The satanic versus

The core of the issue confronting us all is summed up
in the headline a few days ago on a Press article
examining the policy options open to the Government:

ECONOMY VS ENVIRONMENT

There we have it. A perfectly normal proposition, it
seems, based on the idea that ‘economic’ gains might
come at a cost to the ‘environment,’ and that there
must be tradeoffs between the two. But there is no two.
There is only one. The economy is the environment is
the economy. To say ECONOMY VS ENVIRONMENT
is like saying WORK VS LABOUR or POPULATION VS
PEOPLE. It enables 'the environment'—actually, the air
we breathe, the ground we walk on, the world we live in,
everything that sustains life—to be consigned to a sort
of manipulable category like the price of milk or the
rate of unemployment. We will begin to make real
human progress the day that enough of us perceive that
ECONOMY VS ENVIRONMENT is a meaningless statement,
and that continuing to give it credence is possibly the
single greatest impediment to the betterment of the
planet we inhabit.