Tag Archives: Barney Foran

Six Principles for a Sustainable Australia


My friend, Jerry Holtaway brought to my attention an interesting fellow, Barney Foran, an economist presently a visiting fellow with the Centre for Research and Environmental Studies (CRES) at the Australian National University in Canberra. Professor Foran calls out six principles essential to building a sustainable Australia. They are:

Stabilising human population number and age structure;
reducing the use of the grand global elements;
basing economy and society on flows rather than stocks;
shortening the supply chain;
engineering society for durability and resilience;
and developing a new economics where taxes tell the truth.

Jerry also pointed out a very interesting project, the Australian Conservation Foundation’s Interactive Consumption Atlas, “a really excellent example of making the ecologically invisible visible in a compelling way.”