Ecological economics is grounded in the unavoidable insight that the economy is fully embedded in the energy and material flows of Earth and subject to the laws of the universe. It is a fundamental insight that must ground our thinking and action if we are to have any chance of successfully navigating the stormy Anthropocene. However, it will fall short of providing both compass and momentum if it does not take on two essential, but related, challenges: (1) development of itself—an internal agenda; and (2) furthering the extended agenda (discussed in the introduction to this book) of applying the reorientation generated by its insight into other domains, other disciplines, modes of thought and action, and more broadly how humanity relates to life and the world. Just as standard economics now is the direct or indirect touchstone for many of these domains, so we assume that a full acceptance of the embeddedness of our activities in the physical realm of the Earth—its conditions and limits—will precipitate an equivalent shift in the basic assumptions of these domains. We fail to make these changes at our peril.
This concluding chapter sets out, based on each section of this volume, how the reorientation we argue for can be furthered by future research opportunities and a fresh vision of the human prospect.
1. PROPOSED ETHICAL FOUNDATIONS
1.1. Rethinking Ethics
Ethics and political philosophy in the twentieth century, at least in the Anglophone countries, have largely focused on whether to emphasize human rights or utility. Yet, neither tradition has been firmly grounded in more sophisticated contemporary understandings of human subjectivity and social and ecological interdependencies. In the early twentieth century, Bergson (1911), Schweitzer (1987), Whitehead (1978), and others began an “organic” countermovement that began to articulate an integrated understanding of the relationship between the human self and the world. This inspiring counterperspective has come back to life as thinkers such as Leopold (1949), Callicott (1994), Jamieson (2002), Berry (1999), Elliott (2005), and Brown (2012) have explicitly sought to connect ethics to science. Indeed, contemporary science supports and situates understandings of the self and world that are contained in many of the world’s ethical and religious belief systems, and in the work of previous philosophers such as Spinoza. The insights of neuroscience help us to understand how humanity can access and experience fundamental connections to a creative universe and undergird the construction of new narratives of humanity’s place in it (Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Nadeau 2013). New frontiers of investigation and understanding are emerging, such as Hauser (2006) and Wilson (2002). We must advance the dialogue between moral philosophy and the insights from contemporary neuroscience, evolutionary biology and cosmology (Chaisson 2006), and complexity theory (Kauffman 1995).
1.2. Rethinking Agency
Behavioral economics in particular and evolutionary science in general now paint a much more complex picture of human motivations than is found in neoclassical economics. One clear research agenda for ecological behavioral economics becomes to identify how the human person, and in particular the brain, as a product of evolution shapes our actions. However, this is just the beginning of a rich and far-reaching agenda: human choice and conduct must be understood as embedded in energy and material flows, as well as in social and institutional matrices that shape and direct behavior. How can this understanding be used to help meet the challenges of the Anthropocene?
1.3. Rethinking Rationality
It is essential to further develop and deploy a rationality that respects and enhances the regenerative capacity of natural systems; takes a multigenerational perspective on preserving, enhancing, and restoring the underpinnings of life; and understands that decisions necessarily involve both human and natural systems (Princen 2005). How is “rationality” to be understood in a revised conception of agency? An unavoidable question for ecological economics is whether agency is confined to people. What is the place for the insights from many traditional cultures that agency is widespread in the natural world? Is agency confined to intentional actions? Do viruses and hurricanes have agency?
