Let us begin with a question that is rarely given much space in economics classrooms or development meeting rooms: who exactly gave the modern economic system the authority to treat growth figures as if they carried absolute moral value?

In many development narratives, |Growth| = Growth is treated almost like a modern idol: a sacred entity that must be accepted without much resistance. When growth is announced to have risen by a few percent, we are expected to celebrate, without always being given the chance to ask: growth of what, for whom, at what cost, and with what loss?

This is where the bias of power works quietly. Numbers are not only tools of measurement, but also tools of legitimacy. They determine what is called progress, what is called an obstacle, what is considered productive, and what may be sacrificed for the sake of a graph that appears to be rising.

This essay does not begin from the assumption that all economic growth is inherently bad. What I want to examine is the way growth is treated almost as an absolute sign of progress, while the ecological damage that accompanies it is often pushed aside as an external cost, a side effect, or merely an externality. Under this kind of accounting system, destruction can appear as growth not because reality has changed, but because the metric is too narrow to see what is being lost.

As I discussed in the previous essay, the economy is not a system that stands outside the ecosystem. It is a derivative system that depends on the stability of the biosphere.

What Gets Counted Becomes Real

In modern accounting systems, reality often undergoes a severe distortion.

Only something that can be translated into monetary terms earns the right to be considered “real.”

The complexity of ecosystem services, how microorganisms maintain soil health, how mycelial networks distribute nutrients, or how biodiversity stabilizes a region, is often treated like a ghost wandering outside the economic spreadsheet.

These things are unilaterally categorized as “externalities,” a term that sounds technical, but often functions as a polite way of saying that something exists outside the center of attention.

By contrast, when the land is excavated, the ecosystem is destroyed, and the area is replaced by concrete that generates financial circulation, it suddenly becomes “real” in the eyes of the market.

We have exchanged the biological reality that sustains us for a value system that can only see something after it enters a transaction.

Relative Growth Forced Into an Absolute

This is one of the great absurdities we collectively maintain: GDP growth is fundamentally a relative indicator.

It measures the change in the value of economic activity from one period to another. GDP growth is a comparison, a statistical movement, not an absolute measure of welfare, ecological health, or quality of life.

Yet in mainstream development narratives, this relative growth is often forced to transform into an absolute measure of human progress.

We are trapped in the delusion that a linear graph must continue climbing without limit, as if Earth had endless space and resources to accommodate it.

Treating relative growth as an absolute value on a finite planet is a serious error. And we are paying the price of that error today.

So, Does the Forest Have No Value at All?

The irony of this system becomes clear when we look at a piece of forest.

As long as the forest stands, purifying the air, sheltering countless species, regulating the water cycle, holding the soil together, and supporting the local microclimate, conventional accounting often looks at it with one eye half-closed and mutters: “This place does not contribute enough to economic growth.”

A living forest is treated as idle and unproductive.

But bring in the bulldozers, cut down the trees, sell the timber to the market, and turn the land into a monoculture plantation, an industrial estate, or a mining pit. Suddenly, there is economic activity that can be recorded: heavy machinery is rented, workers are paid, timber is sold, land is processed, investment enters, and the numbers begin to move.

The economic graph may record this as an achievement. The forest is considered useful precisely after it dies and ceases to be a forest.

Put simply, this system often finds it easier to value the corpse of nature than the fullness of living nature.

This simple diagram does not show that a living forest has no value. Quite the opposite: it shows that our measurement systems often recognize transactions faster than they recognize life.

Not Everything That Grows Is Alive

In the end, we need to clean the lenses of our glasses and look at reality more honestly.

In biology, not everything that grows carries life. Growth is a phase, not an endless goal. An organism grows until it reaches a certain stage of maturity, then part of its energy is redirected toward maintenance, reproduction, and homeostasis.

When a cell continues dividing without limit and ignores signals from its surrounding environment, we do not call it progress. We call it a disorder.

In this sense, economic growth that recognizes no limit begins to resemble a pathological logic: it takes resources from the living systems around it, enlarges itself, and weakens the very foundation that makes its existence possible.

