State of the planet

State of the planet 1

State of the planet 2


Poglej podatke iz The Global Environment Outlook (GEO)

Nature Inc.

Zanimivo, vendar vprašljivo. V US so se močvirja vseeeno zmanjšala, saj so jih delali tam, kjer je bila zemlja poceni, se pravi nekje daleč v naravnih območjih, ki niso bila primerna za močvirja, vodo so speljali tja od daleč, uničili naravni habitat ki je vladal tam prej, skratka, mnogo teh nadomestnih močvirij ni opravljalo svojih naravnih funkcij, zaradi katerih so pomembna. Tudi živali, povezane s takšnim specifičnim ekosistemom, se v mnogih primerih ne morejo prilagoditi na to okolje, na katerega niso prilagojene.

Podobno kot pri avtocestah v Sloveniji, saj mostovi za prehod divjadi vedno ne uspejo. Živali se enostavno ne navadijo nanje, populacijam se tako prekine njihove poti in stike, se pravi tudi parjenje.

Vsekakor zanimiv prispevek - vredno ogleda!!!!

KEEP STIRRING

Robert Lamb, producer of dev tv’s Nature Inc. on the background to the series.

“When I hear that a meteorite is on its way to obliterate humans, and give life on earth a chance to start over, I shall raise my glass,” the former British Labour Minister, Tony Banks told me in an interview shortly before he died. At least James Lovelock of Gaia fame says we have 20 years to go out and enjoy ourselves. His contention is that the juggernaut of climate change and species extinction is unstoppable…whatever we do.

Some scientists are, indeed, deeply pessimistic about our chances of keeping the living fabric of life sufficiently intact to avoid economic and social breakdown.

Take population. Our human numbers increase by 200,000 a day. The biggest growth by far takes place in the desperately poor places of our world. Poor people are – unwittingly – as destructive as the rich. A billion people – one in every six – depend directly on their environment for energy (wood or charcoal), water (from a river or a village well) and sustenance (soil and fish). These desperately poor people are living a lifestyle of self-immolation.

Add on predictions from serious quarters of a 4 per cent increase in global temperature and the loss of 150 species a day, and my goodness, the outlook is bleak.

Are we to be the locusts who gobble everything in sight and then perish? Where can the dramatic, ‘to scale’ change – impossible to attain according to those like Lovelock – come from?

Oddly enough, the dismal science, economics, might come to our collective rescue.

There is a new breed of economist beginning to be heard in serious places such as the World Bank.

Five years ago Professor Robert Costanza and his team at the University of Vermont priced the services that nature provides to the global economy at around US$33 trillion – at that time, more than the combined wealth of every economy on earth.

Costanza and the ‘eco-economists’ are criticised by those who believe that putting a price tag on ecosystem services is political correctness gone crazy. Others say it’s counterproductive to reduce nature to economic good – what do we do about the services that have no value?

Underestimating Nature

When I interviewed Costanza recently he told me the calculation is a serious underestimate. Nature’s services, he says, are a public good… “We do need to recognise they are valuable relative to a private good and if we don’t recognise that we over-exploit and deplete them to our social dis-benefit”.

In this view, we have left nature off the books. And some might argue that this is possibly the greatest white collar crime of the last century. But is it feasible to put a price on nature’s services? And if our way of assessing “wealth” embraces ecosystems and their services would it make any difference to the pace of environmental destruction?

That’s what we asked in the first series, of Nature Inc.

Bloom or bust

In our first programme we featured the honeybee and showed how utterly dependent the $2 billion Californian almond crop – source of 80% of the world’s almonds – is on the pollinator-in-chief. Its annual services to US agriculture alone are worth between US$15-20 billion. In 2006 a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder resulted in the desertion of 800,000 hives.

It’s happening in other parts of the world as well and scientists cannot pinpoint the cause. Heading an investigation into the disorder, Dr Gordon Wardell of the US Department of Agriculture concludes it is our love-fest with intensive agriculture that has pushed the bees too far “Like people, they thrive on diversity” says Wardell.

It’s not just bees. All kinds of pest devourers and seed spreaders like frogs and bats contribute trillions of dollars to the world economy.

