We understand that destroying our living co-world is the consequence of our present way of acting on it and viewing it. It is a culturally developed form of interaction, not a natural one. This insight allows us the understanding that we are the culprits, and also the victims of such a logic. Against all better knowledge, this logic is still defended as having no viable alternative.

Unless that traditional economic view of nature is modernised, any call for change might be discredited as a kind of threat to existing industries, economic growth, tax revenue and jobs. Therefore we call for not only a quantitative, but also a qualitative transition in our approach to nature; a paradigm change.

III. Many international and national institutions have already implemented strategies for sustainable development and some have even anchored the expression “conservation of nature” in their constitutions. In the light of this statement, important next steps are to:

• reformulate this as “conservation of nature’s capability to evolve”.
• ensure that direct, immediate, unmediated interaction with our co-world as the basis for all life is made a basic human right.

Ecological sustainable modernisation must be prioritised in all areas of life, in the public and business sector, as well as in the scientific and private sphere:

• Legislative powers should not regard themselves only as the governor of others’ behaviour. All public actors have the duty to practice sustainability in the pursuit of their own dealings. It is not enough to install environment ministries/departments or sustainability advisory councils. Ecologically sustainable modernisation is a cutting-across sectional task.
• Public buildings, whether federal or local/regional, police stations or judicial institutions, technology centres or universities, schools or nurseries, shall be modernised sustainably.
• Planning authorities have to shift their primary focus away from short-term cost advantages to long-term pay-offs. Higher one-off investments pay for themselves by reducing costs for heat and power in the long run.
• A review of academic courses, for example architecture and engineering, should be initiated in order to establish ecologically sustainable construction and renovation as normal.
• Economic courses have to be modernised with the aim to teach an understanding of nature with self-value and our three-dimensional unmediated reciprocal interaction process with her.
• Sustainability standards should become binding for all public programmes.

In addition to the statutory duty to submit an annual financial statement, banks and all businesses should be obliged by an EU directive to disclose their interaction with nature in precise physical units, as for example weight, volume etc., via an Integrated Balance Sheet, because our interaction with nature can only be measured by physical units and not in money. As a cultural invention, money has no relevance to nature. The Integrated Balance Sheet is to be separated into business-, product- and human ecology. That way, it is possible to state nature’s annual profit through reduced utilization, which can become an equally important objective to the entrepreneurial pursuit of financial profit.

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