The Globe's editorialists missed the chance to incorporate a relevant 1995 quote from the late Gaylord Nelson, U.S. senator, Wisconsin governor and founder of Earth Day:

"The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. All economic activity is dependent upon that environment with its underlying resource base. When the environment is finally forced to file under Chapter 11 because its resource base has been polluted, degraded, dissipated, irretrievably compromised, then, the economy goes down into bankruptcy with it because the economy is just a subset within the ecological system."