PETER G. BROWN
We might summarize our present human situation by the simple statement: In the 20th century, the glory of the human has become the desolation of the Earth. And now, the desolation of the Earth is becoming the destiny of the human. From here on, the primary judgment of all human institutions, professions, and programs and activities will be determined by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore or foster a mutually enhancing human–Earth relationship.
—Thomas Berry
In this chapter, I offer an attempt to start over by regrounding our moral and metaphysical beliefs in a scientific understanding of the world—and more particularly in how we understand the person and the nature of our knowledge. Ethical systems typically have at least five features, which may be weighted and function very differently: a foundation or justification, premises, structured principles or rules, virtues, and a guiding metaphor or ethos.
1. FOUNDATIONS
As with most Western ethical traditions, I ground my argument in an affirmation of human life; however, I place the understanding of what life is in a broader and deeper context. Beyond this, I want to both affirm and deeply question the emancipation project—the drive, initially articulated in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that we can practically and legitimately free ourselves from nature, use “lesser” people as we wish for our own purposes, and alter the nature of the human self to fit the desires of the powerful (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002). This concept found fertile soil in antecedents in Western culture, such as the idea of a chosen people from the Hebrew Bible, the idea that humans are different in kind from all other life-forms found in both Judeo-Christian and Greek sources, and the suggestions in Platonic texts such as The Republic and Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics that the human self should be designed to serve the overall needs of the society as perceived by the wise and well educated.
I suggest that we should regard the emancipation project as a source of great insight and liberation, as well as the justification for an enormous, unjust, and perhaps fatal hubris. This hubris has legitimated the enslavement and extirpation of the many of the world’s peoples, decimated natural living and nonliving systems (which took billions of years to evolve), and ultimately enslaved ourselves to a false conception of who we are.
Fortunately, contemporary science offers a fresh starting point for rethinking our relationship with life and the world. In the last two centuries, but particularly since World War II, we have made monumental advances in understanding the universe and our place in it. At the same time, deep mysteries remain, such as the nature of dark matter, which composes a substantial portion of the universe; how things at the quantum level relate to macro phenomena, as described by the laws of special and general relativity; and the like. Nevertheless, at this time in history, we are positioned to ask these very simple questions: what is life, and what makes it possible? In the twentieth century, more light was shed on these questions, beginning with Erwin Schrödinger’s seminal essay published in 1945, entitled “What is Life?” Schrödinger placed the questions within the domain of physics—more particularly, within the current understanding of thermodynamics. He gave humanity the stepping stones for solving one of the great scientific puzzles of the twentieth century: how do far-from-equilibrium systems, like living organisms, begin and then maintain themselves in an entropic universe? Schrödinger (1945), Prigogine (1968), Schneider and Kay (1995), and others were able to both answer this question and connect the answer to the origins and evolution of the universe, as they are now widely, but not universally accepted in the scientific literature.
If one is to respect life and its flourishing, one must respect what makes life possible. The universe as a whole, the planet, and the other life-forms with which humans have coevolved should be respected. Unsurprisingly, this mindset may lead one to the conclusions of many of the world’s religions (although the deep dualism of these—particularly the Judaic, Christian, and Muslim traditions—have also led us astray). Today’s human world, and the economic forces that drive it, are made possible by physical forces that also dwarf us—and which we see, to our peril, as something different than us. The universe has a beauty and majesty that we can only glimpse. The human mind and spirit are integral parts of this vast system; we can experience this oneness if we can escape the dictatorship of the ego—a common goal of religious teachings and meditations. Scientific research has confirmed that we live in a world of continuous creation, where a young universe is constantly developing new properties and possibilities. The universe is, in a sense, learning as we are. Failing to respect these realities is foolish: it diminishes each of us and undercuts the flourishing of life.
Three questions are essential to answer if we are to construct a sane and safe future for ourselves and the other life-forms with which we share heritage and destiny:
1. What is the nature of the person?
2. What do we know about what we know?
3. What should we do and not do?
The answers to these questions are intertwined. As they emerge, they will constitute the tissue of a new understanding of our relationship with life and the world.
This chapter is a preliminary attempt to set the moral foundations of this emerging understanding by exposing some of the premises on which ecological economics must rest. I then trace how this understanding may develop the other four elements of the ethical underpinnings of the discipline: premises, principles or rules, virtues, and an overall ethos.
