A Contribution to the Qualitative, Interdisciplinary Modeling of Environmental Development

We suggest a simple, interdisciplinary, qualitative, system-theoretical model of long-run environmental development, where the dynamics of environmental quality are determined by the interactions across the political, economic, ecological/natural, and socio-cultural systems. The resulting model is a self-regulating feedback-loop system and can be used to explain the existence and the characteristics of different empirically observable economic/societal development stages (pollution phase and ecological phase) and environmental and economic policy-regime switches consistent with empirical evidence