Comments due by Dec. 5, 2014
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 favored "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 th 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 ecologica 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 scientifi theories, rather than to
popular concerns, to provide an intellectual and political basis for an effective
green politics. 1. 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 modeling 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
neoMalthusian 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 centered 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 modeled 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-organizationhierarchy"
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 th limits set by the available energy input and the prevailing
physical conditions of existence." In their 1967 Theory of Island
Biogeography, Robert MacArthur of Princeton University and E. O. Wilson of
Harvard presented a similar view of evolution as an orderly progression of
natural communities toward a saturation of species. According to this theory,
ecosystems exist in a state of equilibrium in which the colonization by a new
species is balanced by the extinction of a resident one. Paul Ehrlich later
updated the great chain metaphor to that of an airplane. "A dozen rivets,
or a dozen species, might never be missed," he wrote with his wife Anne
Ehrlich. "On the other hand, a thirteenth rivet popped from a wing flap,
or the extinction of a key species involved in the cycling of nitrogen, could
lead to a serious accident." Ecological economists drew from thermodynamic
theory to supplement the ecological view that nature represents a constrained
and constraining adaptive evolutionary system. In 1971, Nicholas
Georgescu-Roegen, a Romanian economist, published The Entropy Law and the
Economic Process which argued, "The Law of Entropy is the taproot of
economic scarcity." Herman Daly, an early proponent of ecological
economics and the leading theoretician of what he called steady-state
economics, built on the idea that a growing economy must eventually wear out
the energy potential (i.e., the organization and integration) of the natural
systems in which it is embedded. Optimism based on the "philosopher's
stone of technology," he wrote, requires "suspensions of the laws of
thermodynamics." In 1992 two prominent ecological economists argued that
standard models of economic growth are problematic because "they ignore the
fact that the human economy is an
integral part of a materially closed evolutionary system." 2. Ecological
economics also drew on theoretical methods and ideas that emerged at Oak Ridge
National Laboratory in Tennessee after World War II. Starting in the 1950s, the
Atomic Energy Commission employed scores of ecologists -- about 80 by 1970 --
in dozens of projects that eventually grew into a Big Science approach to
computer-based modeling of what were then known as biomes. From 1968 to 1974,
various agencies funded the International Biological Program (IBP); the federal
government provided nearly $60 million. Th IBP produced little of intellectual
interest but created a large class of project managers, many of whom remain
active today at governmental agencies funding big think ecosystem research.
Surrounded by physicists at Oak Ridge, ecologists adopted computer modeling and
other conceptual methods that distinguish mathematical from less theoretical,
and thus "softer," sciences. The most influential ecologist of the
period, G. E. Hutchinson, insisted that theory was essential to science,
declaring, "If we had no theory, there would be nothing to modify, and we
should get nowhere." Hutchinson, along with his colleagues, posited what
he called "formal analogies" to explain ecosystem structure and
function in terms o equations drawn from many sciences, including statistical
mechanics, logistic population growth curves, spectral analysis, circuitry,
stoichiometry, thermodynamics, cybernetics, and chaos theory. This was
make-work for mathematicians. Anyone with some mathematics and a metaphor --
typically borrowed from some other science -- could model the ecosystem.
Ecologists of the period assumed "that ecosystems function in accordance
to some overarching rules that control structure and/or function," without
checking that assumption against evidence. Princeton ecologist Simon Levin
wrote, "One must recognize the powerful adaptive and self-organizing
forces that shape ecosystems." These forces were modeled in silico (on
computers) rather than observed al fresco (in the great outdoors). As ecology
became a formal science, it mistook models for empirical evidence. "In
studying the logical consequences of assumptions, the theoretician is
discovering, not inventing," Levin wrote. "To the theoretician,
models are a part of the real world." Theory-based mathematical
speculation about ecosystem structure and function appealed to the academic and
scientific community of the time. The more abstract and mathematical the
theory, the more respect it commanded and the higher, albeit narrower, the
threshold it set for professional success. Mathematicians enjoyed prominent
academic careers without having to engage in empirical research or gain tenure
in a department of mathematics. In 1974, the late Leigh Van Valen, a formidable
University of Chicago evolutionary biologist, concluded that mathematical
ecologists had formed a "clique" and a "new orthodoxy" that
considered gathering facts a "waste of time." 3. Liberated from the
need to test their theories empirically, ecosystem ecologists built their
mathematical models upon ideas that can be traced back to Charles Darwin's