1.1. What Is the Nature of the Person?
The concept of the person has to be one of the cornerstones of ecological economics. The “rational person,” who coolly seeks to maximize his or her own interests and assumes everyone else does the same, is a cornerstone of neoclassical economics. This mythological figure has been repeatedly challenged over the years, most recently by behavioral economics and psychology, although there has been only limited success in changing mainstream thinking. This conception of the person is a partial mixture of rationality (as conceived during the Enlightenment) and the hedonism of thinkers such as Bentham and Mill. In its neoclassical version, this idea contains an individualistic notion of “the good,” where notions of compassion and empathy, as well as community and connections, have largely been stripped away. In its place is a self-interested consumer who is engaged in choosing among alternative goods that satisfy personal preferences, no matter how fleeting or unconsidered, under conditions of scarcity.
1.1.1. The embedded permeable person
The continued findings from evolutionary biology, cognitive science, quantum physics, and systems theory will assist us in answering the questions of who humans are and to what we can aspire. Quantum physics, for example, provides a different conception of the human self than that found in neoclassical economics. Because events at the quantum level cannot be directly perceived by the human senses, we are not normally aware that all physical reality emerges through the interaction of fields and quanta. However, from the perspective of our most advanced scientific knowledge, this is the grounds for our existence in physical reality. As Robert Nadeau put it, the part we call “self” emerges from and is embedded in a seamless web of activity that is the entire cosmos; any sense we have of being separate or disconnected from this ground of being is an illusion that is not in accord with the actual character of physical reality (Nadeau 2013).
Systems theory tells us there are no individuals as the concept is normally understood; human beings live in complex, interlocking environments with other life-forms, which overlap with one another (Wheeler 2006). We live in a world swarming with hitchhikers and symbionts, such as bacteria and viruses. Most of this activity is well below the level of consciousness. These systems influence and, at times, dictate our behavior. For example, our immune system identifies and re-identifies what is us and what is not us at every moment. From the perspective of contemporary systems science, the human self is highly sensitive to initial conditions, subject to multiple feedback loops, and given to wide variation in subjective/behavioral outcomes. For example, a huge variety of factors—the weather, a sudden collision with another life-form, an indisposition—can change our course of action. We are relational and permeable with respect to energy and matter. We live in a world of shared semiotic meanings. Conscious reasoning is not the primary motivator of our actions—and a great deal of what we think is our knowledge is tacit and creaturely. The self is emergent in, and entangled by, the brain, body, environment, culture, and cosmos.1 If we understood from the beginning that the human self is fully embedded, our policies with respect to toxins, for example, might be very different. We would not necessarily regard the world as something to be exploited, but rather as part of who we are. In our culture, how we think of the self largely blocks the understanding of our embeddedness in the biophysical world.
1.1.2. How the market manufactures the person
Once we recognize the inherently embedded character of the human self, it should come as no surprise that this self is also shaped by the institutions and cultural assumptions that surround us. As Stephen Marglin put it:
Markets organize the production of goods and services, but at the same time markets produce people: they shape our values, beliefs and ways of understanding in line with what makes for success in the market. Markets thus exist in a kind of symbiosis with the discipline of economics, shaping people to fit the assumptions of the discipline even as economists shape the world in the textbook image of the self-regulating market. A new economy will need a new economics, which goes beyond the calculating, self-interested, individual to take account of community, compassion, and cosmos.2
To escape the lethal grip of the “market civilization,” we need a fresh conception of the person that reflects both our ontological and cultural embeddedness.
As just one element in this reconceptualization, we can consider the emerging understanding of the brain and its role in consciousness and behavior. The brain is a complex and adaptive system, which makes it malleable. Many of the behavioral characteristics of human beings, whatever the source of their reinforcement, are enabled through the establishment of neurological pathways that become ingrained. The more the pathways are used in the present, the more they will be used in the future—they are the biological basis of habits. The more these pathways are associated with the pleasure centers of the brain, the stronger the incentives are to increase their use—something that has been long understood, at least on some level, by advertisers. What humans and other animals do (e.g., how much time people spend on the computer) actually changes how their brains are constructed. Understanding how the brain works can help us to grasp how the emancipation project has been massively refined in our time to construct nations of consumers while the concept of citizenship fades into distant memory (Curtis 2002).
1.2. What Do We Know About What We Know?
According to contemporary science, the idea of a certain and predictable world is, at best, an approximation of reality. This view is a legacy of the scientific revolution and the European Enlightenment. However, this view, which holds that the world is made up of quantifiable and stable parts, has been modified by nineteenth- and twentieth-century science that emphasizes relations and systems. Indeed, systems theory is now an established foundation of a scientific understanding of the universe (Kauffman 1995).
