I believe that there is a serious incentive on prevention and efficiency. However, there is a much louder voice for curing and expansion. I can offer you two re

I believe that there is a serious incentive on prevention and efficiency. However, there is a much louder voice for curing and expansion. I can offer you two reasons why. 1) Lack of better knowledge in the past: For a long time people thought smoking was fashionable. Today we know it causes lung cancer, but it is now too late to tell all those people that have been smoking their entire life. This can be said about nearly everything in every other field. I would not say that we have better knowledge about many things now. Science is still not sure if eggs are good or bad for you, neither why many people develop lactose intollerance after their childhood. Because of that, prevention is pretty much a luck guess by now. We look at those who have survived and try to figure out why. Then we tell people to do that and see if it works, but there are so many factors that 'I' feel that prevention is in many cases just a gambling game. 2) Lack of knowledge of economy of scale. When the industrial revolution started, steam was on its heydays, and all that, the idea of recycling and efficiency didn't exist AT ALL. People really thought that Earth could take everything that was thrown at it and its resources would last forever. Only now, with a population of many billions that we are seeing that Earth is panting, trying to catch up with our wasteful ways. The idea of 'reduce, reuse, recycle' to save resources is very new and there is a lot of social and economical mommentum it needs to overcome before it becomes mainstream.