Inherited template of growth now being discarded

In the 1950s in England, the River Thames was declared biologically dead. The river that had sustained London for two millennia had become an open sewer by the mid-19th century.

Fish had vanished. The water was poison. This was not an accident or an oversight, but rather the logical endpoint of a development model that treated nature as an infinite sink — a free resource to be drawn down without restraint.

The British Industrial Revolution created extraordinary wealth. It also generated a template for civilizational development that the world has largely followed ever since: growth first, ecology later. The assumption embedded in that template is that environmental damage is a price worth paying for progress, and that prosperity, once secured, can be used to clean up the mess afterward.

The Thames was eventually restored — at an enormous cost, with more than a century of effort.

However, the lesson the world drew from Britain was not the cost of ecological destruction, but the promise of industrial power. Country after country, decade after decade, repeated the same trajectory: sacrifice the rivers, the forests, the soil, the air — and deal with the consequences later.

That bargain is now coming due everywhere at once. We face simultaneous ecological crises — accelerating biodiversity loss, soil depletion, ocean acidification, freshwater scarcity and, above all, climate disruption — precisely because "later" has arrived and the debt is compounding faster than any economy can repay it.

The lesson of the Thames is a warning that the world failed to heed.

Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization represents a fundamental departure from this inherited template. Its central insight — that "lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets" — is more than just an aesthetic or lifestyle preference. It is an economic truth that the industrial era systematically ignored.

Ecologies are productive life-support systems. Destroy them, and you destroy the material basis of human well-being, no matter how high the GDP figures climb in the interim.

This insight is now vindicated by ecological science in terms that admit no serious dispute. Earth system scientists speak of "planetary boundaries" — nine biophysical thresholds within which human civilization can safely operate. We have already breached seven of them: climate, biodiversity, land system change, freshwater use, biogeo-chemical flows, novel entities and ocean acidification. Operating beyond these boundaries undermines the stability of the systems on which all economic activity depends, along with any expectation of sustainable human flourishing.

What made the old development model so persistent — and so dangerous — was a particular conception of what the economy is for and how it works. The dominant framework, inherited from the 19th-century political economy and refined into neoliberal orthodoxy by the late 20th century, treated the natural world as external to the economy: a storehouse of inputs and a dumping ground for outputs, but not itself a participant in or precondition of economic life. Growth was the story. Nature was a backdrop.

Ecological civilization thinking reverses this relationship. The economy is understood as embedded within society, and society as embedded within the biosphere. Damage the biosphere and you damage everything else. This realization is not an ideological position but rather an empirical description of how complex systems actually function.

The practical implications are profound. It means that development strategies cannot optimize for economic output without simultaneously optimizing for ecological integrity. It means that the goals of eliminating poverty, expanding shared prosperity and maintaining the natural systems on which all prosperity depends must be pursued together, not sequenced. It means that the framing of "environment versus development" — still common in policy debates worldwide — is not a genuine trade-off, but a category error.

China's own experience over recent decades illustrates both the danger and the opportunity. The environmental costs of rapid industrialization were severe and are well documented. The subsequent commitment — embedded in national policy and increasingly in institutional structures — to ecological civilization as a governing framework represents a pioneering attempt to break with the logic that produced those costs. At its deepest level, the "Beautiful China" vision represents an attempt to reconceive what development means.

The Thames today supports over 100 species of fish. The restoration was real, but it required acknowledging that the original damage was not a necessary cost of progress, but rather a failure of imagination. The British industrial economy chose to destroy its rivers, simply because the institutions and incentives of the time made ecological destruction cheap and ecological protection costly. Change the institutions and incentives, and different outcomes become possible.

Ecological civilization offers a different framework — one in which the health of the natural world is not a constraint on human flourishing, but its very foundation.

The rivers do not need to die before we learn this.

The author is president of the Institute for Ecological Civilization, co-founder of the Ecocivilization Coalition and founder of the Deep Transformation Network.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.