contemporary, the British philosopher and biologist Herbert Spencer. The
explicit purpose of the International Biological Program -- to determine
"the biological basis of productivity and human welfare" -- was one
that Spencer himself might have recognized. Spencer envisioned a theory of
systems that would explain the evolution, not just of species, but of
ecological communities and of human societies. While Darwin's theory of descent
with modification, for which the fossil record offered empirical evidence,
explained the properties of species, Spencer's theory postulated a
"universal law of evolution" which asserted that any collection of
living things over time tends to self-organize in a "dynamic
equilibrium" while dissipating energy. This principle became a program for
interpreting everything. Spencer's theory of systems provided the critical
bridge from 19th century community ecology not only forward to 20th century
systems ecology but also backward to 18th century natural theology. As
geographer Clarence Glacken has written, "I am convinced that modern
ecological theory, so important in our attitudes towards nature and man's
interference with it, owes its origin to the design argument. The wisdom of the
creator is self-evident... no living thing is useless, and all are related one
to the other." In 19th century America, naturalists who came of age at the
time of the Civil War were educated in the tradition we associate with
"intelligent design," the idea that God's fullness and magnificence
is demonstrated in the perfect organization and replete diversity of the
natural world. The 18th century English poet Alexander Pope celebrated this
idea, "Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroyed / From Nature's
chain whatever link you strike." The scala natura or Great Chain of Being
served as the organizing metaphor for what would become community ecology. This
approach, according to historian of ideas A.O. Lovejoy, exalted the
"sufficient reason" that put every species in its place and
attributed self-sufficiency, self-organization, or "quietude" to
natural communities -- an ability to arrange and sustain themselves as God made
them if left undisturbed. The commonplaces of modern ecology, such as
"everything connects" and "save all the parts," recall the
neoplatonic view of nature as an integrated mechanism into which every species
fits. How were botanists, zoologists, entomologists, and other biologists able
to reconcile their education in natural theology with their acceptance of
evolutionary biology? Stephen Forbes, who headed the Department of Zoology at
the University of Illinois, showed how this could be done. According to
historian Sharon Kingsland, Forbes took from Herbert Spencer the belief that
evolutionary forces will achieve and maintain adaptive dynamic equilibriums
despite ever-changing relationships in ecological communities or systems. In a
seminal article written in 1887, Forbes described a glacial lake in Illinois as
a "system of organic interactions by which [species] influence and control
each other [that] has remained substantially unchanged from a remote geological
period." What could cause this system to organize and to maintain itself
for thousands or millions of years? Forbes wrote: Out of these hard conditions,
an order has been evolved which is the best conceivable... that actually
accomplishes for all the parties involved the greatest good which the
circumstances will at all permit.... Is there not, in this reflection, solid
ground for a belief in the final beneficence of the laws of organic nature? In
this paper, indeed, in this paragraph, Forbes performed intellectual feats that
remain impressive to this day. First, he assumed that there was an order, a
dynamic equilibrium, in the lake he visited. He had no empirical evidence to
show that the organisms he observed were ancient and enduring, nor did he
consider any necessary. Forbes, like Spencer, relied on deductive argument
based in a universal theory of natural history. The best-adapted or (as Forbes
wrote) "adjusted" species will organize themselves into sustainable
and resilient communities. Second, Forbes, like Spencer, called the dynamic
force or universal law that organizes nature in ascending levels or scales of
complexity not God, but Evolution. This substitution of nomenclature turned
18th century Great Chain of Being theodicy -- with its emphasis on pattern,
scale, process, mechanism, hierarchy, resilience, and plenitude -- into ecology
as it was studied throughout the 20th century. Frederic Clements, the most
influential plant ecologist of the early 20th century, who was also influenced
by Spencer, agreed with Forbes that nature is progressive and beneficent.
According to ecologist S. P. Hubbell, Clements believed that the community was
literally a 'superorganism,' and that species were its organs and succession
its ontogeny. He argued that each species had an essential role to play in
preparing the way for the next serial stage in the succession toward the
equilibrium or 'climax' plant community. Because Spencer's theory of adaptation
applied not just to species, but also to ecological communities, it allowed
community ecology to hold on to its theological roots while it embraced a
concept of evolution. By assuming that anything God could do, evolution did
better, biologists leapt from 18th century natural theology to 20th century
community ecology without missing a beat. But for the mantle of mathematics
that ecologists had draped over it, mid-20th century community and ecosystems
ecology could not be distinguished from the more openly theological framework
that Forbes had adapted from Spencer and presented 80 years earlier. 4.
