Idea 18. To avoid self-destruction, we need to rethink the meaning of progress

Human societies must now change course and steer away from critical tipping points in the Earth system that might lead to rapid and irreversible change. This requires fundamental reorientation and restructuring of national and international institutions toward more effective Earth system governance and planetary stewardship.

Navigating the Anthropocene (2012)[1]

We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature—for we will not fight to save what we do not love.

Stephen J. Gould

Many scientists now believe that we have reached a critical tipping point in the Earth system that will lead to rapid and irreversible change. As millions have already experienced, changes in the ecosystem can be catastrophic, such as prolonged heat waves, wildfires, floods and mega-storms. These storms, together with rising sea levels caused by melting of ice sheets due to global warming, are having a devastating impact on human populations living in coastal regions and on islands. At the same time, growing demand for land has put many people in jeopardy – mostly the poor – by forcing them to remain in places subject to killer heat waves, floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters.

We are also exposed to more deadly viral and bacterial infections as we keep disrupting habitats where microbes live in equilibrium with their animal hosts.

Despite these threats, little has changed in terms of our consumption and spending habits: currently, humanity uses 30% more of our planet’s natural resources than we can replace. If everyone wanted to live with the lifestyle of the average North American, then we would need five planets to pull it off. Humans have already converted about 43% of the ice-free land surface of the planet to uses like raising crops and livestock and building cities.[2]

The efforts for a global agreement to reach more sustainable levels of consumption and greenhouse gas emissions have been, so far, a dismal failure. The treaties that emerged from the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 failed to achieve even a fraction of the promises made by world leaders. Despite their promises to protect the environment, most countries have taken only minimal steps on climate change (the Inflation Reduction Act in the US, passed in August 2022, is a step in the right direction).

In fact, global emissions have soared, not fallen, in the 30 years since the 1992 Earth Summit. Today, collectively we emit over 50 billion tons of CO2e (greenhouse gases are measured in ‘carbon dioxide equivalent’ or CO2e). This is over 53% higher than the levels in 1992.[3]

Are humans destined for extinction, like 99.9% of the species that have existed on Earth? The odds don’t look good given past and current trends. One of the most significant events in our history was the transition from hunting-gathering to settled agriculture, about 10,000 years ago. This transition dramatically altered humans’ relations with nature. As the average diet of the hunter-gatherer was 60–80% plant foods, their lifestyle required intimate knowledge of the locations, plant cycles, properties and uses of virtually all plants in their environment. By contrast, the agricultural lifestyle led people to settle permanently in a more limited amount of space, and to depend on only a few crops used for large-scale production. At the same time, agriculture encouraged people to assume a greater amount of control over the natural world.

Removed from immediate food production, people started living together in cities, where they were able to pursue occupations in arts, religion, sciences, or technology. Human society developed into a complex pattern of ordered, differentiated relationships where traits such as rationality, personal responsibility and planning for contingencies were encouraged.

In time, humans were able to “tame” forces of nature such as electricity, atomic power and DNA. They have become powerful allies of human civilization, but their use has also contributed to the depletion of resources and degradation of the environment. Indeed, “pure and untamed nature” has become a scarce commodity. The fingerprints of humankind are now found on every continent, in every sea. For example, radiation from atomic tests can be found in sediments across the world, and the chemical signature of the Industrial Revolution, when coal began to power human activity, can be seen in ice cores drilled in Greenland.

The lessons from history: We ignore them at our own peril

What is clear is that our mastery over nature does not include the wisdom to manage it properly. In his best-seller 2004 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond traces the demise of many civilizations through history. He identifies five factors that explain these historical collapses:[4]

• climate change

• hostile neighbors

• collapse of essential trading partners

• the damage that people inflicted on the environment.

• and failure to adapt to environmental issues.

For example, the collapse of the Maya civilization in southern Yucatan had environmental degradation at its core. The Mayans were innovators in writing, astronomy, architecture, and art. Mayan society rose especially after the year 250 AD, reaching peaks of population and sophistication in the late 8th century. After that, around 90% of the population left the area, leaving cities to become overgrown by jungle. A major factor in this was environmental degradation: deforestation, soil erosion and water management problems, all of which resulted in less food. Those problems were exacerbated by droughts, which may have been partly caused by humans themselves through deforestation. Chronic warfare made matters worse, as more and more people fought over less and less land and resources.

