This is a reflection of how a lost little person (i.e., your truly) went through a paradigm change and then found purpose in Ecological Economics.
“Every saint has a past, and every sinner has future.”
~Mathew Kelly
My dissertation work was funded by the Southeast Climate Science and Adaptation Research Center—a DOI effort seated at NC State’s department of applied ecology. The motivation of my work was the threat posed by sea level rise on Cape Romain, a wildlife refuge in South Carolina. I defended my dissertation just a few days after two important occurrences for the global discussion around climate change action: (1) the release of the IPCC’s special report on the catastrophic consequences of a global warming of 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels, and (2) the award of the economics Nobel Prize (not a real prize, by the way) to William Nordhaus for his work on climate change to find the optimal carbon tax.
Independently, each of these events was significant in determining the pace, tone, and direction of the global governance discussion that had started with the Paris Agreement in 2015. But in tandem, they canceled each other’s message. In other words, these works were incompatible: while the IPCC report (which was written by hundreds of experts based on the work of thousands of scientists using super computers and the latest science to represent the effects of climate change) said the world would basically end if we reached 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels (and we are already at least 1C over), Nordhaus’ (garbage) model estimated that reaching 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels (and more) was better for the world economy. For a student of environmental economics who was a month away from receiving a PhD, this was a critical collision of worldviews that made my academic foundations collapse. Today, I am grateful for the anxiety it created because it quickly drove me to reconsider my personal and professional paradigms and led me to a belief system that is more consistent with what I knew was real about the world before I had gotten indoctrinated into the neoclassical economics framework.
When I tell my story of conversion, I compare environmental economic to ecological economics in the following manner: in environmental economics, Nature is a house. In ecological economics, Nature is a home: it’s a place of relationships, of complex connections, where all living things take care of each other and affect each other. Where nothing goes unnoticed and anyone’s actions at any point have an impact on the others, at some point.
By the time I defended my dissertation, I had already started to work as an economics researcher for The New Climate Economy—an ambitious initiative presided by academic authorities, such as Lord Nicholas Stern at LSE (who wrote the famous Stern Review in 2006)—that sought to bring academic and political support to the argument for active climate policy as means to advance a progressive, sustainable, community-centered agenda of prosperity. The NCE was an effort to shift dominant neoliberal paradigms by proposing a new model of economic development for the XXI century. A model driven by the need to address climate change, hence its name: The New Climate Economy.
During my first few months at NCE, I discovered ecological economics by accident (miracle?). In it, I found solace and hope for my role in the world as a professional. Since that discovery, I have grown fond of heterodox approaches to economics in general and I have become a non-apologetic critique of the conventional approach and its supporters. Pluralist Voices Matter.
Why is EE important?
The planetary emergency, which is the consequence of a 2-century-long model of colonial exploitative economic growth fueled by Western greed (which is now being aggravated by added Eastern avarice and excess), is the most pressing and important ecological, scientific, political, and humanitarian challenge of our time: it threatens the integrity our Earth’s systems and is already causing devastating impacts on our Human systems. As such, climate change should occupy a space in everyone’s minds. At least everyone who has some interest in other humans, other species, the planet, or the future.[1] However, the economics profession is contributing very little to this discussion.
A recent assessment finds that between 2000 and 2019, 71% of the top 300 economics journals have published under 1% on climate change, and 95% under 1% on natural capital, ecosystem services or biodiversity (NEB). Comparatively, 58 of the top 100 journals have published an equal or greater number of articles on marriage than climate change, and 85 of the top 100 journals have published an equal or greater number of articles on sports than NEB (Butler-Sloss and Beckmann, 2021).
Not all economists have ignored climate change. Those who have addressed climate change are divided between environmental economists who see it as a micro-economic issue and address it within the frame of neoclassical economics, and ecological economists who do not see it as a microeconomics allocation issue and do not address it within the frame of neoclassical economics but instead are drawn to what we call heterodox economics (the humbler kind of economics). Because the neoclassical approach is built on foundations that are embarrassingly disconnected to reality, if we want a credible voice that can inform environmental (and social) policy and global governance to come out of the economics discipline, we must turn our hope to the EE subfield.
What is EE? (a convert’s version)
EE relates economics, energy, and the environment. It is founded upon the concerns of the 1960’s and 1970’s for limits to growth, the study of the flow of energy and materials in the economy (i.e., incorporating the Laws of Thermodynamics into economics), and the re-definition of externalities as a structural piece inherent in modern economic activity (Spash and Asara, 2018). Essentially, EE explicitly recognizes the economy as embedded within a larger ecological system as opposed to being independent of the biophysical systems—upon which it is totally dependent.
What do ecological economists focus on?