Ecological economists drew on the study of ecological systems -- systems
ecology -- that developed after World War II in the context of Big Science and
postulated that ecological systems or communities are unified or governed by a
set of organizing principles. Nature itself, however, seems scandalously
indifferent to this philosophy. Ecologists who engaged in empirical research
found that the mathematical models devised by community and systems theorists
were not supported by observation other than by examples cherry picked for the
purpose. Had theoretical ecologists been interested in empirical evidence,
according to ecologist John Lawton, they would have easily falsified any
principle they tested; there are "painfully few fuzzy generalisations, let
alone rules or laws." As early as 1917, however, American botanist Henry
Gleason (1882-1975) had challenged the assumption that the living world is
organized under enduring principles or by powerful forces. He argued instead
that each association of plants and animals is unique, ephemeral, spontaneous,
idiosyncratic, extemporaneous, and a law unto itself. The sites that ecologists
study, he believed, should be seen as path-dependent histories rather than as
rule-governed communities. From this point of view ecosystems do not evolve;
they jus change. Gleason argued that no general law, principle, model, or
theory gets any predictive traction on the comings and goings of species. In a
recent article, Daniel Simberloff, a leading contemporary ecologist, refers to
the "longstanding controversy stemming back to Clements Gleason, and their
contemporaries, over whether a plant community is anything other than the
assemblage of populations co-occurring in a specific place at a specific time:
that is, to what extent are communities integrated, discrete entities, and, if
they are, what is the nature of the integration?" Underlying this
controversy is "the question of whether community ecology itself actually
has generalization beyond trivial ones like the laws of thermodynamics, and
whether seeking such generalizations advances the study of ecology at the
community level." Simberloff concedes that there are no nontrivial laws,
principles, or generalizations that predict events at the "system" or
the "community" level or that explain the integration these concepts
suggest. "Laws and models in community ecology are highly contingent, and
their domain is usually very local." William Drury found no emergent
properties, governing rules, or integration in the forests he studied. I feel
that ecosystems are largely extemporaneous and that most species (in what we
often call a community) are superfluous to the operation of those sets of
species between which we can clearly identify important interactions.... Once seen,
most of the interactions are simple and direct. Complexity seems to be a
figment of our imaginations driven by taking the 'holistic' view." Simply put, the evidence does not support the
idea that evolution applies on a system-wide scale. New ecosystems appear all
the time; the species found at a place rarely coevolved there. Nearly anywhere
one looks one finds species coming and going -- many or most are recent
arrivals. A group of 19 ecologists wrote in Nature, "Most human and
natural communities now consist both of long-term residents and of new
arrivals, and ecosystems are emerging that never existed before." If
creatures just show up at sites for their own reasons, which is usually the
case, the concept of evolution does not apply even as a useful metaphor at the
scale of the community or the ecosystem. As Drury argued, self-organizing
adaptive ecological communities or systems that achieve and sustain a dynamic
equilibrium are figments of the theoretical imagination driven by taking the
holistic view. Just because places change -- nature is continually in flux --
does not mean they evolve. There is no dynamic order, force, or principle of
self organization that makes every hodgepodge a system. 5. If the ecological
foundations of ecological economics rested upon shaky ground, the economic
foundations were no less problematic. Ecological economists have argued that
because they cannot guarantee that growth is sustainable -- that new
technologies will save the day -- we should (to quote the literature)
"degrow" the economy. "Given our high level of uncertainty about
this issue, it is irrational t bank on technology's ability to remove resource
constraints," insisted Costanza. "This is why ecological economics
assumes a prudently skeptical stance on technical progress." Ecological
economists argued that what they did not know about the ecological foundations
of the economy could hurt us, and that we ignored their uncertainty at our
peril. In other words, they appealed to their own ignorance about ecosystem
structure and function to empower their "precautionary" position.