We need to remember: a tree does not keep growing taller forever. At some point, it strengthens its trunk, expands its canopy, bears fruit, becomes a habitat for other organisms, and shelters what lives around it.

If our economic system does not know when to stop chasing quantitative growth, then it is not moving toward progress. It is walking toward collapse, written in the language of statistics.

Brief References

• World Bank – Natural Capital
  This reference is relevant for understanding the concept of natural capital: forests, water, soil, biodiversity, and ecosystem services can be understood as material foundations that support the economy. This concept relates to the argument of this essay, especially how economic systems often fail to recognize ecological value until it becomes a market transaction.
  https://www.worldbank.org/ext/en/topic/environment/natural-capital

• The Dasgupta Review – The Economics of Biodiversity (2021)
  This reference supports the idea that the human economy does not exist outside nature, but is embedded within natural systems. This aligns with the main critique of this essay: economic growth cannot be fully understood if biodiversity loss and ecosystem damage are left outside the balance sheet.
  https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/final-report-the-economics-of-biodiversity-the-dasgupta-review

• World Bank – The Changing Wealth of Nations
  This reference is relevant because it discusses how a nation’s wealth is not made only of produced capital and human capital, but also natural capital. It strengthens the critique of economic indicators that are too narrow when evaluating progress.
  https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/environment/publication/changing-wealth-of-nations

What I frequently encounter on the internet when people discuss the environment is a rather binary mindset: economic growth is pitted against ecological preservation, as if humanity were forced to choose one over the other.

I choose not to take part in this debate. Do you think that is because I am arrogant? Perhaps. But there is a more fundamental reason: the narrative that frames the economy and the ecosystem as two equal, opposing camps feels conceptually invalid.

When attempting to deconstruct the words themselves, I stumbled upon a rather amusing paradox.

Etymologically, economy traces back to oikos, meaning home, and nomos, which relates to management or rules. On the other hand, ecology combines oikos with logos, meaning knowledge or study. From this, a subtle irony emerges: how could humanity presume itself capable of drafting the “rules of the house” if it fails to understand the “knowledge of the house” itself?

Of course, etymology is not scientific proof. It is merely an entry point. Yet this entry point reveals something compelling: from its very beginning, the economy was never truly meant to exist outside its ecological home. Modern humans may have trapped themselves in the illusion that the economy is an independent system driven solely by numbers, market laws, and technology. In reality, all of it is nothing more than a fragile bubble inside a much larger chamber called the biosphere.

The Material Basis of the Economy

Food, clean water, soil, and a stable climate are the material foundations of the economy. Imagine a scenario where humanity finds itself in a relatively affluent financial state by current standards, yet the ecological system has lost its stability. Clean water becomes scarce. Soil and water are contaminated with substances hazardous to many organisms. The climate shifts with increasing volatility.

At that point, money loses most of its magic.

Money can buy commodities only as long as those commodities exist. Money can dictate distribution only as long as there is something left to distribute. But money does not have the biological capacity for photosynthesis. It cannot manufacture calories. No factory, no matter how advanced, can replicate or replace the planetary scale of the natural hydrological cycle that sustains human civilization.

This reality demonstrates that the economy, at its core, is merely a set of rules for a game. If the playground itself is destroyed, the rules naturally cease to function.

Every economic commodity, from the cup of coffee beside me at this cafe, to sheets of stock certificates, to the 15-inch laptop I am currently using to write this, is fundamentally a transformed form of planetary matter and energy. The economy is not sorcery that summons reality out of a vacuum. It merely organizes, displaces, processes, prices, and then labels things as “value.”

Consider fertile soil. It is not merely “land property” or a real estate commodity; it is the result of long, intricate labor performed by organisms, microorganisms, decomposers, minerals, water, air, and deep time. When these biological processes are disrupted on a systemic scale, the global food supply chain does not simply encounter a technical glitch. It suffers a rupture at its material foundation.

In other words, an ecological crisis is never just an environmental issue. An ecological crisis is an economic catastrophe that has not yet been fully recognized by the vocabulary of conventional economics.

