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The Path: From the Sacred Harmony of Humanity to a New Economics Read chapter Read first chapter

2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

3. Human and Nature Revisited: The Industrial Revolution, Modern Economics and the Anthropocene

Author : Ryuichi Fukuhara

Published in: The Kyoto Manifesto for Global Economics

Publisher: Springer Singapore

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Abstract

The Aral Sea disappeared due to overuse of water to cultivate cotton, causing the largest-scale environmental catastrophe in the 20th century. Taking cotton as an example, this chapter aims at revisiting the interrelationship between human and nature, collapse of which is a great concern of our society. The modern economics have regarded nature just as an endowed “bundle of resources”, and this perspective may have contributed to the socio-economic prosperity in part at the unprecedented level in the human history while the accumulative negative impacts on the environment since the Industrial Revolution disrupt the Earth system in whole, leading to the new geological era, the Anthropocene in the Earth history. Then, cotton played a decisive role in the Industrial Revolution, and its industrialized production and associated market system drastically changed the relationship between human and nature, and thus denaturalized our economy. The changes of the Earth system, represented by climate change, imply that the natural condition the modern economic paradigm has assumed as “given” for more than two centuries may be no longer granted. In our Kyoto Manifesto context, a view of nature and human expressed by a Japanese painter in the 18th century in Kyoto, provide a way from where we relink with nature and adopt ourselves to the coming Anthropocene.

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previous chapter The Survivability of Humanity Within the Current Global Economic Paradigm
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Footnotes
1
A water footprint is the real amount of freshwater used, including pollution, by individuals, groups or companies in order to make goods or provide services used by the community, proposed as an alternative water use indicator in 2002. This concept was inspired by British geographer Tony Allen’s idea of “Virtual Water” (Allen 1997).
 
2
The title of the invited presentation in the American Geophysical Union 2012 Fall Meeting. His pessimistic answer was “In sum, the dynamics of the global coupled human-environmental system within the dominant culture precludes management for stable, sustainable pathways and promotes instability” (Werner 2012).
 
3
The Trading Consequences project is a multi-institutional, international collaboration between environmental historians in Canada and computer scientists in the UK that uses text-mining software to explore more than 250,000 historical documents related to international commodity trading in the British Empire during the 19th century, and its impact on the economy and environment. See http://​tradingconsequen​ces.​blogs.​edina.​ac.​uk/​about/​.
 
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Metadata
Title
Human and Nature Revisited: The Industrial Revolution, Modern Economics and the Anthropocene
Author
Ryuichi Fukuhara
Copyright Year
2018
Publisher
Springer Singapore
Book
The Kyoto Manifesto for Global Economics

Print ISBN: 978-981-10-6477-7

Electronic ISBN: 978-981-10-6478-4

Copyright Year: 2018

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6478-4_3

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