Ecological Economics for the Anthropocene

ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS

Peter G. Brown and Peter Timmerman, editors

FOR THE

ANTHROPOCENE

AN EMERGING PARADIGM

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I n t ro d u ct i o n

The Unfinished Journey of Ecological Economics P ete r G . B r o w n a n d P ete r T i mme r ma n

1. T h e U n f i n i s h e d J o u r n e y

A specter is haunting the Earth—the living ghost of an economic theory that, no matter how much it is assaulted or how much damage it causes, refuses to die. The economic order that is based on the premises of this theory is grinding itself into the physical face of the planet. Many indicators suggest that we are witnessing a rapid decline in the richness of life processes, including accelerating climate change, increasing loss of natural diversity, changing and expanding disease vectors, and the spreading of an unsustainable growth and consumption model of what constitutes human well-being and happiness across the globe. The spectral nature of standard economics is reflected in its inability to halt, or even recognize, our seemingly inexorable movement toward some critical boundary conditions necessary for the flourishing of life on Earth.

Why does this economic order hold us so captive? Two important elements of the current economistic approach are often overlooked: (1) it not only provides a explanation of how markets, transactions, and so on

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function, but it also contains (in spite of its value-neutral rhetoric) a powerful ethical formulation of what it is to be a human being in search of well-being; and (2) at its heart is an abstract, ideal model—a set of quasiscientific claims about the operations of a social system. Apart from any other issues that these elements of economics may involve, they help protect it from proof or refutation. If the facts or dynamics of the actual system in operation are different, then either the facts are not yet captured by the ideal model or the human beings are being perverse or irrational, not living up to their designated role as rational agents.

Among the attempts to bring down this toxic mix of quasi-science and social psychology, ecological economics is perhaps the best equipped. In its short history, the main strength of ecological economics has been its focus on the shortcomings of the quasi-scientific model upon which standard economics has been based (Costanza 1991, 2003; Daly 2005; GeorgescuRoegen 1971, 1986). The model been shown to be based on ill-grounded nineteenth-century models and rhetoric concerning science and scientific processes (De Marchi 1993; Mirowski 1989, 1994; Nadeau 2006). These assumptions render it incapable of dealing with the actual physical dimensions of the situation that it is helping to spawn around the world. Because it dominates public policy and discourse alike, this model holds life’s prospects in a death grip.

The fundamental, original premise of ecological economics is to insist on seeing the human economy as embedded in and part of Earth’s biogeochemical systems. Energy, matter, entropy, and evolution, among others, have been neglected by standard economics. This neglect imperils the present and future well-being of humanity and the other creatures with whom we share Earth’s heritage and destiny. To be faithful to its fundamental insights, ecological economics must address this situation—first by developing this physical understanding and underpinning, then by drawing out its implications for human economic, social, and political experience in this critical moment in Earth’s history.

However, we believe that ecological economics has only just begun to consider the radical implications of its original promise—that its “journey is unfinished.” Part of what is unfinished is the consideration of how the new physical understanding and the human experience together demand some form of ethical foundation for their mutual enhancement. As mentioned, standard economics, in spite of its pretensions to being value

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neutral, in fact contains a wealth (or illth) of ethical assumptions and implications drawn from its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century underpinnings in emergent Western individualistic capitalism. Ecological economics has operated with many of the same assumptions as the model from which it is trying to get away.

This volume is an attempt to revisit, reconfigure, and challenge some of these assumptions. We begin with the working assumptions already in place in ecological economics concerning a more necessary and appropriate understanding of the relationships between economics and the earth’s biogeochemical processes. We use this as a beachhead in the unfolding battle for the heart and soul of Earth. Our particular point of entry is in developing the ethical, social, and normative foundations of ecological economics, which so far consist mainly of borrowings from the neoclassical dustbin.

This book forms a link between the new understandings of thermodynamics, evolutionary biology, cosmology, and ecology, as well as a better understanding of economics and its fundamental and operational constructs. In this sense, we want to explicitly broaden the mandate of ecological economics beyond its concern with scale, which is its centerpiece in the work of Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly. To accomplish this, we must understand the heterodox nature of ecological economics itself and the conflicting agendas that have emerged in its short history.