Diamond also offers an important cautionary tale in his account of the Viking colonies of Greenland. In the 15th century, after centuries of continuous occupation, the Norse colonies collapsed, as they exhausted the local food and timber resources. According to Diamond, the main factor in the collapse was the unwillingness of the Greenland Norse to reexamine and change long-held core values, even when conditions changed, and those values no longer made sense. The Norse, argues Diamond, continued to view themselves as transplanted Norwegian pastoralists, and to look down on their indigenous Inuit neighbors as pagan hunters, even after Norway stopped sending trading ships and the climate had grown too cold for a pastoral existence.

The Norse needed to reduce their reliance on livestock – particularly cows, which consumed enormous amounts of agricultural resources. But cows were a sign of high status to the Norse and beef was a prized food. They needed to copy the Inuit practice of burning seal blubber for heat and light in the winter, and to learn from them the difficult art of hunting ringed seals, which were the most reliably plentiful source of food available in the winter.

But the Norse despised the Inuit and did not interact much with them. During the centuries that those two people shared Greenland, Norse annals include just two or three references to the Inuit. The Norse, as Diamond points out, referred to them as “skarelings,” which translates approximately as “wretches.” There was not much chance that the Norse would adopt the customs of people they did not particularly like. They died off as a result, leaving Greenland to the Inuit.

Is our society also in danger of environmental collapse because of our unwillingness to change our status-oriented and materialistic values? Diamond believes so, and the historical evidence supports him. As the case of the Norse shows, it is painfully difficult to decide whether to abandon one’s core values when they seem to become incompatible with survival. At what point do we as individuals prefer to die than to compromise and live? The Greenland Norse, so it seems, preferred to die as Christian farmers rather than live as Inuit. Are we also willing to die before we give up our gas-guzzling SUVs and the comforts to which we have grown accustomed?

Can technology and the markets save us?

Some think that humans will not have to make these stark choices, since technology will ultimately save the day, as it has done so often in the past. Many economists fall into this camp. One case in point is the food supply. Factors like population growth, improved diets in developing countries, and biofuel production, are raising the global demand for food and feed. But as we have seen, climate change and a shortage of land and other resources are making it more difficult to increase food production. All the evidence is that this clash is only going to intensify, and the result could be a lasting shift to higher food prices. Other experts disagree and believe that prices have the power to drive the technological change needed to help societies adapt to all kinds of events, including climate change.[5]

Debates about the food supply are nothing new. In the 18th century, the Rev. Thomas Malthus famously argued, in his Essay on the Principles of Population, that the power of human reproduction will always outstrip increases in the food supply, and that episodes of famine and pestilence are required to bring the population back into line with the resources available to support it. So far, history has proved him wrong. In the early 20th century, for example, a “simple” chemical innovation in Germany resulted in an exponential increase in farm output by making boundless quantities of nitrogen available in a form accessible to plants (a shortage of nitrogen had been the biggest limitation on plant growth.) And between the 1940s and 1970s, a series of research, development and technology transfer initiatives, known collectively as the “Green Revolution”, significantly increased agriculture production around the world. These innovations were one of the major factors that allowed the human population to grow from less than two billion to more than six billion during the 20th century.[6]

Recently, agriculture has shown the ability to adapt to climate change, to higher demand, and to the other problems that confront it. We have seen that spikes in food prices have usually been followed by an increase in food production. For example, in 2008 and 2009, following an extensive drought that created worldwide food shortages, global food stocks were rebuilt to some degree and, consequently, prices fell. Farmers have shown flexibility and adaptability, such as growing different varieties, or planting them earlier to avoid hot spells, or to grow two crops a year instead of one. Some wealthy farmers have invested capital in water-saving systems like drip irrigation. There are other technologies that look promising. Scientists, for example, have already produced genetically modified crops that can survive drought or flood conditions.[7]

There is no doubt that prices are powerful signals to which both producers and consumers rapidly adjust. If there is a profit to be made, prices can also drive much of the innovation in the markets. But will prices and the markets alone allow humans to produce food, energy and other consumer goods more sustainably? This is doubtful. For starters, innovation is not costless. In fact, some of these innovations have been very damaging to the planet. The nitrogen breakthrough enabled the expansion of agriculture and population, but also created far higher emissions of greenhouse gases, causing a warming of the planet that, in turn, represents a tremendous risk to future food production. Nitrogen- and potassium-rich fertilizers have polluted many freshwater and marine ecosystems. The same nutrients in fertilizers that nourish crops and lawns can cause rapid growth of algae, also known as an algal bloom. Dying algae in turn feed bacteria, which consume so much dissolved oxygen that fish and plants cannot survive. Some species of algae also produce toxins that can be harmful to humans.

