By Brian Carnell

Wednesday, November 24, 1999

After debating with him in a forum on a Wired site several years ago, I knew anti-globalism activist David Korten didn't understand economics very well, but now it turns out he could use a lesson in fundamental physics as well.

Browsing through the university bookstore (Korten's book is required reading in several classes here) I came across this unbelievable couple sentences in David Korten's Globalizing Civil Society:

The "garbage index" is one of our best sustainability indicators. In blunt terms, to achieve sustainability we must reduce to zero the amount of waste product permanently thrown away into the environment without the possibility of natural recycling. Once taken from the ground, minerals and other biodegradable resources must become a part of society's permanent capital stock and be recycled in perpetuity. This means organizing productive activities as closed systems.

Unless Korten has made some breakthrough in physics, it is impossible to recycle anything in perpetuity due to entropy. In fact, it is impossible to create a truly closed system as well since everything on the planet requires the constant addition of energy from the outside to sustain it -- we call it the Sun.

Even attaining very high levels of recycling is often possible only at immense social costs, since recycling itself requires additional energy, effort and materials. And who pays a disproportional part of such social costs? Why, of course, the poor on whose behalf Korten claims to be acting.

The idea of trying to create a closed economic system where there are no resources lost in production is the sort of pie-in-the-sky environmentalism that, unfortunately, seems popular with some elements of the far Left.

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