1.2.1. The importance of uncertainty
The systems that make up the universe have multiple, interactive feedback loops, as well as both fragile and robust initial conditions. The universe itself is a complex adaptive system that is “a creative advance into novelty,” to quote Whitehead (1978). Hence, equilibria or static, predictable states—the centerpiece of the neoclassical model—are rare, perhaps even delusional. The overall reality, as Heraclitus wrote, is change. Surprises should not surprise us. In a world of complex systems, attempting to maximize a single variable, such as the gross domestic product, is sure to bring chaos and instability in its wake by causing perturbations in other changing and evolving systems. For example, international commitments to economic growth are destabilizing the climate system, even though the climate system is typically not part of mainstream economic discourse or, worse still, of any concern to macroeconomic policy.
1.2.2. Knowledge is approximate and provisional
The human ability for abstract reasoning is one of our great adaptive capacities, but it also has many shortcomings. Consider the example of a map of Quebec. A map should tell us as much as possible about the land and water in the province. The more the map approaches the size and complexity of what it is trying to depict, the more accurate the depiction is. Thus, an ideal map of Quebec would be the size of Quebec itself, but then it would not be very useful. Therefore, much is subtracted from maps, and they are typically reduced in size. In the same manner, our abstractions leave out most details, even though much of what we need to know is lost in achieving the benefits of abstraction. Our sensory systems naturally edit out the blooming, buzzing confusion of the world: we operate through gestalts. The more those gestalts are simplifications, the more hazardous they may become.
1.2.3. Is intelligence lethal?
One thing we need to consider is the question of the adaptive advantage of intelligence. Noam Chomsky summarized Ernst Mayr’s arguments on this question as follows:
[What] he basically argued is that intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation. And he had a good argument. He pointed out that if you take a look at biological success, which is essentially measured by how many of us are there, the organisms that do quite well are those that mutate very quickly, like bacteria, or those that are stuck in a fixed ecological niche, like beetles. They do fine. And they may survive the environmental crisis. But as you go up the scale of what we call intelligence, they are less and less successful. By the time you get to mammals, there are very few of them as compared with, say, insects. By the time you get to humans, the origin of humans may be 100,000 years ago, there is a very small group. We are kind of misled now because there are a lot of humans around, but that’s a matter of a few thousand years, which is meaningless from an evolutionary point of view. (Chomsky 2011)
From this perspective, what is remarkable about our intelligence is how it is both highly adaptive while at the same time quite stable. Humans are inventive creatures: new products, discoveries, and scientific and technical insights pervade our age. But concurrently, we fail to examine the underlying assumptions of the emancipation project. We are insightful within it but not about it. These inquiries are blocked in part because they touch on religion, which is contentious terrain—terrain that sparked the devastating religious wars in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The current internecine wars and armed struggles have many of the same sources, with religious and ethnic groups pitted tragically against each other. As a result of these wars, people tried to disentangle religion from politics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which was a key to the subsequent success of liberal societies.3 The same strategy is still followed today by some in the desire for the establishment of “secular societies.” However, this disentanglement was not and is not without cost; it allowed the development of superficial narratives that were ungrounded in an empirically substantiated sense of place in the universe. In North America, the task of taming (liquidating?) the continent and improving our material circumstances took precedence. It seemed more desirable and safer to concentrate on technique (i.e., the means) rather than to reflect on the ends (Lowi 1969). Our culture is profoundly and tragically allergic to any self-conscious metaphysics; as a result, we have embraced a decadent materialism that now is undercutting life’s prospects.
The Western philosophical project has not been self-correcting. This is not to say that in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries there were not philosophers who tried to exhibit the limits and dangers of the emancipation project. These philosophers included Bergson (1911), Schweitzer (1987) and Whitehead (1978), but they were marginalized. What took center stage was the less threatening, narrow debate between the Kantians (who advocated rights and strong related duties) and the utilitarians (who argued that maximizing human happiness is the sole standard of conduct), which dominated ethics as well as much of the social and political philosophy in the Anglophone world. This debate was conducted in the main, without anyone noticing that it took place within the emancipation project. The challenge in these early days of the Anthropocene is to prove Mayr and Chomsky wrong—to show that intelligence can be self-correcting and highly adaptive. Can some kind of collective response be formulated to respond to the emerging abyss of the Anthropocene? Hopefully, a global narrative informed by current science can emerge to ground and shape a collective response. If we do not succeed, life’s prospects will be dim indeed.