A whole programme was given over to the devastating impact of alien species such as the cane toad in Australia or the Burmese python in the USA. One assessment is that the damage caused by alien species costs the global economy US$1.4 trillion every year.

Another story featured the victimised fruit bat in West Africa. In Ghana it finds refuge from the bush meat hunters in military barracks. And yet the Shea tree which yields the butter for chocolate and cosmetics needs the bats to spread its seeds.

So what is the value of the fruit bat to Ghana? No-one has worked it out, but it’s more that the 60 cents it costs to buy a roasted one in the markets of Accra.


Shrimps vs Mangroves

At present most governments deliver projections of wealth where an oil spill would show up as generating wealth (the extra economic activity of salvage, chemicals, over-time etc). But the damage to the local marine ecosystem just doesn’t appear. Nature has no value, in this method of calculation.

Imagine that you are a manager for a Pension Fund. Imagine, too, there is an investment opportunity to turn a slice of mangrove swamp into an industrial shrimp farm that will, over ten years, bring in a handsome profit. The swamp brings in nothing. You will invest in shrimps. Meanwhile the country has lost a valuable fish nursery, a barrier against hurricanes and sea level rise and a biodiversity pool.

A comparative study in Thailand found that shrimps were worth $5.443 per hectare, meanwhile the true value to society of the mangrove was $35,696 per hectare.

Multiplied a million times a day, eco-economists argue that investing short instead of long is what is at the base of the planetary green asset stripping.

Green shoots

So should we be welcoming that meteorite or whooping it up until the green doomsday?

Perhaps not, not yet at any rate. There are some green shoots out there.

Real change, several contributors argued, has to come to come from governments pressured by the public. The final episode of Nature Inc underlined this, showing that governments are crucial in creating markets for environmental assets such as wetlands.

Most of us may not want new laws or taxes, but we can use our voting power to push for change for long-term common good, of the not-so-painful, politically acceptable variety. Cap and trade; bio-credits; paying directly for ecosystem services; trusts that enable private investment for public good. These are all being tried out. And we reported on the ups and downs of the new approaches.

In Costa Rica the government pays farmers to conserve or replant forests rather than use land for cattle and maize, with income from freshwater users such as breweries or HEP dams. It’s an environmental policy that safeguards water supply, biodiversity and tourism.
In our edition on the economic return on preserving watersheds, we found that New York has one of the cheapest and cleanest water supplies in the USA because in the 1970s it was decided to keep the Catskill mountains undeveloped.

Other countries – Norway and Canada for instance – are making serious attempts to reassess the way they measure national wealth, to include ecosystem services.
Wanted: New Stories.

I started making environmental films in the 1980s. Then we had no problem in finding sceptics to balance programme output. Many so-called “environmentalists” were angered that a film on environmental issues would not take the orthodox green line. The big difference nowadays, is that its next to impossible to find any established economises or scientists or even businessmen who will not agree that the planet is being asset-stripped at a truly alarming rate.

There is new green thinking out there and some of it is grappling with pricing renewable assets. As such we felt it was a legitimate new area to take as an organising theme for the new series.

We had an overwhelmingly positive reaction to the first series, but there were a small minority who wrote in to say they hated the premise of the whole series. That’s good, we want to foster discussion in Nature Inc. which is why we are encouraging viewers to contribute ideas for the next series.

In the opening programme, Professor Bob Watson, chief scientific adviser to the UK’s environment ministry pretty much dismissed Dr Co stanza’s calculations but added that what he had done was stirred up a debate about an important issue. And that’s we intend to do – to keep stirring up by giving airtime to the best scientific and economic sources we can find.

Channel 4 - Edward Goldsmith - Green Revolutionary

part 1



part 2





A Blueprint for Survival was published in January 1972, occupying all of The Ecologist Vol. 2 No.1, in advance of the world's first ever Environment Summit: the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm. So great was demand for the Blueprint that its was subsequently republished in paperback by Penguin books on 14 September 1972.