The situation in the energy sector is not much better. Oil and gas refineries are well-known polluters and prone to accidents and spills. As oil deposits get depleted, producers are digging deeper to keep up with demand. They are also using more “intensive” extraction technologies, some of which can be potentially damaging to the environment. One of them is hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, a technique used to release petroleum, natural gas, and other substances for extraction. This technique, which creates fractures from a wellbore drilled into reservoir rock formations, has made it possible to extract hydrocarbons that were formerly inaccessible. The proponents of fracking claim it is a safe procedure, although the evidence shows that it can contaminate ground water, cause surface contamination from spills, and release gases and other contaminants into the atmosphere. For these reasons hydraulic fracturing has come under scrutiny internationally, with some countries suspending or even banning it.[8]

This is known, using the economists’ lingo, as an externality: a cost (or benefit) that is not transmitted through prices. In other words, the prices do not reflect the full cost (benefit) of producing or consuming a product or a service.[9] Sometimes, like in the case of greenhouse gas emissions, the whole society bears the cost of an externality, but most of the time the poor are the most negatively impacted. Invariably, new technology will have externalities of some kind, including those considered eco-friendly. For example, hydroelectric power is substantially emission-free, but dams destroy ecosystems and displace human communities, usually the poor.

Probably the most promising technology is power generation through nuclear fusion. In a nuclear fusion reaction, two lighter elements, such as hydrogen or helium, combine to form a heavier element, while releasing energy. This is different from nuclear fission, which produces energy by splitting uranium. Nuclear fission powers conventional nuclear reactors. As a source of power, nuclear fusion is expected to have many advantages over fission, including reduced radioactivity in operation and little high-level nuclear waste, ample fuel supplies, and increased safety. While some scientific breakthroughs have been achieved, it probably will be several decades before fusion energy will be deployed on a large, practical scale.[10]

As these examples illustrate, the Earth ecosystem is hugely complex and the actions of economic agents responding to price signals can have unintended consequences. The market-driven approach to correcting externalities is to “internalize” third party costs and benefits, for example, by requiring a polluter to repair any damage caused. Some of these market-based approaches work well in practice. For example, the so-called congestion charges in London, Singapore, and Stockholm, while understandably not popular with drivers, have reduced traffic congestion in busy centers, lowered air pollution, and delivered social benefits. Another example is the US sulfur-dioxide (SO2) cap-and-trade program, which has cut SO2 emissions from US power plants by more than 50% since first introduced. The introduction in 2008 of a carbon tax in British Columbia was effective in reducing CO2 emissions. Taxing polluting activities has the added advantage of generating revenue for the government.[11]

In many cases, however, internalizing costs or benefits is not feasible, especially if the true monetary values cannot be determined. How much can you, for example, charge an airport for noise pollution? One alternative is to introduce government laws and regulations to reduce the impact of externalities. The government could limit, for instance, the hours of operation of the airport. Regulations, however, are not always effective and can negatively impact economic activity. Moreover, they often face stiff political opposition from affected groups.

Rethinking our views on the meaning of progress

There is no easy way to deal with externalities. This gets more complicated if we consider that some externalities do not respect national borders, such as greenhouse gas emissions. Any approach to correcting these externalities will require the coordination and cooperation of political leaders across nations.[12] This will not happen anytime soon, at least not before more irreversible changes start occurring, as some scientists are predicting.

Nonetheless, it is important that the costs incurred in generating wealth are reflected in our measures of economic growth. The Gross National Product, or GDP, is the standard measure of overall productivity in a country. More specifically, it is the monetary value of the final goods and services produced by a nation. In the last few decades there has been an effort to develop economic indicators intended to replace GDP, which doesn’t account for ecological or social costs.