1.2.4. What should we do and not do?
Contemporary sciences call into question one of the key ideas of economic and political liberalism: that each person is free to act as he or she wishes so long as that action does not harm other people. Two important sources of this idea are John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration ([1685] 1983) and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty ([1859] 2011). Locke held that our religious beliefs are internal matters and hence should be beyond the legitimate reach of the state, whose principal tasks are external—to secure “life, liberty and property.” Mill held that the state has no right to interfere in what he called “purely self-regarding acts”—although interpreting this phrase has proved contentious, even for Mill. Yet, despite the pedigree of these two philosophers, the assumptions their ideas contain have become problematic as foundations for economic and political liberalism alike.
Locke’s ideas about what one thinks is private have been transformed into the idea that one can live however one wants. Also, in the tradition of Veblen, Clive Hamilton (2010) and others have noted that consumptive goods became key markers of social status in the twentieth century. When we connect these foundational principles of political liberalism to the basic laws of chemistry and earth systems science, there are two distressing implications. First, in normal chemical reactions, matter is neither created nor destroyed. This means that the carbon released when fuel is burned in, say, a Toronto traffic jam, directly affects the interests of people and the composition of ecosystems around the world. Second, the process of burning fuel inevitably creates waste heat (most of which is radiated into space), causing a net decline in the stocks of useable energy on the earth.
We must see that how we live is potentially harmful to others. There are no actions that only affect us alone. The conceptual and moral underpinnings of economic and political liberalism were flawed from the beginning. We have no choice but to recognize that, as Thoreau articulated, “our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice” (2004:210). It is critical that we interrogate the ideas of liberty and freedom (Fischer 2004; see also chapter 10 in this volume). What do they mean once we consider them in the context of a scientific understanding of the world? What are their relationships to justice? In a world of limits, liberty may only be legitimately exercised if one is using only one’s fair share of low-entropy sources and sinks. Properly understood, true liberty lives in a modest room within the mansion of justice. Hence, “justice” for us must be understood, as it was for Aristotle, both as a particular virtue and as one overarching concept that holds the rest of morality in balance.
2. PREMISES
Henceforth, one can see that ecological economics rests on at least three rather simple and interconnected premises. I call them premises because, within the scientific paradigm, they are self-evident.
2.1. Membership: Escaping the Undertow of the Emancipation Project
The Western tradition has become globally hegemonic. It has also come to embrace a form of “exemptionalism”: the idea that human beings are special, are in some miraculous way not a part of nature, and are therefore not subject to its sanctions, controls, and limitations. This has led to absurd ideas, such as thinking we can control “pests” with compounds that will affect them but not us. From a scientific perspective, humans are fully embedded in, and creatures of, the world. Humans are related to all earthly life; like all life on this planet, humans have coevolved with the earth itself. Recognition that we share heritage and destiny with all other people and all other life on this planet, as well as the dependence of life on physical and chemical evolution, must lead us to expand the moral community. The attitude of domination of the world and its peoples must be replaced with respect and reciprocity toward all that is. Humans are members of, not masters over, life’s commonwealth (Leopold 1949). It is the flourishing of all people and life-forms that matters.
Of course, we are members of human communities of enormous variety, complexity, and size, and we have duties and privileges in these communities. “Membership,” as I have defined it, recognizes this. However, membership also aims to redirect our attention to the natural world that makes the human world possible, as well as to treat it with respect and reverence for its own sake. It seeks to avoid, for instance, the idea that ethics is primarily confined to humans and to human relationships with God, as found in documents such as the Ten Commandments. The internalization of these ideas may have played a large role in the “success” of Western culture in reaching toward global hegemony. However, as Hans Jonas (1984) pointed out, these restricted ethical codes offer limited traction for responding to long-term macroscale crises, such as global climate change—good for a world with a few people in a large place but not sufficient compass for the Anthropocene.
Contemporary science has completely overturned the ontological dualism that has dysfunctionally underpinned Western culture for more than two thousand years (Singer 1985). The new (or rediscovered) “relational” ontologies do not need to labor to justify concern for the commonwealth of life of which we are a part (Bateson 2002; Kohn 2013). Also discarded is the “great chain of being”—the idea that there is a hierarchy of value, with a creator god at the top and rocks at the bottom. This schema is backward. Mind permeates the natural world and is the product of nearly fourteen billion years of evolution—not, to the best of our knowledge, its source. The teeming cities of India; the basement of an abandoned barn with spiders, snakes, and rotting timbers; the water trickling into a pool where brook trout lurk; the Milky Way; and the vast reaches of the universe—these are all our community.