2. T h e T h r e e A g e n da s o f E co lo g i ca l E c o n o m i c s

In our view, ecological economics poses a simple but very broad question: what would economics entail if it rested on a worldview based on current science? Ecological economists have an existing agenda that requires making important adjustments to the frameworks of macroeconomics and public finance. These changes can be made while leaving the bulk of the frameworks of economics, in particular, and contemporary culture, in general, intact. This we call the explicit agenda.

At the same time, ecological economics can be thought of as something that is radically revolutionary, stronger, and more fundamental, offering a clarion call for a thorough rethinking of the human relationship with life and the world. This is accomplished simply by asking the same questions of many other disciplines that make up the edifice of contemporary

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thought in addition to economics. These disciplines or frameworks include law, governance, finance, ethics, and religion; like economics, each offers norms of conduct—they tell us what we should do. As we will see, we are in a situation of “all fall down,” as in the nursery rhyme. Like a row of dominos, once one of these structures falls, so do the others. This we call the implicit agenda.

Given the fulfillment of these agendas, a different and brighter prospect for life’s future comes into view. Scientific developments of the last two hundred years, particularly in the post–World War II period, have challenged mainstream Western culture’s assumptions about the place of humans on Earth and in the universe. Developments in evolutionary, organismal, and molecular biology; equilibrium and far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics; quantum theory; complex-systems science; astrophysics; cosmology; neuroscience; and certain branches of theology are just some of the elements of a new understanding of who we are, where we came from, and where we may be headed. The implications of this burgeoning narrative are profound and far-reaching for developments not only in science but also in economics, finance, law, governance/political science, religion, and ethics—in short, for all of human culture. This we call the reconstruction agenda.

2.1. The Explicit Agenda

With roots in the early-twentieth-century work of Frederick Soddy, ecological economics emerged in the 1980s as a seemingly natural and unthreatening subject of study. Much of its justification came from The Limits to Growth report (Meadows et al. 1972) and the work of Nicolas GeorgescuRoegen in the early 1970s (Georgescu-Roegen 1971). Drawing on the work of John Stuart Mill, Herman Daly’s Steady-State Economics (1977) provided further justification for the idea of placing limits on the economy. Ecological economics gained force at about the same time as the Brundtland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987) and seemed to accord well with the idea of sustainable development.

One could describe the explicit objectives of ecological economics as being concerned with three issues: scale, distribution, and efficiency. Scale refers to how the economy can be regarded as a subset of local and global biogeochemical processes (which both determine its content and set limits to its growth). Distribution or fairness is embodied in a commitment to

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sustainable development with both intra- and intergenerational dimensions (e.g., Müller 2007). Efficient allocation, the central goal of the neoclassical school, is retained. However, it must be constrained by the considerations of scale and equity. In addition, there is a methodological commitment to use material and energy flows in conceptualizing and measuring the performance of the economy.

Concerns with scale were important precursors in classical economics in the work of Thomas Malthus, and distribution is important in the works of David Ricardo and Karl Marx. Even in the 1950s, Richard Musgrave (1959) had included distribution as one of the key branches of public finance, along with stabilization and allocation. Thus, the emphasis on distribution within the frame of ecological economics offers adjustments to the neoclassical framework that are restorative (rather than revolutionary) of certain classical economic insights and concerns.

Indeed, it seemed to some ecological economists that some tools of the neoclassical model could be extended to assess the relationship between the economy and the natural world in which it is embedded. Many ecological economists thought they could retain the ethical perspective that underpinned the neoclassical model that they had rejected. One of the forms this takes is the movement to assign monetary values to ecosystem services.

This is, in a way, a turn back toward the neoclassical idea of internalizing externalities. It is thought by many, including these authors, to constitute a regrettable retreat to the subset of neoclassical economics known as environmental economics. It has served to blur the meaning of ecological economics, to hobble its mission, and even to endanger its existence. Partly for this reason, ecological economics is in danger of going extinct, although it might continue to exist in name only.

