A Sustainable Prosperity
Fís Nua seeks to achieve a prosperity which satisfies and transcends material concerns. We understand that today’s growth economy is based on the ‘cashing in’ of natural resources for a relatively quick financial fix. These resources include – among other things – oil, soil, gas, minerals, timber, and fish-stocks. As these resources are rapidly consumed, the environment is degraded. This is horrifying, as the ‘economy’ is actually a subset of the natural economy that supports us. When we take it for granted, we put ourselves in peril. This is unsustainable. A sustainable prosperity recognises these truths and would operate on a different set of fundamental principles to the way the economy operates today. Perhaps the most important principle that we recognise is that a sustainably prosperous economy would ‘close the loop’. Unlike today’s extractive and destructive economy, which takes natural resources, and turns them into goods, which themselves end up in landfills, a sustainable economy would mimic the natural economy in it’s most fundamental aspect: the circle. In the natural economy, every output is an input for something else. Waste is always turned into new life and new growth – completing the circle of life and death.
Our economy is based on growth alone, and it does not acknowledge equal and opposite de-growth necessary for long term sustainability. This is not at odds with material abundance.
We propose a steady state economy, which balances growth with contraction and which can provide people with security, peace, and prosperity.