Ecoinomy - Ecosystem - Economics

It is worth taking a look at the Ecoinomy website, they are a company purportedly setting out to help businesses become more 'sustainable'.

The main motivating force they are appealing to to get clients on board is the bottom line: money and profit. Their messaging is so explicit, it is almost painful, they might even fall flat on their face as a result. What particularly disturbs me is their hi-jacking of the word and concept of Ecosystem. Check this out from their website:

The eco.system. What's that? What's in it for me?

For a small monthly sum per employee, we will bring our unique ‘eco.system’ into your workplace. Not only will this help you begin to comply with the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme regulations, it will also repay itself many times over as your employees begin to see the fun in behaving in a greener way, are encouraged to interact with each other (particularly between departments that previously had nothing much to do with each other), and find their morale and motivation growing. As a recent survey observed, a highly motivated workforce is 84% more productive than one that isn’t. Imagine that translated into profits. What a happy manager that would make you, especially as Ecoinomy and our eco.system will also lift an astonishing amount of responsibility from your shoulders.

The linguistics here are appalling. Talk about appealing to and reinforcing damaging 'self-enhancing values'. To learn more about the dangers of this read up on the Common cause report. The rest of Ecoinomics site including this video explains their concept a bit more. Aside from the outrageous abuse of the meaning of the word ecosystem, Ecoinomics seems to me to be a classic example of businesses being encouraged to ask 'what can sustainability do for me', rather than 'what can we do for sustainability?'

Stripping the Natural World

You might have noticed these Artemis billboards about the place. It reads: 'If PROFITS are scarce in one territory.... ... our Strategic Assets Funds hunter is free to cross into another.'

or..

'Strip an ecosystem of all of its resources then move on to the next one and mine that one dry too. All in the name of short term profits.'

Artemis are right; this is what happens thanks to deregulated free market economics. Until you run out of new territories that is (look out Burma!), then what?

The metaphor of this imagery is all a bit too literal for me. The 'hunter' looks like he is living in some 1920s romance novel called 'Man tames Nature'. But, it is 2010 now and there is far far less Nature left for us to strip assets out of, this poster alludes that there is and that, for me, is irresponsible. Artemis seem to be forgetting that the economic system is a sub-system of a global ecological system, which ultimately it is dependent on. Unless we stop taking from nature and start living and learning from it, it'll disappear completely, we won't be able to grow any food if there isn't any soil! But, hey who cares, so long as I've made my millions before we're down to bare rocks and sand.