Mainstream macroeconomists -- those who deal with indicators of economic
performance such as employment, inflation, trade, productivity, and national
competitiveness -- generally reject this precautionary stance. Robert Solow, a
Nobel laureate, spoke for many economists when he opined that if the future is
like the past, "there will be prolonged and substantial reductions in
natural-resource requirements per unit of real output." He asked,
"Why shouldn't the productivity of most natural resources rise more or
less steadily through time, like the productivity of labor?" By shifting
the content of their warnings from resource exhaustion to system overload,
ecological economists convinced few but themselves. Microeconomists swatted
away the precautionary principles of ecological economists as easily as they
had earlier dismissed the jeremiads of neo-Malthusians like Ehrlich. The answer
mainstream economics gave to system overload was the same as its response to
resource exhaustion: greater resource productivity and technological
innovation. By the 1980s, in response to some of the same challenges and
opportunities that had inspired the creation of ecological economics, a group
of mainstream welfare economists had founded the Association of Environmental
and Resource Economists. These neoclassical economists developed the field of
mainstream environmental economics to provide their own analysis of and
prescription for the environmental crisis. They rejected the thermodynamic theory
of value ecological economists proposed -- the idea that the constraint on
growth is "negative entropy," meaning "the degree of
organization or order of a thing relative to its environment." Instead,
environmental economists offered what they called "utility,"
"welfare," or "willingness to pay" as the central value for
environmental analysis and policy. Environmental economists defined and
measured welfare or utility in terms of preferences or, practically speaking,
the amounts people are 1) willing to pay (WTP) for a good or 2) willing to
accept (WTA) to relinquish it. They did not describe pollution and other
assaults on the environment in terms of entropic forces wearing down the
resilience of holistic and integrated evolutionary systems. They diagnosed environmental
problems as market externalities, that is, as uncompensated effects of economic
decisions on third parties whose interests -- or whose WTP -- those decisions
did not take into account. Economist Robert N. Stavins wrote, "The
fundamental theoretical argument for government activity in the environmental
realm is that pollution is an externality." Environmental economists had
an advantage because they applied a framework that was already familiar in
economic thought and therefore in policy analysis and political discourse.
During the 1990s, environmental outfits and agencies staffed up with economists
to attribute prices to externalities and discover market failures. Dueling
cost-benefit analyses and opposing stories about WTP or WTA began to co-opt,
infiltrate, and even replace moral argument and political persuasion. In
response, many ecological economists, including some who had criticized the
framework of neoclassical welfare economics, adopted it. It was easy to argue
that people are willing to pay a lot for nature and for the services it
provides. Accordingly, ecological economists, rather than continuing to
construe economic systems as embedded in ecological systems, reduced their
ambitions to tweaking neoclassical cost-benefit models to assign higher
existence values to nature and lower discount rates to its use. For example, in
the most cited and well-known paper written in ecological economics, Costanza
and a dozen colleagues in 1997 applied what they considered to be the concepts
of neoclassical utility theory to assign an economic worth of about $33
trillion -- much more than the value of the product of the global economy -- to
what they called "The Value of the World's Ecosystem Services and Natural
Capital." Ecological economists ended up fully embracing the slogan of
mainstream welfare economics that protecting the environment is a matter of
getting the prices right. A discipline that just a decade or two earlier had
insisted the market was embedded in nature had learned how to embed nature into
the market. 6. Having caved in to the normative framework of WTP or
cost-benefit utility theory, ecological economists have been unable to confront
the reasons that led Herman Daly, among others, to reject the market mechanism
as an approach to understanding environmental problems. There are exceptions. A
few ecological economists chided their colleagues for "commodity
fetishism" and called for "conservation based on aesthetic and
ethical arguments." They cited the article, "Selling Out on
Nature" by Douglas McCauley in Nature magazine, which argued that
"conservation must be framed as a moral issue," because nature has
"an intrinsic value that makes it priceless, and this is reason enough to
protect it." Costanza wrote in response, "I do not agree that more
progress will be made by appealing to people's hearts rather than their
wallets." Gretchen Daily, a prominent ecological economist, insisted that
only by attributing instrumental or economic value to nature can
conservationists influence public policy. "We have to completely rethink
how we deal with the environment, and we should put a price on it," she
said. Ecological economics, when it embraced cost-benefit and market-based
valuation, abandoned the ethos of much of the landmark environmental
legislation of the 1970s, which had rejected a market failure theory of
pollution. These statutes, such as the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, were
intended to protect public safety and health against toxic wastes and hazardous
emissions. This legislation rests on the same principle as common law: the
belief that one person should not injure or invade the person or property of
others without their consent. Understood in this way, pollution represents an
invasion of person and property and therefore is to be enjoined, minimized, or
tolerated unwillingly until technology can do better. Environmental law is
libertarian, not utilitarian, because it seeks to protect people and property
against peril and trespass rather than to maximize utility. One person does not
have the right to pollute and thus to trespass on another even when it is
socially efficient to do so. Economists Maureen Cropper and Wallace Oates wrote
in 1992 that "the cornerstones of federal environmental policy in the
United States explicitly prohibited the weighing of benefits against costs in
the setting of environmental standards." In response to the Reagan
revolution, ecological economists had followed the cost-benefit bandwagon. But
in doing so, they unwittingly played into their opponents' hands. By changing
the political conversation from the question, "What is a cause of
what?" to "What is a cost of what?" ecological economists
substituted the technocratic framework of microeconomics for the ethical
framework of responsibility. John V. Krutilla, an influential environmental
economist and strong environmentalist, demonstrated how pliable the idea of an
ecological or environmental externality could become. He observed that people
who contribute to environmental causes must (by definition) benefit from them.
