The primacy of the environment is a basic principle ignored by economic theory.
The environment is agnostic about human purposes, but people cannot continue to be agnostic about the environment.
You can't build a wonderful economy and use that to "buy" a better environment. The environment is unknowing about prices and unresponsive to price changes.
To successfully use the environment we have to understand how to act with knowledge and concern for environmental sustainability.
I've been "green" for many years, but I've always had a weak view of what we can do about promoting better environmental policies and actions.
I'm a child of my time. I studied economics. Although I "knew" intuitively that those principles were wrong, I had no ability understand where the fault lay.
There is a simple formula for predicting the increased size of our cities or the increased resource use caused by any degree of growth you think is "sustainable".
The key number is "70". (To find the doubling period at any annual growth rate, simply divide 70 by that growth rate.)
The essential problems of environmental degradation were well understood by science and were reported to US President Jimmy Carter in 1979.
Since then we've pretended not to know. 70% of the oceans are over fished and we can't stop the fishing. We are actively destroying our world.
We are so focused on increasing the GDP, that we choose not to see the destruction we are causing. Zero Economic Growth is the issue at hand.
With zero economic growth as our objective we need to make changes on many fronts. We'll need functional democracy. Social justice will become a key issue.
We can't any longer anticipate that "growth" will solve that problem in time.
Cities properly developed can be one way to protect the environment. But the cities we have actually built don't do that.
Restricting population growth is highly desirable, over time a clear necessity, but that's not widely accepted. I'm sorry to be so gloomy, but I expect a die-off event.