2.2. The Implicit Agenda

Taken at its word, ecological economics is radical compared to the status quo—yet it is an essential framework, especially given the current ecological crisis. It both is grounded in a scientific understanding of the world and also has the potential to guide the behavior of one of our principal normative structures (economics)—one that happens to be laying waste to the earth and that has a goal to digest the biosphere. As Robert Nadeau (2006) has convincingly argued, neoclassical economics is intrinsically

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incapable of addressing the crises it has created; it urges acceleration toward the precipice. Seeing this, the founders of ecological economics have issued a clarion call: abandon the fantasies of the neoclassical vision and live in the world as it is currently understood. To be consistent and visionary, we must take advantage of the insights of the current scientific revolution. This is apparent not only for economics but also for other disciplines founded on dated and unrevised metaphysical and prescientific visions. They may be thought of as orphans whose intellectual parents have perished while they live on.

Here is a preview of the sweep of the revolution: current conceptions of property, which assume boundaries and severability, underlie the law in many countries. Yet contemporary science emphasizes the interpenetrating character of Earth’s natural systems. The evolutionary worldview dethrones humanity and undercuts the presumption that human ownership is morally justified as a gift from God (Brown 2004; Cullinan 2011). “Ownership” is, at best, a diminished concept. Western liberal political systems rest on the idea that human actions can be independent of one another—an idea sharply at variance with the law of the conservation of matter and energy, which emphasizes that there are no actions that affect only the actor. Traffic jams in Dallas may affect the flooding of fields near Dakha. The gasoline burned in Dallas may deplete the supply and inflate the price of fossil fuels needed to produce the inexpensive fertilizers on which billions depend for their food supply. The world’s natural systems live under the shadow of the guillotine of finance. Being designated as the source of a lucrative commodity or an attractive “emerging market” can be a death sentence for forests and the flora and fauna within them, not to mention the peoples who have depended on them from time immemorial. However, leading finance textbooks do not contain a single word about the relationships between money and the fate of these forests and their peoples or of the imbalances in the carbon, nitrogen, and hydrological cycles, which are massively perturbed by money (Bodie and Merton 1998). Mammon appears to have escaped this world. Our ethics are the residue of the crumbled foundations of metaphysics past. For those who consider us to be free of these dusty encumbrances, a fantasy that one way of behaving is as good as another is espoused. The result is moral and conceptual chaos that eviscerates public discourse and blocks the development of the collective responses needed to avert catastrophe. Ironically, many of the “faithful” use their energies in

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quarrels of doctrine and retain and pronounce views that are sharply at variance with well-grounded empirical beliefs. Yet at the same time, strong leadership from the Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Baha’i, Quaker, and other faiths, as well as in the scientific community, is emerging to respond to the decline in life’s prospects. Certain movements emerging in these faiths are reasserting humanity’s place in the universe based on a modern scientific synthesis.

Simultaneously, these traditions and others are reconsidering our relationship to the rest of the ecological community with which we share the planet. Human beings need other species and beings to flourish independently of our needs, wishes, and desires. This has little or nothing to do with instrumental concepts, such as “ecosystem services”—it has to do with fundamental understandings of our place in Nature. Part of our need stems from what Wilson (1984) called “biophilia”—our long history with other species with their own worlds and autonomies (Kahn and Kellert 2002); part is due to what Louv (2005) called “nature-deficit disorder”—that we are ever more removed from nature and natural processes. However, more profoundly, animals inhabit other and different worlds from ours—they are “other” to us, even though we share genetic and environmental histories with them. We need to respect and assist in maintaining and enhancing their differences—communing with them in a “communion of subjects” (Berry 1999:82). Because of our current influence over the planetary ecosystems, our main aim should be to manage—and reduce—that influence so as to provide our fellow beings with their own room to live, breathe, flourish, and even die on their own terms. Instead, at the moment we appear to be heading for a planet where there will be little other than versions of ourselves and our goals grinning (or weeping) back at us as we survey the world about us.

2.3. The Reconstruction Agenda

Scientific understanding has advanced markedly in the twentieth century.

It provides a broad evolutionary narrative that Thomas Berry coined as the “New Story” (1999). From this vantage point, a sweeping agenda emerges for informing and shaping the human prospect as we recognize that we have entered the Anthropocene. The narratives from which we currently take our bearings are simply not true to our circumstances.

