The Earth: Natural Resources and Human Intervention

Editor's Foreword
 Preface: how environmental protection mutated into an eco-strategy
 Acknowledgments
 1 The Earth In Motion
 How we manage natural resources
 Dematerialization of the economy
 Moving resources
 Changing the way we manage the economy
 The necessity of dematerialization
 The ecological rucksack and an ecological metric
 Energy in the ecological rucksack
 How we manage resources
 From old to new environmental policy
 2 The True Price Of Things
 Focus on function
 Two new concepts
 Ecological rucksacks
 The ecological price, or the true price of things. Material input factors --
MIFFive different rucksacks
 Factor 10
 In a nutshell
 3 The Ecological Metric
 Costs per service
 The ecological price of utility
 MIPS is evidently the ecological equivalent of COPS
 The service unit S
 An example: what is dematerialized steel?
 Resource productivity: more utility for less environment
 Resource productivity of production
 Resource productivity of services
 Ecological prices and labels
 Ecological prices
 Do prices tell the ecological truth?
 4 The Economy's Metabolism
 An Excursus: The Tower Of Babel
 Inseparable: economic activity and the ecosphere. Material flow accountsThe resource strategy
 Material flows in Germany
 Food metabolism in Germany
 Material flows in the European Union
 The global economy's material flows
 The population problem and resource consumption
 Boomerang effects
 Sustainable world trade?
 5 Consequences For The Earth
 The complexity of the economy and the ecosphere
 The devastation caused by hurricanes
 Early warnings
 The Kyoto Protocol --
the path to the future?
 Sustainable solutions?
 6 Services And Their Utility
 Practical services
 Luxury and resources
 Services performed by machines
 Nature's services. The utility of lifeChanging values?
 Focusing on utility helps to create a future with a future
 Seeking ecological utility
 Choosing the best
 Making difficult choices
 The new Kondratiev wave
 Who are the movers and shakers?
 Making MIPS smaller: dematerializing existing products
 Designing the invisible: innovations for tomorrow
 Multifunctional equipment
 Designing sustainable utility
 7 The Earth In Our Hands
 The productivity of labor and resources
 Unemployment with no prospects?
 Misdirected financial burdens?
 Energy and resource efficiency
 Unintelligent taxation
 Full-cost pricing. The reality of wasting resourcesInnovation on the wrong track?
 The Aachen scenario
 We still lack information
 Carnoules Potentials
 Investing in tomorrow
 Europe's historic opportunity
 Epilogue
 Glossary
 Tables
 References.