One such measure is the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW). Rather than simply adding together all expenditures like the GDP, consumer expenditure is balanced by such factors as income distribution and cost associated with pollution and other unsustainable costs. In 1989, the pioneering ecological economist Herman Daly and the theologian John Cobb calculated the ISEW in the US from 1950 to 1986. The results reveal that the increase in economic welfare of an average American has stabilized after the 1970s although the economy, measured by GDP, has continued to grow. According to Cobb and Daly’s calculations, the external effects of production and the inequity of income distribution are the main reasons for this development in which an increase in production does not necessarily lead to an increase in welfare.[13]

The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) is another metric that has been suggested to replace, or supplement, GDP. Like the ISEW, the GPI is designed to take fuller account of the well-being of a nation by incorporating environmental and social factors which are not measured by GDP. For instance, even if a country’s GDP increases, GPI may decrease in value if the poverty rate increases. Similarly, the GPI will decrease if pollution increases in generating GDP.[14]

Unfortunately, the computation of these alternative indices has not yet caught up to allow comparisons across countries and across time. One key problem is the difficulty of measuring such intangibles as well-being, which may mean different things for different people. Opponents of the indices claim that, given the subjectivity of some of their metrics, they are more vulnerable to political manipulation. Moreover, their attempt to combine things that are incommensurable makes it hard to say what they exactly indicate and difficult to make decisions based on them.[15]

While these criticisms may be well-founded, they do not invalidate the use of these indices as alternative metrics of development. In fact, all mayor indices, including GDP, have weaknesses and limitations.[16] One key virtue of the alternative indices, however, is that they induce us to make a distinction between development and economic growth, and between a growth economy and a steady-state or sustainable economy. It is worth quoting here the economist Herman Daly: “When something grows, it gets bigger physically by accretion or assimilation of material. When something develops, it gets better in a qualitative sense. It doesn’t have to get bigger.”[17]

The key is quality over quantity. We are now producing more and bigger cars, but is the standard of living “growing” if we factor in the deaths and injuries caused by car accidents, chemical pollution, and depletion of non-renewable resources? Our attachment to gas-guzzlers is not different from that of the Greenland Vikings, whose decision to keep their voracious cows led to environmental collapse.

The case of guns is even more stark. Americans are the most heavily armed citizenry in the world; about one-third of US adults own a gun. Yet the demand for guns keeps increasing. Regulations for gun ownership have also been relaxed. In many states an 18-year-old can legally buy an assault rifle, a weapon designed to kill people. In fact, assault rifles are commonly used in mass shootings, sadly a frequent occurrence in the US.[18] No sane person can argue that our standard of living has increased as a result of having more guns.

The last example brings about another important distinction that goes back to Aristotle. In Idea 14, we saw that Aristotle makes a distinction between real and apparent goods. The things that are really good for us are the things that satisfy our natural needs. The things that only appear to be good for us are the things that satisfy our acquired wants. Enjoying apparent goods is an essential aspect of the good life, but it is only when we acquire the real goods that we will be able to experience eudaimonia, which Aristotle considers as the supreme good.

The success of the growth economy depends on people’s growing demand for apparent goods. The implicit assumption is that conspicuous consumption (new clothes, bigger houses, latest model cars, more powerful guns…) will bring us happiness, an illusion that is fed by the marketing machinery that is an integral part of the growth economy. For a poor country, economic growth is important to increase the standard of living. Yet, once a subsistence level has been achieved for the population, a country should switch to a steady-state or sustainable economic model. In essence, as explained by the economist Herman Daly, a sustainable or “steady state” economy is an economy made up of a constant stock of physical wealth (capital) and a constant population size. Such an economy does not grow in the course of time.[19]

Moving to a sustainable economy will require “changes in the fundamental design” and deep changes in people’s mindsets regarding what is meant by progress. Ideally, we should seek the real goods that will fulfill our most fundamental intrinsic needs (see Idea 14), but in a way consistent with a sustainable economy. This is a worthy goal and any advance we make towards its achievement should be considered progress. In other words, progress is not just producing more stuff, but producing goods that can improve people’s standard of living without impacting the environment negatively.[20]

The main lesson: Rethink your relationship to nature

There are different ways in which we can think about nature. The most basic one is as an essential source of food, water and raw materials. That is, we can see an ecosystem as a “factory” that supplies the goods that living beings need to sustain life, with inputs and outputs, and processes that are governed by the laws of thermodynamics. According to the second law, entropy – a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work – is continuously increasing in an isolated system (see Idea 2). To keep producing the food, water and materials that can sustain life, the ecosystem needs energy (with low entropy), and as a byproduct generates “degraded” energy (with high entropy). The Sun has been our main source of low entropy, since the Earth is not an isolated system.

