Economists (and others) who are satisfied with nature-free equations develop a dangerous hubris about the potency of our species
Interpretation
The quote warns against overconfidence in our ability to manipulate the environment without considering natural limits.
Garrett Hardin emphasizes the peril of relying solely on abstract economic equations that ignore the constraints of nature. Such an attitude may lead to a dangerous arrogance about humanity's power to control and dominate the natural world, potentially resulting in detrimental consequences for both the environment and society.
In practice
In a lecture on environmental ethics, one might use this quote to discuss the limitations of economic models.
Moreover, the practical recommendations deduced from ecological principles threaten the vested interests of commerce; it is hardly surprising that the financial and political power created by these investments should be used sometimes to suppress environmental impact studies.
A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.
Thou shalt not transgress the carrying capacity
A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero.
Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.
Society does not need more children; but it does need more loved children. Quite literally, we cannot afford unloved children - but we pay heavily for them every day. There should not be the slightest communal concern when a woman elects to destroy the life of her thousandth-of-an-ounce embryo. But all society should rise up in alarm when it hears that a baby that is not wanted is about to be born.
Just one living cell in the human body is, more complex than New York City.
Economics is not an exact science. It's a combination of an art and elements of science. And that's almost the first and last lesson to be learned about economics: that in my judgment, we are not converging toward exactitude, but we're improving our data bases and our ways of reasoning about them.
The atom can't be seen, yet its existence can be proved. And it is simple to prove that it can't ever be seen. It has to be studied by indirect evidence - and the technical difficulty has been compared to asking a man who has never seen a piano to describe a piano from the sound it would make falling downstairs in the dark.
Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination
It was the late Dr. Mahendra Lal Sircar who, by founding the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, made it possible for the scientific aspirations of my early years to continue burning brightly.
Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale. Medicine, as a social science, as the science of human beings, has the obligation to point out problems and to attempt their theoretical solution: the politician, the practical anthropologist, must find the means for their actual solution. The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and social problems fall to a large extent within their jurisdiction.
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