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"Vanitas”, was painted in 1660 by the Spaniard Juan de Nisa Valdés Leal at the economic peak of the Spanish empire. He has adopted arts reasoning to express the need for sustainability.
Our profligate use of Earth’s resources emerges from a series of short- lived episodes of empire building . Imperial growth is about a central state extending political control over territory and people. This can be achieved by military, or cultural means—usually a combination of these factors! However, a common feature of building empires is the development of what is commonly referred to as “take, make, waste" economies. Resources like minerals, fossil fuels, timber, and the like are extracted from the environment and used to make a commodity; the commodity is sold, used and then deposited as trash at the end of its life.
This process is not necessarily “bad” – it has created economic wealth, job opportunities and success for corporations and the people they employ. Linear economies have increased our quality of life, reduced mortality rates and enabled a free exchange of cultures and ideas. But a linear economy depends on two basic assumptions: one, that there will always be resources that can be extracted and two, that there will always be an “away” to dump our discarded materials. While this seemed to be true at the dawn of the industrial revolution, we’re realizing today that it is not.
In fact, the assumptions upon which we’ve based our entire economic system of world development are simply false. In the "blink of an eye" the world’s population has grown from one billion people in the early 1800s to nearly 7.4 billion today and we are using natural resources, which were created over millions of years, faster than they can regenerate. A linear economy cannot continue indefinitely – continuing resource constraints are putting business and humanity at risk. Now is the time to “close the loop” and create a more circular – and vibrant – economy that incorporates repurposing, redistributing, remanufacturing and reusing resources into our industrial processes.
These trends point the way to a general educational framework that would link together culture history and ecology in a common knowledge system of human life, consciousness and environment. This would be a form of cross-disciplinary systems thinking, where social, economic and material concepts are regarded as being embedded in ecological relations.
It reveals a fundamental need to assemble new knowledge systems that deal with the future of our species as one ecological community boxed into a relatively small niche in evolution. The need is evident in the trend to expand the boundaries of subject divisions. For example, arising from the great diversity of modern approaches to archaeology has come the need to develop a theory of persons within a more general theory of culture and ecology, with interventions into established disciplines and practices.
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