MIPS then is a simple and directionally true indicator that can be applied to all products and all services alike. Unfortunately the market is full of different indicators, most of which are pointing in a non-systemic fashion in specific directions. For instance, there are plenty of examples why using less energy for a certain service may have to be paid for by a higher material consumption, leave alone that the ecological quality of the electricity available is hardly ever known to the consumer - or even misinterpreted as is the case with photovoltaic. The label "natural fiber" may hide the fact that the product is an environmental atrocity, like cotton from the Aral Lake area. And the label "biological product" very rarely takes the erosion into account that was generated for its production. We believe that in many ways MIPS would be a more reasonable way to describe ecological quality. Naturally, information on the toxic nature of things would have to be stated in addition, where known. Now, the "ecological price" of services, their MIPS, says nothing about the true resource throughput in an economy. Even if every product and every service has been dematerialized, the Total Material Flow through this economy can still be very high and even rising. Sometimes we call this the "rebound" or "boomerang" effect. Together with colleagues from your country and others, the total Material flows of Japan, Germany, the USA, The Netherlands, Vietnam, and others was computed. Surprisingly, people in OECD countries tend to consume 40 to 70 tons of non-renewable materials every year while Vietnamese for instance can still make it on 2 tons. Two questions remain to be dealt with. First, what is the globally required dematerialization for reaching ecologically sustainable conditions. And second, why is it that the western economies do not run on the lowest possible material input trajectory - as they should under ideal market conditions? Lets have a look at the so-called "carrier capacity" question first. What is the ecological limit for using natural resources on this earth without destroying the irreplaceable services of the ecosphere? Nobody knows, really, and it is extremely unlikely that we will ever have reliable numbers. This is so because the ecosphere is a non-linear complex system and so is the human economy. The interrelations are sufficiently complex to defy mathematical answers. But a few indications led me to suggest that the world-wide reduction of the current use of natural resources should be cut by at least a factor of 2 on the average. And this has been widely accepted as a first approach. Equity demands, however, an additional consideration. Today, the 20 % richest people of the world consume in excess of 80 % of the natural resources. The 80 % poor people of this earth are struggling to reach a similar material prosperity as we enjoy in OECD countries. That means that we need not only to reduce our take by a factor of 2 but at least by a factor of 10 in order to leave environmental space for the poorer countries for their development. Let us now turn to the economic side of the story that I am privileged to tell you today. Why is it that the world economy runs away from sustainability rather than making the best possible use of resources? The simple answer to this question is this: because the price signals on the market prevent that saving of resources is financially attractive beyond narrow limits. Natural resources are so cheap and the costs of labor are so high that cost cuttings in all parts of the economy can best be achieved by saving on labor and buying machines that replace humans. That's what industry does every day and the stock market applauds this trend. And every government, church, bank, labor union and every household in industrialized countries does the same thing. This means not only that products and services remain less resource efficient than they could be. It means also that additional natural resources are invested every day in order to replace human labor. To some degree, unemployment and environmental destruction thus have the same origin: a misguided economy.