The alleged superiority of the West is a conceit that has legitimated slaughter, slavery, empire, the appropriation and liquidation of precious sources of low entropy, and the filling of absorptive sinks locally and globally. The most recent manifestation of this global pathology is the world economic system, dominated by elites who are the primary beneficiaries, underpinned by assassination, terror, and covert military operations (Henry 2003). All people in all cultures have equal moral claims to flourishing, which are constrained and enhanced by the claims of other species for their place in the sun. We are not the chosen species or the chosen people. This, if you like, is the new emancipation.
2.2. House Holding
The idea of natural resources needs to be radically revised. When humans see themselves as members of the natural community, the idea that the earth and all of its life exist solely for our utility becomes absurd (Brown 2004). The world is not a collection of sources for satisfying human desires and a place to legitimately dispose of the waste stream inevitably created by those satisfactions. Rather, it should be considered a commonwealth where all species interact with each other and the planet’s biophysical systems in a manner that facilitates the thriving of life. Ultimately, this thriving ought to be allowed and enabled to continue on its metaphysical journey into novelty.
The idea of the earth as a collection of resources and waste receptacles must give way to that of the earth as life’s household (oikos). The house need not have an owner; however, it does represent a world and locus, familiar to many traditional communities, of reciprocity and respect. Over time, everything is a resource to everything else. In this conception, private property can legitimately exist only if it enriches the flourishing of life’s commonwealth. This understanding, if adopted, would be an all-species version of John’s Locke’s justification of private property in the Second Treatise of Government—that private property is justified as a means to enhance what he took to be the divine mandate to preserve all mankind (Locke [1690] 1980).
2.3. Entropic Thrift
Low-entropy stocks and flows, as well as the sinks for high-entropy waste, must be used judiciously and with respect. Like all other systems that are far from equilibrium, life depends on low entropy—a fundamental good. Low entropy is the preservation of the earth’s capacity to support flourishing human and natural communities; it makes all life possible. Broadly defined, energy is a fundamental good that underlies all other goods. It enables autocatalytic living organisms that are far from equilibrium to exist and thrive. This repositions the eminent twentieth-century philosopher John Rawls’s (1971) concept of primary goods, such as income, wealth, and opportunity, to a secondary status because they all depend on energy. In an ecological political economy, wasting resources that make life possible is a fundamental moral wrong (Odum 2007). The earth’s limited capacity to construct and maintain systems that are far from equilibrium implies that there are limits to the legitimate human appropriation of energy and sinks. Energy must be conserved for future human generations and for the flourishing of life itself.
Considerable interest in the restoration of the commons has been spurred by the work of Peter Barnes (2001), Joshua Farley (2010), and many others. One way to think of successful common property systems, such as those described in Ostrom’s Governing the Commons (1990), is that they manifest a resting point or temporary halt—perhaps lasting as long as millennia on the entropic highway. They keep their stocks and flows of low-entropy sources in balance, and they avoid filling their sinks. They are masters at moderation.
Perhaps the clearest example of entropic thrift is a culture that lives within the current solar flow and does not fill its sinks any faster than natural systems can handle the waste. However, the idea of entropic thrift offers no definite answer to the question: how far into the future is of moral concern? The idea of a discounted present value—the centerpiece of much neoclassical analysis of duties to the future (Nordhaus 2008; Stern 2007)—is irrelevant in answering this question when the viability of the earth’s life support systems is at stake.
The ideas of membership and house-holding set the reference points for defining our responsibility. How thrifty should we be with energy sources and sinks? The mandate should be as follows: be thrifty enough to persist and flourish among the other members of life’s commonwealth. The Iroquois idea of being mindful unto the seventh generation sets the right tone. We are members of historical human and natural communities that have persisted for millennia, enabling us and defining who we are. We, the living, are custodians of a trust with no definite beginning and no discernible end.
There may be technological escapes from living within the solar flow—for example, ways of extracting and using fossil fuels that, over time, responsibly access the huge stores of hydrocarbons that remain in the earth’s crust. There also may be ways of using these sources that allow for their burning without contributing to overfilling the sinks. These empirical questions will only be answered in the future. Ethics requires that we behave on the basis of reliable knowledge, not some fanciful dream of what might happen as promulgated by technological optimists. The current fossil fuel orgy clearly violates our minimal obligations to the flourishing of life’s commonwealth.
