A New Economics

New York to Boston Amtrak Dispatch 3

Still on the train. Moving slowly (track work) through Massachusets. Rolling meadows and tree covered hills extend into a misty horizon. A boat floats on a lake, bobbing with twilight fishers.

Let us never forget, not only the beauty of such a scene, but the literal treasure it represents. Not because it offers an ideal location for another sprawl of tract housing and big box stores. Nor because of the valuable timber it houses or gas reserves lurking beneath it. Land's true, everlasting value lies in it just as it is, intact and diverse.

It is time to transform our economics. The failure to exploit and remove the resources from land does not mean a lack of value created, as our current economics would have it. Intact ecosystems mean value perpetuated and preserved. We don't gauge the worth of our lungs by what they'd go for removed from us. This greenness of nature, this life unbound and glorious, it is our lungs, our circulatory system, our heart and our soul.

The longer we ignore this, the poorer we become.