1.4. Rethinking the Human
As noted in various chapters, the model of the human in standard economics is a very strange, deracinated, being. This model was designed to mimic simple physical processes so as to make the mathematics work out; its danger, as in all simple models of humans to which humans are susceptible, is its appealing social, cultural, and political power. The deepest danger is that if humans do not fit the models, they need to be made to fit the models or be disregarded, killed, or left to die. In addition, the pervasiveness of the economistic perspective has strongly influenced our fundamental senses of selves, objects, and nature (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002). The “rethinking of agency” research agenda is only one reflection of the current trend toward rethinking the human through the application of behavioral science, etc. One specific research role of ecological economics is to enrich the rethinking of the human in its ecological matrices and settings. Human preferences are dependent on social context, individual histories, and conscious preference development (Albert and Hahnel 1991). An ecological economics model incorporates a sense of fairness and a socially contingent decision-making rooted in the biology of moral reasoning (Fehr and Gächter 2002). Models of decision-making, such as “prospect theory” (Tversky and Kahneman 1981) and “biased cultural transmission” (Henrich 2004), have proved to be better predictors of economic behavior than the axiomatic rational actor model.
1.5. Changing Our Relationship to the Community of Beings
Neoclassical economics conveniently relegates all other forms of life and the processes that support it to purely instrumental standing. This could be a stepchild of the doctrine of special creation—that humanity is made in the image of God—found in the book of Genesis. On this view, other animals and Earth itself have a different moral standing than humans. This idea finds no support within an evolutionary worldview, thus opening wide the door to reimagining our place in the community of beings and the universe as a whole. Is the universe our community, as Stuart Kauffman suggested in At Home in the Universe (Kauffman 1995)?
1.6. Reconsidering Justice and Distribution
At its most fundamental level, ecological economics is about justice. On a planet open to energy and closed to matter, what are fair shares of Earth’s life-support capacity? In an evolutionary paradigm, there is no reason to think that humans are the only ones with moral standing. Justice pertains to all creatures great and small, now and evermore.
At the human level, ecological economics has had mostly a marginal interest in the marginal people of the world, with some exceptions (e.g., Martínez-Alier 2002); much more needs to be done, drawing on more recent detailed research (e.g., Banerjee and Duflo 2011), the discussions toward the next phase of the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (post-2015), and multiple case studies on unsustainable development (e.g., Suyanto, Khususiyah, and Leimona 2007). Marginal people are often at the “cutting edge” of forest destruction, water scarcity and degradation, and overexploited ecosystems—how does ecological economics respond to this at more than the theoretical level?
1.7. Recasting Education
Multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary initiatives have made some progress in educating students on the multifaceted nature of the current human crisis, but they rarely question whether individual disciplines are authentic and scientifically sound. Yet, many of these disciplines can be likened to “orphans.” They are alive in pedagogy and practice, but their intellectual parents are often incompatible with what we know about the universe and our place in it at the dawn of the new millennium—for this reason, they should be called “orphans.”
These frameworks and/or disciplines can be divided into at least two groups. First, there are several normative structures that shape and mediate humanity’s relationship with life and the world. These are directly prescriptive—they tell us what we should do. Economists are happy to share their ideas about how to stimulate growth; finance to prescribe how to get rich; law to adjudicate between persons in conflict, and among various justice claims; governance for the powers of the state over the individual and how to secure ourselves from foreign enemies. Ethics offers guidelines for being a good person and living a good life. Second, there is a much broader set of disciplines that also suffer from deep ontological errors. Engineering takes it for granted that the world belongs to humanity and may be modified, often at will, to suit our purposes no matter how trivial. Conventional agriculture assumes that “food security” applies only to people. It can be argued that many of the social sciences are orphan disciplines in that they rely on the assumption of a sharp nature–culture divide (Kohn 2013).
2. MEASUREMENTS
2.1. Rethinking Price
The economy is now largely oriented around a single signal: the price signal. Price is such a remarkable, successful, and ubiquitous invention that we have come to believe it is inevitable and inherent to things. Price conveys a signal about the relationship between resources and desires: how much will I give up or gain for what I want? When the price signal is aggregated across all transactions, it produces a signal about the overall movement of goods and services toward the satisfaction of desires in the economy. That movement is currently captured poorly by the gross domestic product (GDP). Orienting ourselves toward that number orients us toward growth, leading to further declines in life’s prospects. Ecological economics has made substantial contributions to adjusting GDP to better account for income distribution, unpriced costs and benefits of economic activity, and broader tradeoffs between paid and unpaid work (Bagstad, Berik, and Gaddis 2014; Cobb, Halstead, and Rowe 1995; Daly and Cobb 1994; Lawn 2005). However, these efforts still accept price as a unit of comparability, and thus implicit substitutability between economic and non-economic human wants and needs. Vatn and Bromley (1994) challenged us to imagine “choices without prices without apologies.”