Burning the Capital, Ignoring the Interest

In the financial realm, if someone holds capital in a bank, the sane policy is to live from the interest generated, not to liquidate the principal until nothing remains. Earth possesses its own version of this account, known as natural capital: forests, topsoil, water, biodiversity, a relatively stable climate, and the ecological processes that support life.

A stable ecological cycle is the natural “interest” that humanity enjoys, often free of charge. Yet the modern economic engine frequently operates in reverse: it clears forests, contaminates soil, erodes biodiversity, and destabilizes the climate system, all in pursuit of short-term returns.

This is not holistic growth. It is systemic bankruptcy being temporarily postponed.

This absurd inclination is also mirrored in the way modern humans idolize data. Countless corporations today describe data as the new oil, the ultimate fuel for growth. But they overlook a data center that is older, larger, and far more fundamental than any server farm ever built by human hands: nature itself.

The forest archives information within its intricate web of roots, soil, fungi, insects, birds, mammals, microbes, local humidity, and microclimatic patterns. The ocean stores information in its currents, plankton populations, salinity, temperature, and complex trophic relationships. The soil preserves a biological record that can never be replicated on a spreadsheet.

When this biological data center is compromised, the damage does not immediately flash red on a quarterly corporate report. Instead, it materializes quietly in humbler, more brutal places: on dinner plates, water bills, food prices, bodily health, and our collective capacity to survive.

The Economy Does Not Exist Beyond the Biosphere

Frameworks like natural capital and planetary boundaries have already shown that the economy cannot be decoupled from the ecological conditions that anchor it. Nature is not a static backdrop for human ambition. It is the life-support system that makes human ambition possible in the first place.

Thus, the ultimate question is not whether humanity must choose between the economy and the ecosystem.

The far more precise question is this: what kind of economy can still call itself “rational” if it actively destroys the ecological prerequisites of its own survival?

Science does not negotiate with political rhetoric, climate diplomacy, or currency exchange rates. The laws of biology and physics remain indifferent, continuing to operate even as humans busy themselves giving elegant names to their own destructive behaviors.

If the biosphere loses its stability, human economic calculus will not become more sophisticated. It will simply become irrelevant.

If that ecological dystopia finally arrives, the most tragic part will not be that humanity failed to predict it. The signs were already there. The tragedy will be that humans managed to name their destruction “rationality” while standing inside the very system they were dismantling.

Ultimately, the economy is not the antagonist of the ecosystem. The economy is its derivative. It is not a freestanding mansion, but a minor household arrangement within a much grander home. And no household management can ever be deemed successful when the house itself is being burned down from its foundations.

To be continued in Part 2: When Destruction Poses as Growth

References

• World Bank – Natural Capital
  The World Bank defines natural capital as the stock of natural assets, including forests, water, soil, minerals, and ecosystems, that provide vital services and benefits to the economy and human well-being. This framework supports the argument that economic systems are inseparable from their ecological foundations.
  https://www.worldbank.org/ext/en/topic/environment/natural-capital

• Stockholm Resilience Centre – Planetary Boundaries
  The planetary boundaries framework defines the ecological limits within which humanity can safely operate to maintain Earth-system stability. Transgressing these boundaries increases the risk of large-scale and potentially irreversible environmental change.
  https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html

• IPBES – Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (2019)
  The IPBES report highlights the unprecedented global decline of biodiversity and ecosystem services, detailing how the degradation of nature directly threatens human material survival and economic security.
  https://www.ipbes.net/global-assessment

• The Dasgupta Review – The Economics of Biodiversity (2021)
  This review emphasizes that the human economy is deeply embedded within nature, rather than external to it. It also criticizes conventional economic models for failing to account for the true value of ecosystems and biodiversity. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/final-report-the-economics-of-biodiversity-the-dasgupta-review

• World Bank – The Changing Wealth of Nations
  This report monitors global wealth accumulation, arguing that a nation’s true wealth must include natural capital alongside produced and human capital. It reinforces the analogy of preserving planetary capital rather than liquidating it.
  https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/2ad40228-16c5-4484-969a-ac604539e067