Pošteno, zdaj gre zares - Green Bible

Citation from "Environmental Ethics: the main approaches (Sigrid Sterckx):

According to some commentators, our exploitative and destructive attitude towards nature originates in an ‘anthropocentric’ attitude, widespread in Western societies. Hence, they argue, we need a fundamentally new ethic (or some even say a new religion) in order to introduce a new way of interacting with nature. This view can be labelled an ‘idealistic’ approach to the origin of the environmental problem and its potential solution(s).
Others defend a ‘materialistic’ approach. They argue that science, technology and capitalism, rather than cultural factors, are the major causes of the undesirable developments we are witnessing. They do not deny the importance of cultural factors, but consider them as consequences rather than causes. An example of a materialistic approach will be discussed in the next section.

In his famous article The historical roots of our ecologic crisis, the historian Lynn White argues that Christianity bears a heavy responsibility for the environmental crisis because it has promoted the domination of nature. White is representative of the abovementioned ‘idealistic’ approach. He assumes that all species disturb their environment (and have done so in the past), but notes that since the 19th and 20th centuries, something fundamentally new has been occurring: a world-wide destruction of nature. The proximate cause of this development, according to White, is the interaction of modern science with technology in the 19th century.
But the origin and development of science and, particularly, technology, have been
determined by a specific pattern of values, which he calls the typically Christian ‘arrogant’ attitude towards nature. White asserts that this arrogance is the result of a particular view of the relation between God, man and nature
a view typified by the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible.


"And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth. And the fear of you, and the dread of you, shall be upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. (Genesis, 9, 1-2)".


In Genesis, the earth is neither sacred nor divine. Earth is merely a creation, and so is man, but he is made in the image of God. It is not nature that is holy, but Man, to the extent he resembles the Maker. In this creation, Man is central and dominates the animals. Through this conception, White argues, constraints on intervening in nature – which are typical, for instance, of the animistic religions – are removed and, Man is encouraged to exploit nature. Christendom is said to be the most ‘anthropocentric’ religion in the world. In White’s view we need a fundamentally new cultural attitude:


"More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one … We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man."


The importance of White’s paper can hardly be overestimated. His main thesis regarding the impact of value-systems on our interaction with nature has been taken over by many environmental ethicists, particularly by representatives of the so-called ‘deep ecology’ movement. White’s claim that our attitude towards nature is determined primarily by religion stimulated the interest in searching for alternative religions, including a search within Christianity
for a new and more ‘environment-friendly’ interpretation of the Bible.

Lewis Moncrief wrote a reply to White (also in Science), entitled “The cultural basis of our environmental crisis”.He observed that cultures which have not been influenced by the Judaeo- Christian attitude also had, and increasingly have, a destructive impact on the environment. The only decisive factor seems to be that modern science and technology developed in the West. However, this fact may be unrelated to the Christian attitude towards nature. According to Moncrief, the real explanation can be found in political and socio-economic developments
primarily the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution.

John Passmore presented yet another vision in his book Man's Responsibility to Nature
(1974), one of the earliest major books on environmental ethics. He justly remarks that for a correct understanding of the West, one must take into account the two important inspirational sources of this culture, namely, the Judaeo-Christian and the Greek. The fact that nature has no sacred status in the Old Testament is not sufficient, according to Passmore, to explain the exploitative attitude with respect to nature. He believes that the clearly anthropocentric character of Christendom is co-determined by the influence of Stoicism. In the Stoic philosophy, Man is the only rational creature and the ultimate goal of nature. All other creatures are at Man’s service.
However, two interpretations remain possible. The first is that God has created nature for the sake of Man, and hence everything in nature is as it should be. The other interpretation emphasizes the creativity of Man – here Man is seen as a creature that intervenes in nature and ‘cultivates’ it through technical interventions. This view gained grounds in Western Christianity during the 17th century. It was shared, inter alia, by people like Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes and Robert Boyle.

Passmore’s contribution to the debate is not limited to comments on White’s thesis. He mentions the tradition of ‘man as despot’, which he considers to be the ‘Graeco-Christian’ arrogance, but he also refers to a minority opinion about ‘stewardship’, which dates back to the post-Platonic philosophers. This current of thought, however small it was in the West, gave rise to two traditions:


"The first is, in feeling, conservationist. It emphasizes the need to conserve the earth's fertility, by culling and pruning and good management. The second is rather bolder: it looks to the perfection of nature by man, but a perfection which always takes account of nature’s own resources and of what man has already achieved in his civilising of the world."