Humans are now part of the ecosystem, which is also used to produce consumer goods. Nonetheless, most of the low entropy energy utilized by the economies of the world is in the form of fossil fuels, which are non-renewable. Once this resource is exhausted, new energy sources need to be found. Unfortunately, at this point clean energy sources such as wind and solar power are not advanced enough to meet the energy needs of the world. Nuclear fusion is an option, but it will probably not be available for decades, if ever. In other words, there are no easy solutions.

There are less “physical” ways to look at nature. In fact, each religion and culture have its own unique way of relating to nature. While all major religions agree that nature is an act of divinity, they differ in their views of the “proper” relationship between humans and nature. For example, the Baha’i Faith stresses the importance of the harmony between human life and the natural world. “Let us look … at the beauty in diversity, the beauty of harmony, and learn a lesson from the vegetable creation.”[21]

In Buddhism, the notion of karma, being an important part of Buddha’s lessons, conveys the values of conservation and responsibility for the future. It is said that the morality of our actions in the present will shape our character for the future, an idea close to sustainable development. Hinduism is also a religion deeply rooted in nature. The sacred texts (Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita) have many references of divinity related to nature, such as rivers, mountains, trees, animals, and the earth.[22]

Christianity, the dominant religion in Western civilization, also has some reflections on the environment. Some examples: “When they all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, ‘Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted’.” (John 6:12); “Do not pollute the land where you are. Bloodshed pollutes the land, and atonement cannot be made for the land on which blood has been shed, except by the blood of the one who shed it.” (Verse 35:33). However, the main theme in the Bible is not harmony with nature, but human dominion over nature. The tone is set in the book of Genesis: “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Gen. 1:28).

In 1967, historian Lynn White published the now classic The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, in which he blames Christianity for the modern environmental crisis, which he concludes is largely due to the dominance of Christian worldview in the west which is exploitative of nature in an unsustainable manner. He asserts that mass destruction of nature by humankind is an unintended consequence of religious viewpoints of nature. In particular, the viewpoints related to Christian theology as they were frequently applied, or misapplied, toward dealing with the natural world. Western Christianity, having de-sacralized and instrumentalized nature to human ends, thus bears a substantial “burden of guilt” for the contemporary environmental crisis.[23]

White’s essay stimulated a flurry of responses, ranging from defenses of Christianity to qualified admissions to complete agreement with his analysis. There is now a broad field of Christianity (“Green Christianity”) that emphasizes the biblical or theological basis for protecting and celebrating the environment. The term indicates not a particular denomination, but a shared territory of concern. Nonetheless, the concern of the Church over the environment is relatively recent and may not be followed by some parishioners. According to some research and studies by social scientists, conservative Christians and members of the Christian right are typically less concerned about issues of environmentalism than the general public, and some fundamentalist Christians deny global warming and climate change.[24]

One example of the latter is that of former Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who chaired the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee from 2015 to 2017. In his book The Greatest Hoax, Inhofe argues that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the scientific community. Never mind crippling drought, melting icecaps, rising sea levels, and more frequent mega-storms, which he dismisses in his book. In the end, his main argument is based on faith: that only God can change the climate. The book closes with Genesis (8:22): “as long as the earth remains there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and light.”[25]

For all their differences, the religions’ views on nature may reflect deep psychological connections between humans and the natural world. Indeed, there are many more critical connections between humans and nature than one might think. Beyond being an essential source of food, water and raw materials, the natural world can contribute to people’s overall well-being through recreation and leisure, spiritual fulfillment, personal development, social relations, and aesthetic experiences, all of which have a positive effect in our mental and physical health.[26]

Many of these potential benefits are lost to people living in crowded urban settings and disconnected from nature. Worse, the research shows that poorly maintained natural spaces could lead to unpleasant or visually threatening landscapes that might make people feel uncomfortable or scared to be there. This means that we all should try to reconnect with, and protect nature, otherwise the consequences could be dire. Even if we manage to avoid total environmental collapse, the destruction of valuable habitats will have, and is already having, a negative impact on our personal and communal well-being.