Clive L. Spash (2013) separates EE contributors into 3 main camps based on their theoretical and ideological positions: (1) the new resource economists (NRE), (2) the new environmental pragmatists (NEP), and (3) the social ecological economics (SEE). Basically, the NRE are embedded within the free-market ideology and think that “getting prices right” is the way forward. Contributors in this camp tend to focus on including fancy ecosystem functions in traditional economic models that assume markets can deliver efficient and optimal resource use. In turn, NEP focus on pushing methods and concepts because they are deemed to be effective under current political conditions and economic institutions (that is, capitalism and neoliberalism). The NEP tend to buy into the methodology and ideology of quantifying and pricing nature. In doing so, they advance work on concepts such as natural accounting, valuation of ecosystem services, green accounting, carbon trading, and biodiversity offsets and banking.
Finally, researchers in the SEE camp aim to address fundamental flaws in the assumptions of orthodox economics for example by incorporating into their work system dynamics, complexity, and emergence considerations.[2] The most evident distinction between SEE and EE, is that SEE is mostly concerned about the policy consequences of its arguments and openly claims ethical positions rather than neutrality. SEE include the degrowth movement and those focusing on distributional concerns (e.g., the colonial model critique). I would say researchers in the eco-feminist economics and ecological Marxism fields are also part of the SEE.
What is missing and where should EE go?
“Ecology without class struggle is gardening.”
~ Chico Mendes
The mostly widely accepted desirable end in conventional economics is the satisfaction of preferences through market allocation. In contrast, before deciding how to allocate resources, EE assesses the desirable ends of economic activity (production, consumption, distribution), the nature of available resources required to achieve those ends, existing institutions, and human nature. Implications from EE analyses may include that resources are not necessarily better allocated through the market.
EE is also said to place economics in the context of philosophical themes that include limits to wealth creation, the meaning of the good life, how to achieve well-being individually and socially, ethics and behavior, the epistemology of value, and the psychological and social impact of ostentatious consumption (Spash and Asara, 2018). According to that definition of EE, I see two areas where the work put through by the discipline is failing to meet its definition:
- EE as a discipline has failed to adequately address the connection between ecology and society—within which economies are also imbedded. Environmental justice (EJ), wealth inequality, and DEI considerations should be forefront concerns of ecological economics. After all, the only way the few can consume beyond ecological limits is by taking away from the many. Ideas from feminist economics and ecological Marxism can be incorporated so that EE work has implications for global environmental governance—which are rooted on institutions that support global resource and power inequalities (e.g., colonialism, nationalism, and racism).
- Besides EJ being at the forefront, I think EE needs to be more assertive and vocal about recommending the type of human activity that can be sustained by planetary boundaries and not just the scale. In other words, much attention has been given to the need to limit the scale of global throughput (e.g., discussions of steady-state and degrowth—which I find tend to merely criticize technological optimists by focusing on our inability to decouple economic growth and resource consumption and on rebound effects—or Jevons’ Paradox), but the quality of materials being returned to the environment—that is the amount of waste being generated—should also be a central concern. After all, if all the resource inputs were traced to their corresponding pollution outputs, general equilibrium modeling would show how ALL prices in the economy are wrong in terms of efficiency because EVERYTHING would be associated with an environmental externality.
REFERENCES
Butler-Sloss, S and Beckmann M. (2021). Economics journals’ engagement in the planetary emergency: a misallocation of resources? Eocnomists for future. Available at: https://econ4future.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/economics-journals-engagement-in-the-planetary-emergency-v3.pdf
IPCC, 2018: Global warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty [V. Masson-Delmotte, P. Zhai, H. O. Pörtner, D. Roberts, J. Skea, P.R. Shukla, A. Pirani, W. Moufouma-Okia, C. Péan, R. Pidcock, S. Connors, J. B. R. Matthews, Y. Chen, X. Zhou, M. I. Gomis, E. Lonnoy, T. Maycock, M. Tignor, T. Waterfield (eds.)]. In Press.
Kelly, M. (2019). Rediscover the saints: twenty-five questions that will change your life. Blue Sparrow.
Spash, C. L., & Asara, V. (2017). Ecological economics: From nature to society. In Rethinking Economics (pp. 120-132). Routledge.
Spash, C. L., & Ryan, A. (2012). Economic schools of thought on the environment: investigating unity and division. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 36(5), 1091-1121. Stern, N., & Stern, N. H. (2007
[1] I am very passionate about this topic. Together with Salvi Asefi-Najafadaby, we have written extensively—and gotten published—on the inadequacy of neoclassical economics for addressing climate change. We have presented our work at graduate seminars at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and Boise State University. We even wrote a series of commentaries with the scandalous but click-baiting title “talking naked”.
[2] As I understand Spash (and he is hard to read), SEE expands EE in two accounts: (1) in differentiating reductionism from embeddedness (i.e., the implication is basically that we cannot every model the objective reality because just as biology cannot be understood from physics, human behavior cannot be understood from understanding human cells, and economic choices cannot be understood from understanding social patterns), and (2) by recognizing that economics as a social science is the study of humans by humans, SEE realizes that any explanation arising from economics is founded on a specific set of values and believes and is therefore always ethically and politically loaded.
laura villegas ortiz 