"If we have learned anything over the past year, it is that accounting
systems that do not tell the truth can be costly," said Lester Brown, senior
author of the new book, The Earth Policy Reader, which was released today.
"Faulty accounting systems have driven some of the world's largest
corporations into bankruptcy, costing millions of people their lifetime
savings, retirement income, and jobs," said Brown, President of the Earth
Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental research
organization.
In The Earth Policy Reader, coauthored with Janet Larsen and Bernie
Fischlowitz-Roberts, Brown says the global economic accounting system is
misleading us too, but with potentially more serious consequences. Economic
prosperity is achieved in part by running up ecological deficits that do not
show up on the books. Some of the record economic prosperity of recent
decades has come from overplowing land, overfishing oceanic fisheries,
overgrazing rangelands, overcutting forests, and overpumping aquifers.
At some point, these expanding ecological deficits begin to reinforce each
other. In China, for instance, shrinking forests, deteriorating rangelands,
eroding croplands, and falling water tables are converging to expand deserts
and create a dust bowl of historic dimensions. The weight of 1.3 billion
people and their livestock on the land and the rapid pace of economic
expansion has put China on the frontline of the deteriorating relationship
between the global economy and the earth's ecosystem.
systems that do not tell the truth can be costly," said Lester Brown, senior
author of the new book, The Earth Policy Reader, which was released today.
"Faulty accounting systems have driven some of the world's largest
corporations into bankruptcy, costing millions of people their lifetime
savings, retirement income, and jobs," said Brown, President of the Earth
Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental research
organization.
In The Earth Policy Reader, coauthored with Janet Larsen and Bernie
Fischlowitz-Roberts, Brown says the global economic accounting system is
misleading us too, but with potentially more serious consequences. Economic
prosperity is achieved in part by running up ecological deficits that do not
show up on the books. Some of the record economic prosperity of recent
decades has come from overplowing land, overfishing oceanic fisheries,
overgrazing rangelands, overcutting forests, and overpumping aquifers.
At some point, these expanding ecological deficits begin to reinforce each
other. In China, for instance, shrinking forests, deteriorating rangelands,
eroding croplands, and falling water tables are converging to expand deserts
and create a dust bowl of historic dimensions. The weight of 1.3 billion
people and their livestock on the land and the rapid pace of economic
expansion has put China on the frontline of the deteriorating relationship
between the global economy and the earth's ecosystem.