school energy&environment

The Cowboy Economy and Spaceship Earth

It is difficult to trace the concept of the circular economy back to a certain date or a single author. However, practical applications to modern economic systems and industrial processes date back to the 1970s.
Certainly one of the essays that laid the foundations of environmental economics is “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth”, published in 1966 by Kenneth Boulding. In the essay, Boulding outlines two types of economy, identifying them with two figures, the cowboy and the spaceman: the cowboy merely considers the endless plains that surround him, driven by a continuous thirst for conquest and consumption; the spaceman, on the other hand, is profoundly aware of the system in which he lives, the great spaceship Earth, of its limits and the cycles that regulate its operation. “For the sake of picturesqueness, I am tempted to call the open economy the “cowboy economy”, the cowboy being symbolic of the illimitable plains and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behaviour, which is characteristic of open societies. The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the “spaceman” economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system which is capable of continuous reproduction of material form even though it cannot escape having inputs of energy.”
Boulding was the first to consider the Earth as a closed system: only from the Earth, just as spacemen do in a spaceship, can Earthlings get the resources they need, and only on Earth can they discard waste and refuse. Energy stocks, therefore, can only be replaced by solar energy while water and raw materials can only be durable if they are reused and recycled. The myth of the expansion of consumption and the economies of individual countries and the world can only lead to a more or less rapidly approaching crisis, precisely because this model is based on a mistaken assumption, which is to consider the resources on our planet as unlimited.