percent is waste (Whitaker, 1994, p. 30). Amory Lovins goes further, writing that that the US economy converts only about 2 percent of the energy it uses into services, wasting the other 98 percent. Along with co-authors Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawken (1999, p. 52), Lovins argues that only about 1 percent of all materials mobilized to serve North America is actually made into products and still in use six months after sale. They add that only 2 percent of the total waste stream is recycled. These irrationalities can exist primarily because what is considered economic omits full costsmaintaining industrial forms of invisibility. The official cost of materials has simply been the cost of extracting and processing themwith their price determined by this extraction cost coupled with market demand. In real terms, this has amounted to a massive subsidy to the market system by nature. This has continued to erode the power of organized labour, still subject to labour displacement and de-skilling despite worldwide population increase, a situation aggravated by globalization and capital mobility. The official invisibility of natures materials and services to the economy has therefore hidden important costs. Economists now call them externalized costs (or externalities) since, even though they do not affect a firms balance sheet, they tend to show up elsewhereas health costs, costs of state environmental cleanup, future costs created by wasting and depleting resources, etc. For a long time, these externalities were small enough to treat as if they didnt exist. Nature seemed to be endlessly plentiful, and cheap labour always seemed too scarce. Labour also had the inconvenient inclination to demand at least minimal remuneration for its services; nature was always more acquiescent. It was handy that energy and resourcesas expressed in technology or