Abstract:

As announced in our previous works, this paper is part of a larger research that deals with sustainable development and environmental protection in extractive industry. In this respect, this paper is dealing with the estimative speculations and the “Spaceship Earth” concept introduced by Boulding a few decades ago. Developing industries and technologies, population growth, etc. have begun to increasingly use the environment, so that they have become an additional production factor, and pollution has become a more evolved element in the field of natural environment boundaries. It is necessary for man to change his behavior in relation to nature: from violence and foolishness, he has to be a protector and collaborator of the natural environment or, as Boulding argues, to find his place in a system ecologically cyclical that is capable of continuous reproduction of the material form.  At the end, this paper concludes that, by considering the extent to which the price mechanism, used in a way to put prices on external diseconomies, we can deal with the transition to “Spaceship Earth”.