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it can expand and grow and for this it constantly needs to extend its
power over new resources.
How can sustained growth be managed in a sane way on a planet
with a limited capacity to support, in the knowledge of the alarming
decrease of essential natural resources? The secret of the mystery of
sustainable growth is contained in the dogma of universal replaceability.
Technology takes the place of nature and of human nature as well. As
imagined by the technophiles, this characteristically end-of-the-world
sect in wait of a miracle, not only will digitalisation, gene technology
and the other technical miracles save the human race from its original
imperfections, but the self-programming information systems can even
take over man’s governing role if needs be. According to the trans¬
humanists, the computer is the summit of creation, the goal and purpose
of evolution, the clear intellect liberated from its mortal shell. It is no
wonder that faith in the digital afterlife is spreading rapidly among the
youth, since their lives already revolve around the computer, which
fulfils their imagination and desires. They do not even notice the
ecological catastrophe, despotism or the collapse of society. So long as
there is a network connection.
For an ecological economy, as already shown, taking into account
the natural limits of economic growth is an unavoidable starting point.
Herman Daly seeks to console his colleagues who have grown up in the
belief of indefinite growth by showing that the market indicators of
economic performance have long since become detached from reality;
they indicate not the enrichment of society but rather potentially the
exact opposite, for they do not include the serious but not directly
demonstrable or priceable natural and social costs of growth. This
growth exacerbates social injustice, destroys nature, damages health and
creates unemployment and inhuman conditions of life and work. It is
caused by a purposeless and joyless wastefulness. ‘The increased traffic
of war materials or medicine in times of war or epidemics does not
produce an increase in wellbeing, security or satisfaction; it is useless.
In the original sense of the word “economy”, we might even term it
uneconomical.” In his work, For the Common Good, Daly draws attention
to the fact that the principle of “the more, the better” only applies to
the economics of profit (what Aristotle terms chrematistics), while the
economics of subsistence (oikonomia) seeks right measure: what is just
1 Herman Daly: Uneconomic Growth: in theory, in fact, in history and in relation to
globalization. In Herman Daly, Edgar Elgar eds: Ecological Economics and the Ecology of
Economics. Edgar Elgar, Cheltenham 1999.