If you cut down a forest, it doesn't matter how many sawmills you have if there are no more trees.
We have the most crude accounting tools. It's tragic because our accounts and our national arithmetic doesn't tell us the things that we need to know.
Much of what is called investment is actually nothing more than mergers and acquisitions, and of course mergers and acquisitions are generally accompanied by downsizing.
The World Bank is now the biggest culprit in the debt crisis.
I was recently looking at what they can actually do to reduce consumption of petrol. It would be quite possible to build automobiles out of carbon fibre that would be just as strong, weigh 10 times less and consume 10 times less petrol.
The question is not only what is grown but what it's used for. There's not going to be a mass transformation of dietary habits in rich countries-on the contrary, the first thing people do when they become more prosperous is to buy more meat.
Having enough to eat, being able to educate your children, have reasonably stable employment, and being able to live in a society which isn't collapsing around you-all of these things have been generally eroded.
The natural capital is not income, but we spend our natural capital as if it were revenue, as if it were going to come back next year without any problems, whereas these renewals in nature can take hundreds of years.
What's immediately profitable is the only kind of logic that capitalism understands.
We're trying to run a 21st century society and economy with 19th century Darwinian, competitive, crude ideas.
It seems to be the thing now that young people are getting back into politics.
The real fight is about what should be in the marketplace and what should not. Should education be a marketable commodity? Should healthcare?
If the economy becomes disembodied from society it can only lead to disaster.
How do we get democracy at the international level? That's our problem. and it's essentially the same problem people faced in the 18th Century when they tried to get democracy nationally. Now we need it internationally.
What you need if you want jobs are small and medium sized enterprises, local initiatives, labour intensive work, community development, service providers and the like.
There are a lot of people who don't contribute anything to consumption and production.
I'm a radical reformist, because between where we are and where I want to go there's a great deal of work, and I won't see the end of this.
The World Development Movement, to take just one example, is doing good work. Some political parties are, too.
Debt is such a powerful tool, it is such a useful tool, it's much better than colonialism ever was because you can keep control without having an army, without having a whole administration.
Only around 2% of the earth's surface is cultivatable land.
