This paragraph caught my eye in the blog A Prosperous Way Down:

The environment is not an element (subsystem) of the economy/finance role-playing game. The economy is actually a subsystem of society, which is embedded in the geobiosphere, its super-system. From a systems perspective, any rearrangement of the geobiosphere as a result of new driving forces, including anthropogenic emissions, affects the behavior, the stability and the sustainability of the global economy as a subsystem. Economically based choices do impact the environment, but the geobiosphere then readjusts its operation (somewhat unpredictably) and impacts the behavior of the global economy itself. Any hope to make significant changes to the global environment (the super-system) while at the same time keeping the operation of our economy fixed or expanding is inconsistent with systems thinking. But this seems to be exactly what people are trying to do, by trying to freeze the current status of the environment as a provider of raw material and ecosystem services that can guarantee economic growth.

If you think about it enough, it becomes fairly obvious that humans are not that different than other animals trying to gain an advantage by exploiting finite energy and other resources in our environment. We are such ingenious exploiters that we have been able to pretend the environment isn’t there, but it seems clear that the environment may finally be catching up with us. Reorienting the principles of economics in an ecological framework seems like an obvious and clear thing to do.