Rockefeller University

Program for the Human Environment

Area of Research: The ImPACT Identity

Making Nature Useless

On November 5 Iddo Wernick and Jesse Ausubel participated together with colleagues from the Breakthrough Institute in the seminar at Resources for the Future (RFF) in Washington DC titled Making Nature Useless? Global Resource Trends, Innovation, and Implications for Conservation. Iddo presented work on century-long trends in USA resource use, Making Nature Useless: Relative Dematerialization & Absolute Peaks. 

We also post Jesse’s brief (3-page) prepared remarks, On Useless Nature, subsequently published in RealClearScience (18 Sept 2015).

Some coverage at

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-humans-and-nature-co-exist/

https://reason.com/archives/2014/11/10/making-nature-useless

29 July 2004

Upon submission for publication of our paper on “Industrial Ecology for Leverage to Loose Less Cadmium,” we post our simulator of cadmium flows to our ImPACT identity site. The “DynaCad” simulator provides the basis for key conclusions in the paper. We thank Paul Waggoner for his lead role in creating the simulator and Iddo Wernick, Peter Elias,
and Tony Barrett for their patience in completing this work, which grew out of our 1997 report Industrial Ecology: Some Directions for Research.