3. PRINCIPLES
Ecological economics has an implicit structure of concern (Daly 1996). These concerns are matters of the scale or size of the economy relative to the earth’s capacities, the fair distribution of these capacities, and efficiency in allocation, which provide the foci for the consideration of ethics within the paradigm.
As the principal insight of ecological economics, the size or scale of the economy relative to the earth’s biophysical systems must be explicitly addressed in formulating and implementing economic policy. This has at least two dimensions: (1) maintaining the low-entropy sources of life and (2) not filling sinks with more high-entropy waste than they can process. The first point, as emphasized by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Herman Daly, and others in this tradition, is a fundamental concern; it entails the prudent use and restoration of low-entropy stocks and flows. The second point requires an acknowledgment, understanding, and respect for the fact that nature has only limited capacity to process the high-entropy waste stream produced by society; the atmosphere and water sources can be overloaded with carbon dioxide, phosphorous, nitrogen, and the like. A failure to operate the economy within the “resilience limits” of the earth’s sources and sinks can bring about massive—even catastrophic—instability that is incompatible with life’s flourishing.
Although it is useful analytically to separate issues of scale, in practice this is quite misleading (Malghan 2010). Transgressions of the earth’s resiliency limits are heavily dependent on purchasing power (or lack of it). The 500 million or so well-to-do individuals are the main current contributors to climate change. These people are in continuous violation of the golden rule. The billions of radically poor citizens contribute very little to climate change, although poverty often stimulates local ecological degradation. In some countries, the wealthy have simply bought the political process and use their control to prevent desperately needed climate-related legislation.
A core concern within ecological economics is the idea of intergenerational fairness. One generation has no right to deplete the sources or fill the sinks required for the flourishing of future generations. The position in time is morally irrelevant. We have a duty to pass along a world that is at least as good as the one we found. In the contemporary scientific narrative, the position in space is also morally irrelevant. Everyone alive today is a descendant of a small group of people; all of us share common DNA. We have the capacity for complex symbolic thinking and consequent participation in cultural narratives. In our time, we share a common, emerging, global narrative—and, of course, a collective (and perhaps tragic) destiny. The cultures of the world and their physical circumstances have selected for different talents, skin color, customs, and the like. Insofar as our differences are the result of biological and cultural evolution, there is no evidence that one group is more deserving than another.
Within the evolutionary tradition, matters of fair distribution are best informed by the idea of flourishing. One could start with Amartya Sen’s (1999) work on capabilities and functioning, which is very aware of the dimensions of the Western emancipation project that legitimated empire on the presumed basis of European superiority. However, in two other closely connected respects, Sen remains entangled in it: (1) the human-focused individualism of the neoclassical model, and (2) an instrumentalist, arms-length view of the natural world. Hence, Sen nods in the right direction, but the reconstruction agenda of ecological economics requires a fundamental rethinking of fair distribution—the foundations of which lie beyond the purview of the emancipation project.
With respect to climate change, Henry Shue (1993) has suggested the following four questions of justice:
1. Who pays the costs of avoiding future global warming?
2. Who pays the costs of making the adjustments to global warming that are not, or cannot be, prevented?
3. What background conditions of wealth and power would make bargaining over the first two questions fair?
4. What rights are there to future emissions within some cap designed to stabilize concentrations to avert runaway climate change (if such a course is still open to us)?
The reconstruction agenda of ecological economics suggests that the analysis of questions of fair distribution must be rethought in a broader context. Words like who, pay, and cost must be thought of in a different context. Let’s begin with who: Within the evolutionary framework in which ecological economics finds its home, there is no reason why only human flourishing should matter. Rather, the flourishing of all of life must be a principal moral concern of economic and other policies. Regardless of the distributive framework, the challenge tabled by ecological economics is that we must have an account of the fair shares of the earth’s life support capacity for all members of life’s commonwealth.
Ideas such as cost and pay must also be thought of in a broad context that includes, but goes well beyond, money. Our understanding must be grounded in the use of the earth’s life support systems. A logical place to begin is with the use of low-entropy sources and sinks—in the present, as well as in the past and the future. There can be no question that people in industrialized nations owe a huge climate debt to those in the South. In part, this debt can be paid in technology transfer and money, but in both cases the postulate of entropic thrift must be front and center. If money transferred to Kenya to combat drought is derived from pumping and burning fossil fuels, then we have defeated the purpose. The use of money for any purpose, including the discharging of debt, must be done in a manner that is constrained by the limits of the earth’s life support systems, with an obligation to protect and enhance a flourishing Earth.
