Prosperity for Rhode Island

Dear Dr Dasgupta, I am the founder of the Prosperity Project in Providence RI, so I was interested in reading your article that came to me today in the Encyclopedia of the Earth on Natural Capital and economic growth.  I found it sort of troubling, as it really seems to underestimate the amount of damage humans are doing to the ecosystems, and does not really take to task the miscalculations that we see  in our efforts to understand if the economy is sustainable.  I do not believe that adding up the manufactured, human and natural capital to see if it is a positive number is all that useful.  You note that things like deforestation, soil erosion, depletion of fish in the ocean are vastly undercounted, but you seem unwilling to give them additional weight in the calculations for determining sustainability.  My guess is that nothing being done today is sustainable as long as ecosystems continue to deteriorate.  What makes up for the loss of the rainforest, soil erosion, dead zones in the Oceans, global climate change?  Just because more people have more education and there are more computers, we are still depleting capital and the ability of people to feed themselves in the future.  We can not eat computers.  

I am not an academic, I am an activist, so I guess we have to approach things a bit differently, but I do not think manufactured capital makes up for losses in natural capital, and that the only way to sustainablility is to repair and heal ecosystems.  I am going to copy below the notes for a talk I gave recently at the RI Land And Waters Partnership summit.  You may or may not find it interesting, but I would be interested in your thoughts about how to make sure we are not miscalculating sustainability.  Greg Gerritt Providence RI