- Tytuł:
-
Metabometria
Metabometrics - Autorzy:
- Ostasiewicz, Walenty
- Tematy:
-
metabometrics
social metabolism
anthropocene
ecology
energy-material flows - Pokaż więcej
- Wydawca:
- Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Ekonomicznego we Wrocławiu
- Powiązania:
- https://bibliotekanauki.pl/articles/433923.pdf Link otwiera się w nowym oknie
- Opis:
- The last decades have witnessed tremendous advances in technology. Accelerating rate of technological change has brought about not only humans daily life, but also extraordinary climate change. Almost one-half of the land surface has been transformed by human action, the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere exceeded permissible level, biological diversity is dramatically reduced. This human dominance means that the humanity is responsible for all the havoc wreaked on the earth , atmosphere, stratosphere, and humanity itself. We observed tremendous irreversible havocs and damages wreaked on the planet, and on humanity. The whole planet has endured so big changes that scientists agree to name the current period of the planet’s existence as Anthropocene. E. Fromm alerted a time ago that for the first time in the history the physical survival of the human race depends on a radical change of human heart. It was allegedly A. Einstein, who observed that we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. It is not difficult to discover what kind of thinking brought humanity on the edge of a precipice. Paradoxically, it is thinking of the highly glorified, the so-called modern science. It was irresponsible transfer of Newtonian and Cartesian thinking from natural sciences into social sciences. As it is well known, the so-called modern science is based on a mechanistic worldview. However, neither ecosystem, nor society is a mega-machine, for which one has a spare parts. People are not equal self-loving atoms separated one from another. Particularly, it is economism, world-wide religion with its basic dogma of consumerism that is responsible for any kind of society’s desertification and biosphere destroying. Market is not an instrument for reaching equality and freedom, ruled by a providential Invisible Hand, but it is a place where mighty exploit the weak (L. Bruni). Human being is a social being, and outside the society can be either beast or god. People are living social atoms, with a Trinitarian nature constituting basic elements of social cells, i.e. family units, which in their turn constitute building material for social tissue. Society is therefore a living organism, having its proper organs. Lotka considered it as the “one huge multiple Siamese twin”. Economy is to be conceptualized as one of various of its exosomatic organs, designated by society and controlled by society. Like biological systems, social systems depend also on continuous throughput of energy and materials in order to maintain their structure and “life”. The concept of metabolism seems to be the unifying concept for any living organism, biological and socio-economical. This paper presents an introduction into economics, or as some prefer, oikonomics, as a science of economy considered as a society’s organ. Society, as a living organism, takes up ( through its organs) resources from the environment, transforms them into useful product and consumes, and excretes needles products of social metabolism again into environment. It is worthy to observe the drastic difference between mainstream economics and economics as a life science. The traditional, mainstreaming approach is based on the principle of using monetary units as the common denominator of all that is important in human life, such an approach was termed by B. Gross as a new philistinism. The alternative approach is based on the metabolic profiles, which are characterized by their material and energy flows. Instead of monetary measurement units, for the description of all society-nature relations there are used physical units. Although the development of a new approach is underway, there are already obtained significant results in measuring the human use of nature, as well as creating material and energy flow accountings.
- Dostawca treści:
- Biblioteka Nauki
Artykuł