“A major clash between economics and ecology derives from the fact that nature is cyclical, whereas our industrial systems are linear. Our businesses take resources, transform them into products plus waste, and sell the products to consumers, who discard more waste…”

Epilogue: Ecological Literacy
The Web of Life (1996)

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Fritjof Capra43

American physicist 1939

Robert Aaron Gordon (1908–1978) American economist

Source: Business Leadership in the Large Corporation (1945), p. 3

“Clearly, the broad effect of economic evolution until about 1920 was to increase the concentration of jobs in the cyclically volatile industries, and this was a major force tending to intensify declines of employment during business contractions. Since then, the continued progress of technology, the very factor which originally was mainly responsible for the concentration in the cyclical industries, has served to arrest this tendency. The upward trend of production in manufacturing and the other highly cyclical industries has remained rapid in recent decades.”

Arthur F. Burns (1904–1987) American economist and diplomat

Source: "Progress Towards Economic Stability", 1969, p. 109-110

“Our production system takes abundant grain, which hungry people can't afford, and shrinks it into meat, which better-off people will pay for. But … our production system not only reduces abundance but actually mines the very resources on which our future food security rests.”

Frances Moore Lappé book Diet for a Small Planet

Source: Diet for a Small Planet, p. 65

“We are going through a major economic transformation that is supported by the people, a transformation that will free us from total dependence on oil and restore a culture of work and production.”

Jamal Khashoggi (1958–2018) Saudi Arabian journalist

"Saudi Arabia wasn’t always this repressive. Now it’s unbearable." in The Washington Post (18 September 2017)

“What makes the spectacle of Western bourgeois society so repulsive is the waste and squander of resources on needless products of status or display (e. g., the large, heavy automobile; the extravagant packaging of consumer items) for the sake of consumption.”

Daniel Bell book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

Source: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Chapter 6, The Public Household, p. 274

“The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client”

William S. Burroughs book Naked Lunch

Introduction
Naked Lunch (1959)

“The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.”

William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer

"Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs", written in 1956, first published in The British Journal of Addiction, Vol. 52, No. 2 (January 1957), p. 1 and later used as footnotes in Naked Lunch

“The difference between marketing and selling is more than semantic. Selling focuses on the needs of the seller; marketing on the needs of the buyer. Selling is preoccupied with the seller’s need to convert his product into cash; marketing with the idea of satisfying the needs of the customer by means of the product and the whole cluster of things associated with creating, delivering and finally consuming it.”

Theodore Levitt (1925–2006) American economist and professor at Harvard Business School

Source: Marketing Myopia, 1960, p. 10

“Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, The New Nationalism (1910)
Context: Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. I ask nothing of the nation except that it so behave as each farmer here behaves with reference to his own children. That farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself. I believe the same thing of a nation.

“An economic system is not a linear system, and… this fact stands in the way of the determination of the parameters of the system by methods that presume linearity, and… it introduces great difficulties in the extrapolation from past behaviour for purposes of prediction.”

Arnold Tustin (1899–1994) British engineer

Source: The Mechanism of Economic Systems (1953), p. ix

“A major clash between economics and ecology derives from the fact that nature is cyclical, whereas our industrial systems are linear. Our businesses take resources, transform them into products plus waste, and sell the products to consumers, who discard more waste…”

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