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On gardening and human welfare, or, the role of attitudes and natural capital in sustainable welfare

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Abstract

This paper examines the ancient Judeo-Christian worldview to provide a link between individual and societal attitudes and sustainable human welfare. This “moral ecology” links the welfare of the entire created order to human justice, or right living. Environmental degradation, poverty, and oppression all stem from humans grasping for control. To examine how these attitudes may affect material human welfare the paper develops the concept of natural systems as natural multiproduct factories, showing how they interact with other productive resources to improve human material well-being. Maintaining or increasing such well-being depends upon creating a balance between these natural factories and human-derived inputs within a spatial context. Achieving balance, as well as overall human welfare, is shown ultimately to depend upon the attitudes of people toward one another and toward the rest of creation, indicating that the basic Hebrew perspective under girding western civilization has much to offer as a frame of analysis.

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  1. Robert R. Gottfried
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Additional information

Robert R. Gottfried is Associate Professor of Economics at The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. He has worked in Central America, Ecuador, Puerto Rico, and Appalachia. His special interests include the economics of sustainability, environment and development, and environmental theology.

The research in this paper dealing with natural capital was performed while on sabbatical at the Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza in Turrialba, Costa Rica, where the author worked with the Regional Watershed Management Project. The author wishes to express his gratitude to CATIE and all those individuals who offered their thoughts and inspiration while the author was there. In particular he wishes to thank Pierre Berner and Eric Richters, as well as Scott Brunger of Maryville College. Many thanks to Yolande Gottfried for her helpful comments. The views and any errors expressed herein are the author's own.

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Gottfried, R.R. On gardening and human welfare, or, the role of attitudes and natural capital in sustainable welfare. Agric Hum Values 9, 36–47 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02217963

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