Economics and Environmentalism Tia Stajkowski Yesterday in class, one of the presentations posed an interesting question that I have been thinking about more since then. I don't remember the question word for word, but it was essentially asking what would happen if we created a closed loop economy and what the reactions of society would be. My first thought was that it would obviously be great for the environment. Regenerating systems are cyclic by nature, so there would be no need to extract anything else from the earth, at least not nearly as much. My second thought is that this is also the reason why nothing has been done to close the loop. The national GDP (an incredibly arbitrary method to measure economic growth in my opinion) is held in higher regard than pretty much anything else: the environment, human rights, social justice concerns, etc. Whatever it takes to create a rising GDP, we will do it no matter the cost. Unfortunately, a closed loop economy goes directly against ...