Designing the Green Economy looks at the ecological economy as a stage of human development, as real postindustrialism. The author argues that new productive forces based in human
cultural development have redefined the nature of wealth—from quantitative to qualitative.Real development can now only be defined in terms of individual, community and ecological regeneration—and yet these growing potentials have been increasing suppressed or distorted by industrial institutions over the last century. Archaic definitions of wealth—as money and material—threaten to destroy the planet and what remains of human community, creating crisis, inequality and environmental destruction. The author argues that real social change today involves not just opposing exploitation and injustice, but implementing social and ecological alternatives which directly target human development and ecological regeneration. Postindustrial social movement strategy involves a fundamental shift in focus from opposition to alternatives. These alternatives must inextricably involve individual/spiritual change, community development, and ecological renewal. Designing the Green Economy attacks the dominant pop interpretations of postindustrialism--which reify computer hardware and the information revolution--as propaganda which justifies current trends of superindustrial globalization. By contrast, real potentials for qualitative development, for "doing more with less", and dematerialization of economic life, depend on an ecological restructuring which would make information, like money and matter, simply a means to the end of serving human and planetary need. The author argues that mainstream forms of economic development serve to support corporate profit through the reproduction of scarcity. Since the Great Depression, waste has played the primary role of artificially generating scarcity. The creation of waste has also acted to suppress growing human and ecological potentials, and to reinforce relationships of domination. But this waste has also become a major source of crisis and stagnation for the System.