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The idea of freeing ourselves from nature, myth, and “the primitive” runs strong and deep in Western culture. Mainstream Western conceptions of ethics and metaphysics begin with ideas of separation. Humanity, created in the image of God, is different in kind than the rest of creation. The biblical account of humankind’s early acts sets us apart from God, which has contributed to the fall of humanity and nature alike. We are awarded dominion over a profane Earth. As Carolyn Merchant and Hugh Brody have independently pointed out, an imperative to transform Earth finds its roots in the idea that humanity must retake its rightful place in paradise (Brody 2000; Merchant 2013). Merchant argued that the quest for restoration to paradise forms an underlying narrative that has legitimated the global transformation of nature. This works hand in glove with the “divine mandate” to convert the non-Christian people of the world who are heathen by definition—a mandate that often resulted in the domination, enslavement, and extirpation of people and myriad other species (Pagden 2001).

The Greek tradition that forms the other main root of the Western tradition is a culture that, even before the time of Plato (424–348 bce), had wasted much of its own ecological base. Although Greek “primitive religion” had strong naturalist roots, the philosophical traditions stemming from it did not take their nourishment from them. These traditions have heavily influenced historical and contemporary mainstream Western culture. The traditional Greek hero is Ulysses, who outwitted the gods, outmaneuvered his primitive adversaries, and mastered his own temptations by being tied to the mast (Horkheimer and Adorno [1947] 2002). In this rationalist stream, humanity is regarded as inherently superior to the other animals. In the convergence of the biblical and Greek traditions, the world in which we live, move, and have our being is something to be owned and used, not loved and respected. Regardless, forms of naturalism still persisted on the margins of the dominant culture (Thomas 1996), at least until the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they continue in various forms in indigenous and even mainstream environmentalism—particularly in the legacy of John Muir. Despite the rebellions of movements such as romanticism, we continue to imagine a world in which we are the principal agents—masters of self and world alike.

For these reasons, the Western tradition (in its main manifestation) now struggles with difficulty to formulate an ethic of respect and relationship with the nonhuman world. These distant foundational trends set the stage

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for the scientific and technical revolutions of the last five centuries. These revolutions have radically transformed large parts of Earth’s surface and massively altered the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans. These trends enabled a vast expansion in human population and consumption that now overwhelm Earth’s biophysical life-support systems. We are embarked on a tragic course. More fateful still is our resistance to envisioning and articulating an alternative relationship with life and the world.

3. T h e P i vota l S i g n i f i ca n c e o f E co lo g i ca l E c o n o m i c s

“In for a penny, in for a pound” describes the situation of ecological economics. Once you insist that economics must be grounded in thermodynamics, you have ushered into the conversation the whole of contemporary science.

This is not to say that contemporary science is flawless, complete, final, or anything of the sort. Nor is it to say that deep mysteries do not remain, such as the nature of dark energy and matter, the relationship between quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, or even the nature of consciousness. However, it is to say that, at this point in history, scientific knowledge represents a converging synthesis built around the idea of evolution and complex-system theory (Kauffman 1995).

Here, for those of us who live in the “tower of Babel,” is an offer of salvation. Here is a rock on which the edifice of a civilization worthy of respect can be constructed. As Albert Schweitzer argued in Philosophy of Civilization, ethics is arbitrary unless grounded in a worldview—a theory of the universe and the human place in it (Schweitzer [1949] 1987). Contemporary science, subject to the limitations noted above, offers just this.

What this volume aims to do is to use this perspective to illuminate the ethical dimensions of ecological economics and to trace their implications for its theory and practice. It will turn out that the move to an ecological economics framework is fundamentally about justice and that accepting this implication will transform our relationship with life and the world.

