L7 Environment

Tools For A New Political Economy

Article III


Regarding the Unsustainable Depletion, Destruction and Pollution of Natural Environments, Resources and Ecosystems, and the Practices and Policies Necessary for Sustainable Systems



Problems To Solve

Irreversible destruction of countless species, ecosystems and non-renewable natural resources, mainly as a result of:
  • Unrestrained, organized corporate greed that disregards known negative externalities
  • Unintended consequences of rapid technology development and deployment in concert with undisciplined resource exploitation
  • Explosive growth of human populations and economies, with ever-enlarging concentrations of human habitation and industry
  • The idealization and spreading adoption of U.S.-style consumerism and conspicuous consumption
  • Individual, corporate and collective superagency enabled by increasingly sophisticated, powerful and proliferating technologies, without concurrent moral development or civic accountability
  • The perpetual expansive pressures of growth-dependent capitalism and unsustainable consumption habits
  • Disruptive and chaotic climate change influenced by human activity
  • Careless and accelerating chemical, radioactive, electromagnetic and particulate pollution of natural environments


Proposed Solutions

  1. Inspire environmental consciousness (via the unitive principle, integral practice and ongoing education)
  2. Implement the precautionary principle at all levels of decision-making regarding technology production, resource utilization and public policy
  3. Slow down growth-dependent economies and encourage localized, diverse and distributed interreliance of commerce and production, rather than homogenized centralization
  4. Phase out unsustainable and destructive consumption (overconsumption of energy, beef, water-intensive crops, products requiring deforestation, etc.)
  5. Shift away from extractive industries and mindsets toward regenerative ones as rapidly as possible
  6. Encourage adoption and discourage reproduction
  7. Develop highly distributed, eco-synergistic energy practices and retire fossil fuels
  8. Establish community-centric self-regulation of industry and common resource utilization via direct democracy and citizens councils
  9. Learn from Nature’s mutually supportive patterns, and replicate them in the humanity-ecology relationship

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