What science and common sense are telling us is that we should “relearn” how to love nature. As the great American evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould stated, we should forge an emotional bond between ourselves and nature – for we will not fight to save what we do not love. In the end it is for us to decide what kind of society we want. We already know where the disregard for the environment took the Greenland Vikings. Do we want to go there also?

[1]Biermann F. et al. (2012). Navigating the Anthropocene: Improving Earth System Governance, Nature, 335,1306-1307. [2]See http://www.oneplanetliving.org/index.html See also, Barnosky, A. D. et al. (2012). Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere, Nature, 486, 52-58. [3]Hannah Ritchie, Max Roser and Pablo Rosado (2020) – “CO₂ and Greenhouse Gas Emissions”. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions' [Online Resource]. [4] Diamond, J. (2004). Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Viking Books: New York. [5] This debate is discussed in “Reverend Malthus and the Future of Food,” by Justin Gillis, The New York Times, Jun 6, 2011. [6] See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution. [7] See, e.g., Fukuda-Parr, S. (2007). The gene revolution: GM crops and unequal development, Earthscan, London. [8] See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing. [9]J.J. Laffont (2008). Externalities, The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd ed. [10]See, e.g., “Scientists Achieve Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough With Blast of 192 Lasers,” by Kenneth Chang, The New York Times, Dec 13, 2022. [11] Aldy, J. E. & Stavins, R. N. (2012). Using the market to address climate change: Insights from theory & experience, Daedalus, The Alternative Energy Future, Vol. 1, Spring 2012, 45-57. [12]A useful discussion of externalities is found in: Barnett, A.H. & Yundle, B. (2005). The End of the Externality Revolution, http://mises.org/journals/scholar/barnett.pdf. [13]Daly, H. & Cobb, J. (1989). For the Common Good. Beacon Press, Boston. [14]Kubiszewski, I. et al. (2013). Beyond GDP: Measuring and achieving global genuine progress. Ecological Economics. 93: 57–68. Sep 2013. [15]Goossens, Y. (2007). Alternative progress indicators to Gross Domestic Product as a means towards sustainable development (PDF). European Parliament. Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety. Retrieved Aug 17 2022. [16]Suzuki, D. (2014). How the GDP Measures Everything 'Except That Which Makes Life Worthwhile.’ EcoWatch. https://www.ecowatch.com/how-the-gdp-measures-everything-except-that-which-makes-life-worthwhil-1881869660.html. [17]“This pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end,” by D. Marchese, The New York Times, Jul 17, 2022. [18]“Gun Violence in 2021, By the Numbers,” by Chip Brownlee, The Trace, Dec 21, 2021. [19]“This pioneering economist says our obsession with growth must end,” by D. Marchese, The New York Times, Jul 17, 2022. [20]I recommend to read the book: Lasch, C. (1991). The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics. W. W. Norton & Company. Also, a review of the book: “Where Progress Got Us?” by William Wilson, The New York Tines, Jan 27, 1991. [21]Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh. [22] “Religions and environmental protection”. UN Environment Programme. https://www.unep.org/about-un-environment-programme/faith-earth-initiative/religions-and-environmental-protection. Retrieved Aug 24, 2022. [23]White, L. (1967). The historical roots of our ecological crisis. Science. 155 (3767): 1203–1207. [24]Sherkat, D. E., and C. G. Ellison. (2007). Structuring the religion-environment connection: identifying religious influences on environmental concern and activism. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 46:71–85. Also, Peterson, M. N., and J. Liu. (2008). Impacts of religion on environmental worldviews: the Teton Valley case. Society and Natural Resources 21:704–718 [25]Inhofe, J. (2012). The greatest hoax: how the global warming conspiracy threatens your future. WND Books. [26]Huynh, L. T. M. et al. (2022). Linking the nonmaterial dimensions of human-nature relations and human well-being through cultural ecosystem services. Science Advances. (8) 31. 1-21.