2 of 20

No

Write now Article Tools

Intermediate Technology: Why Protecting the Environment Will Create Jobs

The idea that protection of the environment will involve a loss of jobs is a common misconception, but completely unfounded in fact. The reason for this is primarily due to the fact that so few people actually know what the creation of an ecologically sustainable economy really means.

This is because the actual policies behind Green economics and Green politics are rarely ever covered by the mainstream corporate media, either here in Canada, or in the United States. This is primarily because the same class which benefits the most from destructive patterns of overconsumption are the same people who collectively own transnational corporations, as well as the popular media. And they don't want you to know what we have to say (Winter 1997).

The reason is quite simple. Because the implementation of ecological economics and Green policies is a threat to the bottom line of massive, centrally planned, transnational conglomerates. Centrally planned in the same way in which the Soviet Union was centrally planned, except that transnationals are privately owned rather than government owned, and are not confined within national borders as the Soviet Union was.

This article will explain two things. First, why the implementation of Green economic policies will create more jobs than centralized planning. Second, why Green economic policies are a threat to the centralized planning of transnational corporations.

E. F. Schumacher, who is widely acknowledged to be the founder of ecological (or Green) economics first pointed out that massive, centralized production and distribution systems are ecologically destructive back in the 1970's. This is due primarily to their very size.

He identified four main reasons, which he called the "four unecological trends" in traditional capitalist patterns of economic development.

The first trend is towards increases in the size or scale of economic organizations themselves. This is ecologically destructive not only because the size and scale of production facilities is increased, but the scale of interventions into nature is as well. Managers also become ever further removed from any /direct/ knowledge of the ecological and social consequences of their decisions. All they see, all the can be /expected/ to see is the bottom line, because they have no direct knowledge of most of what is going on in the organization they are managing.

The second and third trends are toward increases

• 1
• 2
• 3
• next page >>

Add your voice

Know something about Does protecting the environment have to come at the expense of jobs??
We want to hear your view. Write now!