Passmore favours the notion of stewardship to that of a despotic attitude towards nature; he suggests a few minor revolutions in science, such as more interdisciplinary research and more respect for scientists working outside laboratories. As to the political and socio-economic problems related to the necessity of reducing economic growth, he has no clear solution.

Robin Attfield, in his book The Ethics of environmental Concern (1983),11 claims that
Christianity is much richer than authors like White and Passmore presume. In his view, there is no need for a fundamentally new ethics as our traditions are sufficiently rich to teach us “that all worthwhile life is of intrinsic value”. According to Attfield, the ecological problem is basically a problem of exponential growth. Judaeo-Christian views cannot be blamed for this phenomenon:
its cause is rather a more recent tradition, the belief in progress:


"[R]ather than the beliefs of Judaism and Christianity, the attitude in large measure responsible for environmental degradation in East and West has been the belief in perennial material progress inherited from the Enlightenment and the German metaphysicians, as modified in the West by classical economists and sociologists, by liberal individualism and social Darwinism, and in Eastern Europe by the unquestioned deference to Marx and Engels."


Attfield’s view on the impact of Christian teachings is that:

"There has been a strong tradition in Europe and lands of European settlement, a tradition of Judeo-Christian origins but not confined to adherents of Judaism and Christianity, of belief that people are the stewards of the earth and responsible for its conservation, for its lasting improvement, and also for the care of our fellow creatures, its non-human inhabitants."

Source: http://www2.agrocampus-ouest.fr/scripts/fr/bioethique/pdf2007/52EN.pdf

Encyclopedia of life support systems EOLSS and Encyclopedia of Earth

"A life support system is any natural or human-engineered (constructed or made) system that furthers the life of the biosphere in a sustainable fashion. The fundamental attribute of life support systems is that together they provide all of the sustainable needs required for continuance of life. These needs go far beyond biological requirements. Thus life support systems encompass natural environmental systems as well as ancillary social systems required to foster societal harmony, safety, nutrition, medical care, economic standards, and the development of new technology. The one common thread in all of these systems is that they operate in partnership with the conservation of global natural resources."

Encyclopedia of Earth, a new electronic reference about the Earth, its natural environments, and their interaction with society. The Encyclopedia is a free, fully searchable collection of articles written by scholars, professionals, educators, and experts who collaborate and review each other's work. The articles are written in non-technical language and will be useful to students, educators, scholars, professionals, as well as to the general public.

Geld frisst Welt

Zanimiva radijska oddaja ORF o finančnem sistemu in denarju.

In o CC

Interview with Andreas Exner

DARWIN ONLINE

http://darwin-online.org.uk/

Watch evolution online: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/program.html

or http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/

A collection of historic and modern biology books

or try new advances in biology - Faculty of 1000

The Darwin Project

Joshua Farley - ekološka ekonomija

Ecological Economics: An Interview with Joshua Farley


Joshua Farley is a professor at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics home of the original $33 trillion estimate for ecosystem service value. Joshua co-authored the recent textbook Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications,which reconceptualizes economics with a few key new axioms: ecosystem and resource limits, distribution issues, and broader definitions of human well-being. He's in the vanguard of a growing movement to get economics right - with sustainability and human well-being as core principles.

Hassan Masum: Josh, thanks for agreeing to do this interview. 'Ecological Economics' sounds like an odd combination the first time one hears it. What exactly is Ecological Economics, and why is it important?

Joshua Farley: Ecological economics has been defined as the science and management of sustainability. There are lots of things that distinguish ecological economics from more conventional approaches to economics. First, ecological economists assume the human economic system is a subset of the sustaining and containing global ecosystem. The laws of thermodynamics tell us that matter-energy cannot be created or destroyed. This means that everything the economic system produces must come from the raw materials provided by nature.

The same laws tell us that entropy increases in an isolated system, and an energy differential is required to perform work. From the perspective of economics, entropy can be thought of as disorder, or uselessness. This means that all economic production uses high quality energy, which is used up and returned to the ecosystem as waste. In fact, everything the economic system produces ultimately returns to the ecosystem as waste. Humans, like all biological organisms, depend for their survival on the goods and services provided by healthy ecosystems. When we extract raw materials from nature to make things and we spew waste back, we degrade the life support functions of the planet’s ecosystems.

