The tragedy of modern economic growth: A call to business to radically change its purpose and practices

Abstract

It is now clear that endlessly growing consumption of resources in the global human economy imperils Earth’s life-sustaining biosystem and threatens human existence as we know it. Long-term sustainability of human and non-human life can be achieved only by creating an entirely new economy that eschews the current economy’s pursuit of continuous growth and concentrates, instead, on refocusing human activities from the global to the local level in organizations that exist to fulfill genuine and concrete human and non-human needs, not to maximize financial wealth of corporations, their shareholders, and their top managers. However, impeding this move to a new economy is the widespread belief that “accounting is the language of business.” This article proposes that the concrete ecological principles underlying Earth’s life-restorative natural ecosystems provide a much more appropriate language to guide a sustainable human economy than the abstract language of accounting and finance.