The true challenge for the ecological economist is to understand the political ramifications of his discipline, which ramifications center on the problem of understanding the resource curse and its relation to market economics.
The relation of the resource curse to free economic behavior is clearly at the center of the Bible's understanding of ecological economics. The predictions of catastrophe at the abrogation of the covenant that comes of violations of God's chuqim all have the tinge of the problems of strongman rule rather than merely a depletion of the natural order as a result of a too-intensive exploitation of God's allottment.
At the root of the Bible's understanding of the laws of sheviit is the suspicion that strongman rule goes hand in hand with paganism, and so paganism is the final covenant-destroying result of the covenant-violating act of hubris that is the irreverence of presuming limitless Man-made growth rather than the honoring of the sabbatical year.
What we really need is not so much an ecological economics but an ecological political/economics.
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