This Week's Post: The Economy and the Environment

This weekly blog post and its host website cover a wide variety of Fred Montague's environmental commentaries, gardening topics, and wildlife/art activities.  Please browse the website and the blog archives for topics you are interested in.

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The Economy and the Environment

This Fox Sense II page depicts how some view the relationship between economic activity and environmental quality-- a "rigid linkage" model.  When the economy flourishes, environmental quality declines.  This occurs as conventional business activity depletes resources, creates pollution, contributes to climate change, and converts more natural areas to production for humans. 

When economic activity slows down or stagnates, environmental quality typically improves (or doesn't decline as fast).  Fewer resources are used, less pollution is produced, and large-scale land use projects are cancelled or put on hold.

This sorry state of affairs is primarily the result of lack of imagination and profound ecological ignorance.  It is also big-picture, long-range economic ignorance.

Our challenge is to engage in appropriate economic activity that also contributes to environmental quality.

Fox Sense II: Upside-Down Worldview

I am working on a new series of environmental mini-posters and plan to publish them in a hand-bound book later this year.  Fox Sense II will pick up where the original Fox Sense left off.

I will share some of these pages as I complete them.  Here’s one I’m working on now. All people have worldviews—notions about how the world works, what’s “right” and “wrong,” and what their role in the world should be.  We seldom question the assumptions that underlie our own perspectives.

Sometimes a simple “why?” can turn your world upside down.

For updates on the progress of the book and on release information, please subscribe to Fred's Mountainbearink newsletter.