All economic production bears an opportunity cost measured in the loss or degradation of ecological life support functions and other ecosystem services. Unique among the planet’s species, humans have the capacity to irreversibly degrade these life support functions. Ecological economists assume a moral obligation to future generations and other species. The first task of an ecological economist is therefore to make sure that the physical size of the economic system — the rate at which it takes resources from the ecosystem and spews them back as waste — never exceeds the capacity of the ecosystem to sustain it.

The economy can’t grow for ever. If the economy can’t keep growing indefinitely, then the solution to poverty is not simply more growth. It makes no sense to care about the well-being of future generations not yet born and not care about those around today. The second task of an ecological economist is therefore to pursue a more just distribution of resources. Ecological economists also care about economic efficiency, but sustainable scale and just distribution take precedence.

Second, ecological economists assume we live in a world of extreme complexity and uncertainty that is constantly changing, and the economic system must also change in response. As our society evolved from hunter-gatherers to farmers to industrialists, our economic systems changed as well, and they continue to change. Ecosystems respond to change through unpredictable evolutionary processes. Economic systems develop unpredictable new technologies, then change in fundamental ways in response to those technologies. Human behavior evolves as cultures evolve. Both evolutionary and technological changes are unpredictable.

Ecosystem goods and services used to be extremely abundant relative to human made objects. If we want more fish on our dinner plates, the scarce factor of production is fish, not fishing boats. If we want more timber, the scarce factor is trees, not sawmills. Some of the most important issues we face today are climate change, biodiversity loss, ozone depletion and other environmental problems that are completely ignored by market forces. Our economic system has to evolve to respond to these new scarcities. Nobody could have predicted these problems two hundred years ago when market economies were first evolving, yet addressing them has become the key to our survival.

Third, ecological economics is explicitly transdisciplinary. Economics is the allocation of scarce resources among alternative desirable ends. Defining the desirable ends requires insights from ethics, philosophy, religion and psychology at the very least. Understanding the nature of the scarce resources requires insights from physics, chemistry, biology and ecology. Figuring out how to allocate requires insights from economics, sociology, political science and psychology. Disciplines impose narrow blinders that keep us from seeing the problem as a whole. This doesn’t mean that ecological economists must master a variety of disciplines, but rather that they learn to communicate and synthesize across disciplines.

The dominant economic paradigm strives for ever-increasing economic growth. Not only is this impossible on a finite planet, but growing evidence suggests that beyond a certain point, more material consumption does nothing to make us better off. Ecological economists seek to adapt our economic system to the increasing scarcity of ecosystem goods and services in order to create a more sustainable and desirable future.

HM: That's an impressive list of goals, which will be a challenge to live up to. You outline the necessity for our economic system to evolve in response to new scarcities - how do you see this evolution happening? What's an example where ideas from ecological economics have been successfully adopted?

JF: Living up to these goals may be a challenge, but if we fail to live up to them, we face insurmountable challenges - if the global economic system continues to grow and encroach upon the global ecosystem that sustains it, both will collapse. Fortunately, in many important areas, the economics system is already evolving to meet these challenges, though as of yet not as quickly as it needs to. Take the cap and trade policy on sulfur dioxide in the US as an example. Sulfur dioxide is emitted by coal fired power plants and other industries. In the US, we capped the amount of sulfur dioxide that industries are allowed to produce. Though the cap may be higher than many of us would like, at least in principle it follows the ecological economic rule of limiting the amount of waste emissions to a quantity that can be safely absorbed by our ecosystem.

The right to pollute was then distributed to the existing polluters, who were allowed to trade the permits. Markets in permits help minimize the financial costs of meeting pollution targets. The policy follows the ecological economic approach of scale first, distribution second and efficiency third. The policy was actually designed by conventional economists, which is why it perversely rewarded those industries that polluted the most. Ecological economists would favor a more just distribution - for example, auctioning off the right to pollute to industries, then using the revenue to replace regressive taxes. For cap and trade policies to be truly just, they must also prevent the concentration of pollutants in Žhot spotsŽ. The basic approach is a good one, however, and can be applied to resource extraction as well as to pollution.

