Πηγή: Oilprice
By Breakthrough Institute
Feb 9 2012
In September of 1982, a group of scholars met in Stockholm intending to reform -- even to revolutionize -- the study of economics. The new ecological economists saw the economy as embedded in, and supported by, natural systems; nature was not simply a factor in, but the foundation of, economic activity. By integrating models from ecology and economics, ecological economists sought to provide scientific arguments for preserving the natural world.
The Stockholm meeting came at a critical time. During the 1970s, prominent environmentalists, encouraged by what they saw as a public awakening to environmental concerns, issued best-selling books and reports that predicted that if population, consumption, and with them the global economy continued to grow, the world would soon run out of food and other resources. By the early 1980s, however, these predictions had been discredited. The public worried more about unemployment and recession. They feared that the regulations environmentalists proposed would derail the economy or slow it down. Environmentalists faced a populist backlash.
President Ronald Reagan swept into office in 1980 promising to get the economy moving again. Reagan had campaigned against "environmental extremists" who he said favoured "rabbits' holes" and "birds' nests" over jobs and economic growth. He arrived in Washington determined to roll back environmental and other social regulations. He named anti-environmentalists to fill top spots at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and the Forest Service. The president promptly issued an executive order that subjected every major regulation to an economic cost-benefit test.
The Reagan administration and other advocates of growth invoked mainstream economic science to justify pulling back regulations. Ecological economists responded by attacking mainstream economic science and contended that mainstream economists failed to properly acknowledge the value of the natural world and the services it provides.
The environmental movement quickly embraced ecological economics because it promised to reconcile ecology with economics in a new science that would be reliably on the side of environmental protection. The MacArthur Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and other large foundations invested heavily in ecological economics. Leading environmental figures such as Amory Lovins, Paul Hawken, Bill McKibben, and Al Gore, and popular writers like Thomas Friedman picked up its language and its concepts, as did the United Nations, European governments, and nongovernmental organizations.
Ecological economics set out 30 years ago to be a redemptive science -- to "right size" the human economy for its natural infrastructure. But today, ecological economics finds itself at a political and academic dead end. Trapped in the amber of its mathematical models and conceptual constructs, ecological economics presents an object lesson for those who would appeal to scientific theories, rather than to popular concerns, to provide an intellectual and political basis for an effective green politics.
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Ecologists and economists made unlikely partners -- indeed, these disciplines have often appeared at odds with, and determined to ignore, each other. As Robert Costanza, the founding president of the International Society for Ecological Economics, acknowledged in the inaugural issue of Ecological Economics, "Ecology, as it is currently practiced, sometimes deals with human impacts on ecosystems, but the more common tendency is to stick to 'natural' systems." The modelling of ecological communities or systems seemed purposely to leave out the human economy. At the same time, economists either took for granted or ignored the principles, powers, or forces that ecologists believed governed the world's natural communities. The market mechanism, or competitive equilibrium, that mainstream economists studied assigned no role to the natural ecosystem. Ecological economics sought to embed the study of economics within a larger understanding of how ecosystems work.
Ecological economists also wanted to distinguish their scientific professionalism from the neo-Malthusian alarmism of the previous decade. The Club of Rome's 1972 best seller, The Limits to Growth, was associated in many reviews with dire projections: for example, that the world would run out of minerals, such as silver, tungsten, and mercury, within 40 years. In 1970, Paul Ehrlich, the neo-Malthusian author of The Population Bomb, predicted that global food shortages would cause four billion people to starve to death between 1980 and 1989 -- 65 million of them in the United States. Further warnings poured forth in the Global 2000 Report (1980) and in annual State of the World reports by Lester Brown and the Worldwatch Institute.
Neo-Malthusians argued that the world would not be able to grow enough food to keep up with population, but this assertion was simply wrong. In fact, world food production more than doubled between 1960 and 2000, and per capita food production during that period also increased. In 1981, economist Amartya Sen, who later won the Nobel Prize for his research, published a book that flatly and effectively contradicted the idea that famines occur because not enough food is produced. Sen showed that oppression, injustice, and destitution -- breakdowns in distribution, not shortages in production -- cause famines. With such "misleading variables as food output per unit of population, the Malthusian approach profoundly misspecifies the problems facing the poor in the world," Sen wrote, noting that as per capita food production increased, the world was lulled into a false optimism that famines would decrease. "It is often overlooked that what may be called 'Malthusian optimism' has actually killed millions of people."
Ecological economists distinguished themselves from neo-Malthusian catastrophists by switching the emphasis from resources to systems. The concern was no longer centred on running out of food, minerals, or energy. Instead, ecological economists drew attention to what they identified as ecological thresholds. The problem lay in overloading systems and causing them to collapse. Costanza and colleagues wrote, "There may be close substitutes for conventional natural resources, such as timber and coal, but not for natural ecological systems."
Ecological economists described ecosystems as evolutionary systems: "complex, adaptive systems... characterized by historical dependency, complex dynamics, and multiple basins of attraction." These communities or systems were assumed to evolve and, as a result, achieve an "adaptive" or a "dynamic equilibrium" that could be modelled mathematically. E.P. Odum, whose Fundamentals of Ecology was for decades the leading textbook in the field, pictured the natural world as a great chain or a "levels-of-organization-hierarchy" ascending from smaller to larger, more inclusive systems (e.g., from genes, cells, organs, organisms, populations, communities, to ecosystems). In an influential paper published in Science in 1969, Odum described the natural world as "an orderly process of community development" that is "directed toward achieving as large and diverse an organic structure as is possible within the limits set by the available energy input and the prevailing physical conditions of existence."
