flourished for several centuries, reaching an estimated population of 20,000. As its human numbers gradually increased, tree cutting exceeded the sustainable yield of forests. Eventually the large trees needed to build the sturdy, oceangoing canoes disappeared, depriving islanders of access to the dolphins, thus dramatically shrinking the island's seafood supply. The archeological record shows that at some point human bones became intermingled with the dolphin bones, suggesting a desperate society that had resorted to cannibalism. Today the island is occupied by some 2,000 people.

These are just three (get the book to learn of other two) of the early civilizations that declined apparently because at some point they moved onto an economic path that was environmentally unsustainable. We, too, are on such a path. Any one of several trends of environmental degradation could undermine civilization as we know it. Just as the irrigation system that defined the early Sumerian economy had a flaw, so too does the fossil fuel energy system that defines our modern economy. It is raising CO2 levels in the atmosphere and thus altering the earth's climate.

The Option: Restructure or Decline. Whether we study the environmental undermining of earlier civilizations or look at how adoption of the western industrial model by China would affect the earth's ecosystem, it is evident that the existing industrial economic model cannot sustain economic progress. In our shortsighted efforts to sustain the global economy, as currently structured, we are depleting the earth's natural capital. We spend a lot of time worrying about our economic deficits, but it is the ecological deficits that threaten our long-term economic future. Economic deficits are what we borrow from each other; ecological deficits are what we take from future generations.

Herman Daly, the intellectual pioneer of the fast-growing field of ecological economics, notes that the world "has passed from an era in which manmade capital represented the limiting factor in economic development (an 'empty' world) to an era in which increasingly scarce natural capital has taken its place (a 'full' world)." When our numbers were small relative to the size of the planet, it was human made capital that was scarce. Natural capital was abundant. Now that has changed. As the human enterprise continues to expand, the products and services provided by the earth's ecosystem are increasingly scarce, and natural capital is fast becoming the limiting factor while human made capital is increasingly abundant.

Transforming our environmentally destructive economy into one that can sustain progress depends on a Copernican shift in our economic mindset, a recognition that the economy is part of the earth's ecosystem and can sustain progress only if it is restructured so that it is compatible with it. The preeminent challenge for our generation is to design an eco-economy, one that respects the principles of ecology. A redesigned economy can be integrated into the ecosystem in a way that will stabilize the relationship between the two, enabling economic progress to continue.

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