An ecological economy would require other signals, relating us to other dimensions of our choices, including their ecological impacts and social transactions. Further research will be required to determine how these signals could be constructed out of the range of indicators we have providing us with information about our relationship to planetary boundaries. Can we aggregate other signals into an impact score of all our decisions? Will it relate to an ecological currency or currencies that function differently from money? Will new aggregates relate to an economy that focusses more on public goods rather than a market economy that focusses more on private goods? These questions are beginning to be explored in various fora, such as social network platforms, and require a slate of empirical investigations.
2.2. Embracing a Plurality of Values
A significant literature critiques the monetary foundation of cost-benefit analysis in economics, including the implicit assumption of substitutability between human-made and natural capital (Gowdy 1997); the phenomena of “crowding-out” moral behavior with the introduction of monetary values (Frey and Oberholzer-Gee 1997); the importance of lexicographical preferences in evaluating tradeoffs between economic, social, and environmental goods or services (Spash and Hanley 1995); and the existence of hyperbolic discounting in evaluating medium-to-distant future outcomes (Laibson 1997). Ecological economics should continue to explore “values-plural” approaches, such as multicriteria decision analyses that explicitly address the biological, social, and complex nature of human decision-making (Kosoy et al. 2010; Martinez-Alier, Munda, and O’Neill 1998).
2.3. Measuring Economic Production as a Biophysical Process
Neoclassical economics treats production as an allocation of given resources without regard to biophysical processes. Ecological economics is instead grounded in material and energy throughput analysis, including measurement and models of ecological footprints (Wackernagel and Rees 1996), human appropriation of net primary production (Haberl et al. 2007), and spatially explicit generation, delivery, and demand of ecosystem services (Kareiva et al. 2011). Ecological macroeconomic systems modeling is now emerging to investigate strategies for growth-neutral or degrowth economies (Jackson 2009; Kallis 2011; Victor 2008). Significant research remains on measuring production in economic systems as a physical transformation of low-entropy matter and energy to high-entropy waste—a return to early goals of ecological economics reflected in the work of Georgesu-Roegen, Daly, Christensen, and others.
3. IMPLICATIONS
3.1. Modeling and Growth
What is a fair distribution of income between capital and labor in the context of a slow or nongrowing economy? Was Piketty (2014) correct in arguing that slower growth favors capital over labor (given certain assumptions about the rate of return to capital and the savings rate)? Or, would slower growth result from financially “unproductive” investment, which in effect reduces the return to capital overall? What is the ease or difficulty with which capital can be substituted for labor? How can these issues be addressed within ecological macroeconomic models?
3.2. Fitting the Economy to the Earth
It is essential to find a way to tie science and its insights into the production of economic norms and the legal frameworks that underpin them. We are now in the midst of producing new ways to generate and respond to legal and economic norms. Just as the emergence of writing and then publication transformed how norms were generated and communicated, so too are computerized network communications producing a revolution in the transmission of norms, which might be called “real-time law.” Real-time law allows us to produce norms reflexively: to have them adjust and respond in real time to the impacts they generate. This is because the latency between the expression of the norm and the impacts of behavior according to it can be reduced to almost zero as we gather data on networks. In the past, we would promulgate a norm, state its meaning and requirements ex ante, try to enforce it ex post, and then amend it periodically in light of shifting social consensus. All of this can now be sped up—and indeed, it needs to be if we are going to have any prospect of averting the catastrophic collective impacts of our choices.
