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  3. Cowboy or spaceman? A dilemma for a children’s party, perhaps. But also a question for economists, argued Kenneth Boulding, a Br

Cowboy or spaceman? A dilemma for a children’s party, perhaps. But also a question for economists, argued Kenneth Boulding, a Br

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问题    Cowboy or spaceman? A dilemma for a children’s party, perhaps. But also a question for economists, argued Kenneth Boulding, a British economist, in an essay published in 1966. 【F1】We have run our economies, he warned, like cowboys on the open grassland: taking and using the world’s resources, confident that more lies over the horizon. But the Earth is less a grassland than a spaceship—a closed system, alone in space, carrying finite supplies. We need, said Boulding, an economics that takes seriously the idea of environmental limits. In the half century since his essay, a new movement has responded to his challenge. 【F2】"Ecological economists", as they call themselves, do not want to revolutionise at the margins of economics, but to revolutionise its aims and assumptions. What do they say—and will their ideas achieve lift-off?
   To its practitioners, their starting point is to recognise that the human economy is part of the natural world. Our environment, they note, is both a source of resources and a sink for wastes. 【F3】But it is ignored in conventional textbooks, where neat diagrams trace the flows between firms, households and the government as though nature did not exist. That is a mistake, say ecological economists.
   They are suspicious of GDP, a crude measure which does not take account of resource depletion, unpaid work, and countless other factors. 【F4】In its place they advocate more holistic approaches (整体分析法 ), such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI)(真是发展指数), a composite index that includes things like the cost of pollution, deforestation and car accidents. While GDP has kept growing, global GPI per person peaked in 1978: by destroying our environment we are making ourselves poorer, not richer.
   Mainstream economists are unimpressed. The GPI, they point out, is a subjective measure. And talk of limits to growth has had a bad press since the days of Thomas Malthus, a gloomy 18th century cleric who predicted, wrongly, that overpopulation would lead to famine. Human ingenuity finds solutions to some of the most annoying problems. But ecological economists warn against self-satisfaction. In 2009 a paper in Nature, a scientific journal, argued that human activity is already overstepping safe planetary boundaries on issues such as biodiversity and climate change. 【F5】That suggests that ecological economists are at least asking some important questions, even if their answers turn out to be wrong. It may be no bad thing if economics became a little more Neil Armstrong, and a little less Jesse James.
【F3】
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答案但这一点在传统的课本中被忽略了。书中那些整齐的图表显示，废弃物的流动路径是在公司、家庭和政府之间的，仿佛大自然是不存在的。
解析 ①本句为复合句，包含一个定语从句，该定语从句中又包含一个方式状语从句。主句为被动句，it指代前文出现的概念Our environment，they note，is both a source of resources and a sink for wastes。②定语从句为主谓宾结构，先行词是逗号前的textbooks，说明传统课本里如何表现废弃物的流动路径。③定语从句还嵌套着一个方式状语从句，as though引导词意为“好像，似乎”，说明传统课本是以基本忽略自然存在的方式去表现废弃物的流动路径。
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