The project upon which this volume is based thus seeks to extend and enrich ecological economics in four main directions. First, it proposes an analysis of what the most appropriate ethics or ethical systems might be for ecological economics in general, given our deteriorating situation with regard to the physical systems within which we are deeply embedded and upon which we are fully dependent, as well as the new understanding of

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nature and natural processes characteristic of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By “ethics,” we do not simply mean rules or norms for individual behavior; we include issues of environmental justice, ecological politics, and social concern more broadly. Three chapters make up this section. The first, by Peter Timmerman, is a lively and quick-moving overview of the myriad ways in which cosmology, culture, ethics, and exchange differ and intertwine. It is meant to loosen up the mind to enable escape from the conceit, attributed to Margaret Thatcher, that “there is no alternative” to the current standard model of economics. The second chapter, by Peter Brown, argues that the new understanding of the limits to knowledge and the nature of the embedded person requires an ethics grounded in respect and reciprocity. The third, by Richard Janda and Richard Lehun, seeks to reposition the centrality of our own pursuit of freedom. It insists on wider justice considerations that bear upon both our stewardship of the conditions for the possibility of life itself and the incontrovertible contemporary reality that each of our free choices impinges upon every other being.

Second, the project proposes to develop credible indicators of an ecological economy. Despite decades of work and controversy on the adequacy of indicators such as gross domestic product, the standard model of economics continues to use them—thus legitimating and masking the process of civilizational self-liquidation that is gathering increasing momentum. Rather than joining this conversation, we offer four chapters on measurement.

First, Mark Goldberg and Geoffrey Garver propose a methodological framework for the development of indicators relevant to ecological economics. This consists of five elements: contextual considerations, considerations of scale and dimension, considerations of scope, considerations of commensurability, and considerations of interacting systems in order to identify and target paths leading to the indicator. Second, Geoffrey Garver and Mark Goldberg address the ecological boundaries and related parameters of the space in which the human economy must function to avoid overshoot, injustice, and collapse in interdependent ecological, economic, and social systems. They set out the policy-oriented indicators that can accurately and reliably show the extent to which human enterprise respects those boundaries and parameters. In the third chapter on measurement, Mark Goldberg, Geoffrey Garver, and Nancy Mayo point out the difficulties in using the metaphor of health in judging the success of an economic system by stressing the many difficulties in defining the seemingly familiar

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idea of human health. The fourth and final chapter of the section, by Qi Feng Lin and James Fyles, explores two related changes in our current thinking on the relationship between humans and the environment that are crucial to successful measurement. The first is the idea of humans as being part of the ecosystem as opposed to the common assumption that humans are separate from it. The second is a reinterpretation of the concept of ecosystem health in view of this humans-in-ecosystem perspective.

Third, we consider the implications of ethical measurement considerations for both microeconomics and macroeconomics. At the macro level, Peter Victor and Tim Jackson argue that we are missing a convincing ecological macroeconomics—that is, a conceptual framework within which macroeconomic stability is consistent with the ecological limits of a finite planet. Despite promising developments in this direction (e.g., Jackson 2009; Victor 2008), there is an urgent need for a much more fully developed ecological macroeconomics to avert immanent and massive disaster.

In the second chapter of this part, Richard Janda argues that an ecologicaleconomics perspective requires the rethinking of individual behavior and corporate charters alike.

In the third chapter, Bruce Jennings critically scrutinizes received conceptions of liberty that are too individualistic and atomistic to realistically and rationally guide human norms and self-understanding in the coming era. He seeks to formulate an understanding of liberty that is consonant with the demands of the new era, the Anthropocene. Finally, Janice Harvey draws on two theoretical perspectives on how change could be facilitated. From a critical perspective, discourse theory holds that the process of institutional-cultural change is discursive and dialectical (Fairclough, Mulderrig, and Wodak 2011; van Dijk 2011). World-systems theory, on the other hand, reminds us that such social constructions occur within a unique historical context that either constrains or propels but ultimately shapes systemic change (Wallerstein 1999, 2004). The publication of this book is also a discursive event, but it occurs in a context of greater and greater appreciation that we are in a global crisis. While intended to help ecological economics on its journey, it aspires to change our relationship with life and the world by grounding our self-understanding in an evolutionary worldview. In this task, it joins an ever-expanding corpus of ecological discourse with similar aspirations. The objective of this chapter is to sketch how we could change course.

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Last, the project discusses how we can fashion a way forward toward a more fruitful path than the one that lies along the current fateful trajectory.

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