Even the long-opposing Marxian model buys into the industrial growth paradigm, shorn of capitalist profit. It sees the world as a vast pool of resources for �productive force development�. Ecology is a concern, but only the ecology of ever more human production and reproduction. The whole of Nature is �man�s inorganic body� to be turned into human laboratory and product. Marx�s vision is that �Man faces himself in a world he has created�. Biodiversity does not arise as an issue in this value system.

The Brundtland Report does not catch up to Marx. The vast capitalist furnace turning Nature into profitable commodities and waste is never challenged on any level except if it does not provide the usable resources to carry on into the indefinite future. Basic issues like the wasteful oppression of billions of working lives, the suffering of increasing millions of animals, the homogenising domestication of life�s species, the eradication ofall wilderness, and rapidly disappearing biodiversity are all blocked out of the calculus. What alone matters is that the monetised economy is sustainable. But even long-view resourcism which factors life�s non-priced ecology out of account depends on an assumption which is very dubious - that any technological plan can adequately understand all the reproductive variables at risk with in ever more invasive industrial systems.

Human knowledge is limited on this score, prior to the problem of ecological knowledge registering in the market calculus. For example, ecologists and biologists agree that nothing like all the species of life

which exist, or which are going extinct, are yet known (current estimates fall under 10%). It follows that nothing like all the ecosystem interconnections among the species. and their reproduction is yet known. That is the basic reason why the variety, connectedness and evolving interplay of changing natural biodiversity, habitat and climate are beyond the scope of human mastery.

As even the sociobiologist-entymologist, E.O. Wilson, has observed (emphasis added): �To explore and affiliate with life is a deep and complicated process in mental development� 4 The mental development required here is to know limits. To assume that we can endlessly restructure the world in accordance with industrial designs, let alone cost-reducing profit demands, is an adolescent conception. If resources are extracted by ever more powerful industrial machines re-engineering the earth�s mantle and its ecosystems and redistributing their effluents into adjacent and distant regions, how can these human plans possibly take into account what needs to be understood?

The engineering physics model which leads the industrial onslaught as well as neoclassical economics is an inherently life-blind paradigm. The widening trail of ecocidal and natural life disaster behind both capitalist and state-industrial growth proves the dimensions of what can go wrong with an engineering model for regulating humanity�s interactions with nature. Not even what is known can enter into technical plans if all that matters is reduced costs and cheaper outputs. This is not to advocate against productive development. It is to recognise the relative poverty of scientific understanding of ecosystem variables and interconnections, as well as, more deeply, the inherent blindness of our outdated economic paradigm to the requirements of life systems.

The limits of human responsiveness to the conflict between planetary life interconnection and global market re-engineering is, in truth, repressed by almost all instituted schools of thought. The resourcist mind-set includes phenomenologists and post-modernists, where attention to the experiencing and the self-differentiating subject is confined to human language-users. The entire European tradition of the Lebenswelt (lifeworld), incredibly, recognises no life beyond the world of human symbols and their �background�, which includes no other life system. We are dealing here, in other words, with a deep-structural closure of mind. It not only rules the global market, but the mental horizons of the schools and disciplines of higher research which its context institutions fund.

The Life Principle of Value as the Proper Economic Regulator

From the standpoint of the wider life principle of value, its regulating principle�to protect and to enable more comprehensive ranges of vital life�recognises life-value beyond the human species. The primary level of movement beyond this era�s given theoretical limit is in recognising life value as value in itself. This principle of value does not assign the same or inviolable life value to all life as Indian Jains, Schweitzerians, and others do. Rather, its standpoint discerns intrinsic value in proportion to the range of vital life�the mental life, felt being and animate motion�at work in the life-forms and ecosystems in question.

On the economic level, this means that success is measured by the extent to which the economy provides means of life for people which would otherwise be in scarce supply.

One can measure economic success at the macro level the same way as we can now measure success at the sector level of air quality, calorie and protein intakes, availability of clean water, accessible affordable

housing, transportation resources, education and health-care levels, sufficiency of public space and play areas, access to cultural goods, and so on. The good is needed by people and the real economy if, and only if, deprivation ofit reduces the life capabilities of those without it.