3.3. Developing the Field of Ecological Finance
From an ecological economics point of view, wealth is the ability to support desirable far-from-equilibrium systems, such as human beings, trees, hospitals, universities, etc. What is only now beginning to be explored is the relationship between these systems and financial instruments of all kinds. The life-support capacity of Earth is arguably about the same (or less) than it was in, say, 1980; however, the total amount of paper and digital wealth is many times what it was then. Is this a problem, and if so, of what kind, magnitude, urgency, and severity? How should we respond? Is there a way to systematically relate money in all its forms to Earth’s life-support systems? How should we deal with the fact that those who hold the money form of wealth control the institutions that would need to undergo radical change that are likely needed? Frederick Soddy’s The Role of Money (1935) is a promising place to begin. Is there a path through the thicket; and, if so, who will venture along it?
3.4. Trading in the Language of “Free” Trade
The current and regrettably expanding trade regime rests on ideas such as “comparative advantage,” the need for growth, “the third world,” and other constructs that find little footing in an ecological framework. Indeed, these ideas serve to facilitate and legitimate the liquidation and appropriation of the low-entropy materials found in forest, farm, and fossil fuels alike. How should trade be understood in an ecological economics context and in the full world of the Anthropocene? Does the social imaginary of “development,” “the third world,” and “poverty” crumble and collapse in the face of a fresh and deeper understanding of wealth? How does ecological economics relate to the need for a “postdevelopment” discourse, such as that called for by Arturo Escobar (2012)?
3.5. Rethinking Transactions
Ever since Adam Smith’s division of economic inquiry into a theory of moral sentiments on the one hand and an inquiry into the wealth of nations on the other, there has tended to be split between caricatures of human behavior from homo economicus to homo reciprocans. We need some further research on the role of a gift economy in an ecological economy. We tend to assume that the operation of an exchange economy will be extended, albeit under different parameters, to an ecological economy. However, this is too simple. The question for the further development of ecological economics becomes: what is the appropriate balance between gift and exchange economies within an ecological economy, and how is it to be achieved?
3.6. Rebuilding Governance and Law
A key postulate of the liberal politics that still underpins most Western democracies is that people may live how and where they wish, pursuing what John Stuart Mill called purely self-regarding actions (Mill [1859] 2011). Yet, ecology and thermodynamics, plus the overwhelming evidence concerning anthropogenic causes of climate change and the sixth mass extinction, clearly reveal that pure self-regard is a misnomer at best. Recognizing this, our project builds on work that pursues the suggestion in Rockström et al. (2009) of the need for novel and adaptive governance approaches from the local to the global level, based on planetary boundaries that define limits (Galaz et al. 2012).
A foundation of law in many liberal cultures is the strict protection of private property. However, the main thrust of current scientific understanding, particularly ecology, directly challenges the idea of severability on which a liberal understanding of property depends and underscores the interconnection between public goods and private property. In addition, the assumption that humans are the sole rightful owners of Earth is difficult to ground in an evolutionary worldview. We will need to advance a more holistic approach to the law that recognizes ecological limits and interdependencies, and that humans coevolved with the rest of life, building on such work as Rose (1997), Solan (2002), Hornstein (2005), Ruhl (2012), Garver (2013), Cullinan (2011), Bosselmann (2008), Ostrom (1990), and Ost (2003).
As a final coda to this ambitious list, it is worth pointing out that ecological economics in itself provides an ideal example of how to build a study of the human economy that is (1) viewed both as a complex social system and as one embedded in the biophysical universe; (2) grounded in the evidentiary standard of the physical and biological sciences; and (3) framed in a problem-solving approach built on methodological pluralism that borrows broadly from many fields (Gowdy and Erickson 2005).
Extending the vision of ecological economics is an opportunity that must not be missed. We are just at the beginning of a great journey of discovery of our place in the cosmos—and the implications of that place for ourselves and the rest of life with which we share heritage and destiny. The findings will be revolutionary, frightening, unsettling, and full of opportunities.
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