Efficiency is a core concept in ecological economics, but it is nested. Efficiency in this discipline is more complex than, and quite diverse from, the neoclassical conception. Once scale and distribution concerns have been met, a highly modified version of the neoclassical conception of efficiency comes into play. It is essential to see that efficiency is a derivative concept—typically depending on assumptions that are not explicit; however, in all cases, it is something that is done in support of an end or objective. To be true to its objectives, ecological economics must reject a foundational idea of the neoclassical model—that efficiency is the maximization of individual preferences. Instead, efficiency is enacted by fostering and supporting people with the virtues set out in section 4, as well as by maintaining, restoring, and enhancing the well-being of other species and their enabling conditions. It is essential that we replace the current goal of constructing and motivating consumers to maximize consumption. Instead, the construction of ecological citizens must be a core goal of economic policy.
4. VIRTUES
The postulates and principles of ecological economics require the cultivation of a new body of virtues. This section presents some examples.
4.1. Courage
The ethic argued for herein is out of step with contemporary culture. Those who endorse and follow it will be thought of as outcasts, killjoys, or outside agitators. Courage will be required. As the Iroquois put it: “The thickness of your skin shall be seven spans—which is to say that you shall be proof against anger, offensive actions and criticism. … Self interest shall be cast into oblivion.”4
Like the crafters of the civil rights movements, we can expect to be out of step. However, the voices calling for a new human–Earth relationship are moving from scattered voices into a chorus—small but growing. A thorough regrounding of the human project and prospect is essential. We cannot rise to the challenge set out by ecological economics by simply extending vocabulary from the worldview we are trying to overturn, such as in the concepts of natural capital and ecosystem services or ill-defined concepts of sustainability. A complete rethink is required of the language, structures, practices, and guiding principles that inform our current system; an urgent action agenda requires mobilization, direct action, and the like.
4.2. Epistemological Humility
Uncertainty and unpredictability should ground epistemological humility. The scientific fact that all human knowledge is partial and provisional has profound implications for action. It should lead us to treat the urge to manage complex systems with enormous caution while at the same time recognizing that, at the present level of overshoot of ecological capacity, some sort of orderly pullback is essential. In Water Ethics, Jeremy Schmidt and I have called for a compassionate retreat—a concerted effort to reduce the human impact on the earth’s life and its life support systems (Brown and Schmidt 2010).
4.3. Atonement
A quest for atonement is necessary for what we have wrought in the domination of the natural world and our fellow humans. Ecological economics argues that the human enterprise has grown too large. This is expressed by a number of measures, some of which are discussed in part 2 of this volume. These measures all carry the same basic message: there are limits to the earth’s life support systems, we are approaching these limits, and these limits are likely already past their ability for self-renewal. We need to be prepared to respond to the collapse of whole systems, such as what is currently underway with the acidification of the oceans, the ongoing disintegration of the Antarctic ice sheets, and the destabilization of the climate system. Life’s flourishing is in decline, and the rate of deterioration is rapidly increasing. Once we recognize that humans, like any other native life-form, are in a reciprocal relationship with the earth, the duty to help restore the massive damage to the earth’s living system caused by our species comes into clear and central focus (van Hattum and Liu 2012). Atonement for our lack of respect and responsibility in the past must inform every action of the children of a new and regrounded enlightenment.
We must not fall back into the trap of overmanaging and forcing complex human or natural systems—much of our current trouble is a result of this attitude. Rather, we must enable the reconstruction of nature and societies and stand aside (often in awe) as they flourish afresh. The reconstruction agenda of ecological economics stands both in reference to, and apart from, the very idea that we ought to have an agenda in the governance of complex systems. We cannot take our first ethical step upon presumed ideas about what we ought to do. Rather, it must emerge from an empirical understanding of our place in a broader community of life.
Atonement, in this case, is more like being a midwife than a surgeon. Atonement can be achieved through activities such as regreening our planet by enabling the flourishing of damaged or destroyed ecosystems. In the future, this will require radical reductions in human consumption in the so-called developed countries, increases in consumption in many places, and reductions in fertility virtually everywhere. The education of women and access to reproductive health services are key to advancing toward a humane, but urgently needed, lowering of the human population. Of course, not all cultures have the same debts to come to terms with, not even remotely. The legacy of unjust carbon emissions and imperialism of the North is immense.