Perhaps the biggest challenge we face is how to deal with complex systems. We don't really know what impacts our activities have on ecosystems, and when decisions are urgent and stakes are high, we rarely have the time or resources to make sure of our facts before we act. Because uncertainty affects future generations, we always confront the ethical issues of our obligations to future generations, so facts aren't enough anyway. We have to make the best choices we can under these circumstances, and avoid irreversible outcomes that will limit our future options.

As an example, we did a workshop/field-course a couple years ago looking at the conversion of mangrove ecosystems to shrimp aquaculture. We did a case study of a site on Palawan Island in the Philippines where mangroves were being illegally cleared as we worked, so decisions were urgent. Few studies had been done in the region, so facts were highly uncertain. The local villagers depended on the mangrove ecosystem to sustain their fisheries, protect their communities against storms, absorb silt and wastes washing the land that would otherwise damage the offshore coral reefs and so on, so stakes were high.

Ecological economists and scientists from various disciplines worked closely with several NGOs, the local government and local community members to learn as much as we could about the local system in the time available. We supplemented this information with scientific studies done in other locations. Guided by our NGO partners (Earth Economics in particular) we presented our findings on the potential ecological, economic and social impacts to the local government and the press.

The local Mayor, Edward Hagedorn, decided that the mangrove deforestation must be stopped before it caused irreversible damage. He not only got permission from the federal government to halt the deforestation, but helped organize the local community to actually tear down the existing dikes. Once people are presented with a bigger picture, integrating both ecological and economic issues, solutions are often obvious.

Unfortunately, universities too often teach people to focus on only one side of a problem, leading to distorted analyses. One way we're trying to advance ecological economics is by changing the way students learn and think. Many ecological economists therefore design transdisciplinary, transinstitutional courses that focus on real life problems, with real life constraints. We have a long ways to go before we accomplish our goals, but when the world finally recognizes that our economic system depends on a healthy ecosystem, we'll be ready with the necessary policies.

HM: Let's explore the question of education. As a university professor and author of the textbook 'Ecological Economics', you have experience on the ground in 'changing the way students learn and think'. How do students react to the broader ecological approach to economics? And what methods have you found to be effective outside academia, e.g. in talking to policy-makers and the public?

JF: In my experience, students react very favourably to ecological economics, especially those students who have some background in the natural sciences or in environmental studies. Occasionally I do find some resistance to the ideas from students who have background in neoclassical economics, but in compensation, when these students do come around, they really seem to get it.

I find more resistance to the methods I use to teach ecological economics. When I learned neoclassical economics, it was taught as revealed wisdom, with no historical context, and with no discussion of the obvious shortcomings of the discipline. I hated that approach - it doesn't teach students to think for themselves. I always tell students that I don't know all the answers, and no economist does. Other professors teach neoclassical economics, and both approaches can't be entirely correct.

I like to teach the theory and have students work with a community partner on some real life problem to which they can apply that theory. If the theory helps them understand the problem they are working on and provide solid solutions, they learn the material better, and have some empirical support for the theory. If instead what they learn from a real life problem contradicts the theory, then they learn the theories are inadequate and must be improved - and it's their job to improve them. That's the scientific method.

The problem is that it's a lot more challenging to apply theories then it is just to memorize and regurgitate. Lots of students are used to being spoon fed, and hate problems with a more applied approach that exposes them to messy, complex real life situations. By the mid-point in a typical semester, most students are intensely frustrated as they try to get their minds around the problem and think about how they can make a meaningful contribution to solving it. They complain if I can't tell them the answers, but I point out that none of them will ever have a job where the boss knows all the answers. Fortunately, by the end of the semester most of the students have made some real progress, and appreciate the approach I use.

I still don't have as much experience as I would like talking to policy makers and the general public, but in the experience I do have, I find the best approach is just to speak in clear, straightforward language anyone can understand. If I canŽt explain something clearly, it's probably because I don't understand it well enough myself. I certainly won't be able to convince policy makers to pay attention to what I have to say if they can't understand it.

