Environmental Limits

This section presents one of the three core analytical tools in ENL: the treatment of environmental limits.

The others are the maximization of gains from economic activities, and the appropriate population level.

Each of these subjects builds upon the framework and the basic concepts of production and cost and consumption and value as defined in ENL. Because there are strong interactions among gains, environment, and population, a systematic approach is necessary.

In ENL's treatment of maximizing gains, marginal analysis is used to determine an output's optimum quantity, without taking environmental limits into account. In the present section these constraints are considered using non-marginal methods in order to establish an output's ecological limit. This allows us to modify the preliminary conclusions about rational output quantities arrived at in the discussion of gains.

Population is here assumed to be fixed, a restriction which is dropped in ENL's treatment of that topic, which finalizes the conclusions presented in the present section.

ENL is intended to address two distinct aspects of the ecological crisis: resource overshoot and impact overshoot.

The first refers to a production level that cannot be maintained once nonrenewable resources are effectively depleted, whereas the second refers to the violation of the biosphere's capacity safely to absorb the environmental effects of economic activities.

The concepts and tools introduced in the present section are based exclusively on the more critical of these two challenges: impact overshoot. How resource overshoot might be addressed is discussed as part ENL's approach to reversing overshoot.

Dealing comprehensively with environmental limits means that we must address four types of natural flows:

  • habitat destruction
  • the utilization of renewables
  • the expulsion of wastes
  • the depletion of nonrenewables

The first three of these are called biological flows because they can directly degrade the natural world, possibly leading to ecosystem decline and collapse. Such effects are scientifically detectable as they develop, thus providing us with natural signals that damage is being done and that thresholds are being approached.

By contrast, the flows of nonrenewable resources do not, in themselves, cause ecosystem damage. That is, nature gives us no indication that uranium, oil, coal, iron, etc. are being depleted "too rapidly."

(It is necessary to distinguish between depletion, which refers to the decrease in resource availability, and extraction, which refers to the economic activities associated with depletion. These activities — fracking, mountaintop removal, surface removal in the Alberta tar sands, etc. — frequently cause immense environmental damage. The discussion here is about depletion, not extraction.)

This means that, while the biological flows can be used to set limits on our economic activities, nonrenewable flows cannot be used for this purpose. This is a crucial distinction that must be kept in mind.

There are two aspects to ENL's treatment of ecological constraints. The first is the widely accepted notion that our economic activities must avoid violating natural limits. The second is the less familiar idea that these restrictions should be imposed so as to maximize human health.

The involvement of health in setting environmental limits means that the analytical tools developed in the present section must be integrated with the methods developed in the other sections.

Contents of this section:

Budget Shares and Share Limits Once an economy's budget for a biological flow has been scientifically or politically established, the budgeted amount must be allotted to the final outputs that require the flow in their life cycles. Each such allotment is called a budget share. Read on…
Ecological Efficiency Ecological efficiency measures the success of production activities in minimizing a required natural flow. Read on…
Ecological Limit—Economy When dealing with an economy's total outputs, ENL's approach assumes the output mix remains the same, and the economy's scale changes by increasing and decreasing this fixed output combination. Read on…
Ecological Limit—Single Output Based on ENL's ethical stance towards future humankind, an economy must respect all of its budgets, without exception. This means that an output cannot contribute to the violation of any of the economy's environmental budgets. Read on…
Environmental Budgets A typical family has a financial budget for what it can spend each month. Such a budget depends largely on its income, and is usually divided into expenditure categories: so much for mortgage or rent, so much food, so much for entertainment, etc. An economy is similar: it has an environmental budget for each biological flow that it requires for its economic activities. Read on…
Flow Rate Patterns Target rates for natural flows are tightly linked to target levels for outputs: as output levels rise, flow rates will tend to rise; as output levels fall, flow rates will tend to fall. Read on…
Natural Flows—Synopsis The four natural flow categories overlap in some of their attributes and differ in others. The following table and discussion are intended to provide clarification for those studying ENL. Read on…
Present and Future Humankind > Today mankind is locked into stealing ravenously from the future. Read on…
Sanctioned Wants Consumption desires that do not significantly increase health when they are satisfied are called wants, and the associated outputs require social judgment to establish their appropriate production levels. Read on…
Target Flow Rates The first aim of this section's analytical tools is to modify ENL's conclusions regarding production by taking ecological constraints into account and determining target output quantities. The second aim is to establish target rates for natural flows. Read on…
Target Output Quantity With houses as an example we can establish what has been informally called an output's rational quantity. If houses have two share limits of 15,000 units and 25,000 units then 15,000 units is therefore the ecological limit. Read on…
Unique Aspects of Nonrenewables The nonrenewables have unique attributes not addressed elsewhere: they are typically hidden in the earth's crust, thus making it difficult to quantify their physical stocks, and many of them are irrevocably depleted. These crucial factors call for additional discussion. Read on…

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