4.4. Fair Share
We must treat all living beings justly and leave them a fair share so they may flourish. Marine protected areas, Ramsar sites, and the like are only very small steps in this direction. In part, the human enterprise should be structured to live interstitially with life’s commonwealth. Pockets of this are already arising. For instance, the Chicago Wilderness alliance works to preserve and integrate natural waterways and other ecosystems with the urban/suburban landscape of Chicago (Chicago Wilderness 2014). Although these steps are in the right direction, they are too modest. If life on Earth is to flourish, it must be given the space to do so. The present projections for the global growth in consumption are 2 or 3 percent per year, which mean that by 2100 the economy would be, respectively, seven or eighteen times greater than it is today (Garver 2009). Similarly, the projected increase of the human population to nine billion (or more) by the middle of this century is incompatible with membership, house-holding, and entropic thrift. In the next two to three centuries, our descendants will be living in a world undergoing a substantial—and perhaps very rapid—sea level rise, along with changes in patterns of food production. It serves us and the rest of life’s commonwealth to reduce the human footprint on Earth with all deliberate speed.
4.5. Respect
We must respect all that is. As most or all of the world’s religions recognize, we should understand ourselves as citizens of the cosmos, as finite actors in an infinite narrative. We are custodians of a tiny fragment of this story. When we gratuitously alter the earth, such as to fuel the North American automobile and truck fleets (and their attendant land-use patterns), we show disrespect for the sources of our being (Santayana 1905). On the other hand, when we tread lightly on the earth, with modest family sizes, low carbon footprints, and the like, we show respect.
The state of the virtues is an economic indicator. In our culture, where the economy is the central and ubiquitous institution, consumption is a major force in the construction of self-identity and expression. It is thus helping to produce people whose characteristics are at cross purposes with what is needed for life to flourish in the Anthropocene. One of the principal tests of an economy must be the kind of citizens it produces; in this context, a major goal must be the cultivation and maintenance of the aforementioned virtues (Madiraju and Brown 2014). Getting these virtues front and center will require a major rethink of macroeconomics, as outlined in chapter 8 of this volume. Also very worthy of attention are a number of movements trying to escape the hegemony of growth above everything else, such as the degrowth movement, transition towns, and buen vivir (born in the Andean regions of South America).
The Western idea of progress, which arguably took firm root within the emancipation project approximately 300 years ago, informed our expectations that the future will be better in some way than the present. It formed the overarching idea of our culture (subject to many interpretations, to be sure) and grounded a sense of optimism. Progress, which today tends to be understood as increased consumption by a massive human population, is now in the process of devouring its own possibility. The sustainability discourse that has become prominent since the Brundtland report (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987) has revealed its impotence. It was not even a timid step aside from the hegemony of the emancipation project. It was an accommodation with the forces and worldviews that are perpetrating the crises in which we are now entrapped. It can be thought of as a failed quest for another ethos, whose comforting rapprochement with the status quo wasted at least two crucial decades.
Ecological economics offers an escape from the emancipation project—an invitation to end to the tyranny of the market over humanity and nature alike, as well as the celebration of our citizenship in a universe that is ever evolving into novelty. The attraction of ecological economics is that it allows us to re-envision the future of life’s commonwealth by calling on us to undertake a thorough re-examination of our relationship with life, the world, and the universe. We are alive in the adolescence of the universe—full of energy and possibilities. By accepting the invitation of ecological economics, we can discover our place with humility and respect. This is the meaning of emancipation in our troubled age.
NOTES
I am indebted to Julie Anne Ames, Margaret Brown, Holly Dressel, John Fullerton, Geoff Garver, Janice Harvey, Bruce Jennings, Suzanne Moore, Robert Nadeau, Alex Poisson, Jeremy Schmidt, Julie Schor, Gus Speth, Dan Thompson, and Laura Westra for comments on various drafts of this paper; to my colleagues Mark Goldberg and Tom Naylor at McGill; and to the students in the classes we have taught together.
1. This description of the self is taken, with modifications, from Wendy Wheeler’s The Whole Creature (2006), and draws heavily on conversations and correspondence with Robert Nadeau.
2. I am indebted to Stephen Marglin (2010) for this idea.
3. The most notable philosophical defense of these ideas is found in John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government ([1690] 1980) and A Letter Concerning Toleration ([1685] 1983).
4. The Constitution of the Iroquois Nations, Article 28. http://www.indigenouspeople.net/iroqcon.htm. Accessed 25 February 2015. Prepared by Gerald Murphy (The Cleveland Free-Net – aa300). Distributed by the Cybercasting Services Division of the National Public Telecomputing Network (NPTN).
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