I think a lot of economists use jargon and language that no one but other economists can really understand. The reason I got a PhD in neoclassical economics was so that I could understand that language, and when I did, I learned that much of what was being said made no sense at all. It's actually a lot easier to explain ecological economics to the general public than it is to explain neoclassical economics precisely because it's solidly grounded in the laws of physics and ecology, is explicit about its ethical assumptions, and shares those ethical assumptions with the majority of society.

HM: Thanks for the insight! Bringing our economic theories into harmony with broadly-accepted ethical assumptions is a challenge for all of us.

This suggests a final question: what would you like to see replace GDP in policy-making and public discourse? As a de facto proxy for progress, it is deeply flawed, since it doesn't account for externalities, many components of human welfare, and so forth. But wouldn't "green GDP" get into tremendously complex and uncertain calculations in, for example, accounting for ecosystem services?

Maybe GDP isn't even the right mental model to use. If not, then what alternate or complementary system(s) would you like to see implemented, that would measure sustainable progress yet be simple enough to be commonly referred to in the media and everyday discussions?

JF: GDP is actually even more absurd than most people think, as it uses economic values in ways they were not meant to be used. The price of something is its value at the margin, the value of one more unit. This is why diamonds are extremely valuable while water is cheap. It doesn’t really make sense to multiply the price (marginal value) of something by total quantity to get total value.

For any resource that is essential and has few substitutes, such as food and energy, when the amount available falls by 10%, the price rises by more than 10% - the less we have, the more GDP grows, and vice versa! This is why Exxon made more profits this year than any corporation in history, not because they produced more oil, but because they produced less. When economists forget this, they draw absurd conclusions. Take for example the recent Nobel prize winner in economics, Thomas Schelling, who says that global warming won’t harm the US much since it will mainly affect agriculture, and agriculture only accounts for 3% of our GDP! When you measure everything in dollars, one dollar is as good as another — better computers are a substitute for food.

Fortunately the various Green GDP measures don’t make such a stupid mistake. Rather than trying to add in the total value of ecosystem goods and services, they subtract the value of what we degrade or use up. This is appropriate, since what we use in one year is more or less a marginal value. The Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare and the Genuine Progress Indicator include other factors on top of this, such as income distribution, non-marketed labor, and leisure time, but the base of all of these is still GNP, so more is always better.

What we really want is a measure of Quality of Life, not consumption. Almost by definition, quantifying quality of life represents a real challenge. We have proposed a measure of quality of life that includes subjective estimates of well-being (basically just surveys asking people how satisfied they are with their lives) as well as objective measures of opportunities available for satisfying the entire range of human needs. Drawing on the work of Manfred Max-Neef, we have proposed a list of human needs that are stable across time and cultures, including subsistence, reproduction, security, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, spirituality, creativity/emotional expression, identity and freedom.

To satisfy these needs, we need much more than just economic output — we also need the goods and services provided by healthy ecosystems, healthy social relationships and healthy minds and bodies, which we refer to as natural, social and human capitals. We also believe our real human needs are satiable. The reason people believe our demand for consumer goods is insatiable is because we use consumer goods to try and satisfy needs they are not capable of satisfying.

While it is a serious challenge to come up with some quantifiable index of human need satisfaction and subjective well-being, an imprecise measure of the right goals is much better than a highly precise measure of the wrong ones. Just thinking about how to measure the right things will get us thinking carefully about how to provide them. For simplicity, we could refer to the measure as gross national happiness, which they use in Bhutan, or something similar.

As long as we continue to accept ever increasing material consumption as the central goal of society and pursue it blindly, oblivious to ecological, social and human costs, we are unlikely to improve our quality of life. Even in countries like India, where increasing levels of material consumption remains extremely important, states like Kerala show that society can do a much better job of meeting human needs with the resources already available.

The problem is that people obsessed with consumption look at all talk of sustainability as a sacrifice. In reality, those of us in the richest countries are sacrificing our quality of life on the altar of ever-increasing consumption, and through the ecological costs this consumption imposes, we are sacrificing the well-being of the rest of the world as well. What we need to do is develop a positive, shared vision of what life would look like in a more sustainable and just world. Sustainability and just distribution does not require sacrifice — in reality it is the only path available to a better quality of life for us all.

Source: WorldChanging


interesting links: Biodiversity economics

EVRI

The solutions journal