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

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.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.