Therefore, ideological, political, and moral commitments could be factored into
the cost-benefit analysis (CBA) that measures social welfare and thus justifies
environmental policy. Once political views, ideological principles, and
spiritual beliefs were treated as consumer preferences, environmentalism could
be reduced to one more interest group battling for its piece of the economic
pie -- for example, the aesthetic, cultural, and spiritual benefits of
ecosystems. The problem for environmentalists wasn't that they were losing the
epic cost-benefit battles that raged through the 1980s and 1990s. They more
than held their own in the dark art of creating social welfare functions to
justify whatever it is that one wants. But, ironically there is ample reason to
believe that CBA has never significantly affected rulemaking or regulation at
all. Robert Hahn, an advocate of CBA, conceded, "The relationship between
analysis and policy decisions is tenuous." He added, "There is little
evidence that economic analysis of regulatory decisions has had a substantial
positive impact" and argued that "the poor quality of analysis can
help explain some of this ineffectiveness." But the poor quality of much
cost-benefit analysis is arguably a function of the fact that cost-benefit
arguments are mostly invoked as a kind of "open sesame" to defend or
decry any governmental intervention. Advocates and policy makers, to borrow an
old saw, use CBA like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.
After Congressional committees, administrative agencies, and the courts tear
through them, the political battles that CBA is supposed to inform are settled
in terms of liability, responsibility, authority, and legality -- not welfare
maximization. If CBA lacks an intellectual and legal basis and has only a tenuous
regulatory effect, why is it done? One reason is that so many people can do it.
As law professor Duncan Kennedy has explained, CBA or the compensation test it
implies is "just as open to alternating liberal and conservative
ideological manipulation" as is the political deliberation it is supposed
to displace. However bad or mistaken cost benefit accounting may be, it has a
centrist effect, "supportive of liberalism and conservatism together, seen
as a bloc in opposition to more left and right wing positions." In other
words, by engaging in CBA, experts form a scientific "centrist bloc"
that agrees on "moderation, statism, and rationalism." When partisans
and opponents of environmental causes adopt the discourse of market failure and
social externality, they co-opt their political fringes and tamp down the moral
fervor of environmentalism, making the political conversation safe for
expertise. Ecological economics has evolved into the more pro-environment wing
of standard environmental economics. This has depleted the discipline of its
initial energy. As long as the vocabulary of microeconomics, including
cost-benefit analysis, remains the lingua franca of environmentalism, properly
credentialed and preferably academic participants will have the policy debate
to themselves. Evidently, this temptation proved to be too much for ecological
economists. 7. Ecological economics aimed to be revolutionary, but it is now
ignored by the sciences it had hoped to transform. Both ecology and economics
have changed, but not because of the rise of ecological economics. The science
of ecology could not draw indefinitely on its roots in 18th century theodicy.
As contemporary ecologists have abandoned theory for empiricism, ecology has
returned to the long suppressed view of Gleason, as Hubbell put it, that species
are "largely thrown together by chance, history, and random
dispersal." Species come and go. Ecological sites do not have a structure
or a function. They have a history. The science of economics has moved on as
well. Just when ecological economics caved in to the normative framework of
neoclassical welfarism, empirical work in behavioral and experimental economics
profoundly undermined that approach. Empirically-minded economists turned to
studying the behavior of institutions and individuals, rather than continuing
to model abstract utility functions. Ecological economists today try to put
prices on ecosystem benefits and services. This effort by environmentalists is
self-defeating. If environmental decisions are fundamentally framed as
questions of economic welfare, public officials and the public itself will opt
nearly every time for whatever policy promises more economic growth, more
production, and more jobs. Moreover, in a world where human influence is as
ancient as it is pervasive, it may be helpful to recognize that the natural
environment where we live is less of an input than an output of economic
activity. Ecological economics today, its ambitions greatly diminished, has
reached senescence; it provides an academic assisted-living facility for "Great
Chain of Being" ecology and cost-benefit economics. A hybrid discipline,
ecological economics crosses closet creationism with market fetishism. When
ecological economists dispute the relative importance of intrinsic vs.
instrumental value, the hybrid reverts to type. The scientific and
self-referential controversies in which ecological economists engage drain away
the moral power that once sustained environmentalism. This moral power may
return if environmentalists employ science not to prescribe goals to society
but to help society to achieve goals it already has. Environmentalists may then
shape the natural environment of the future rather than model and monetize the
environment of the past. (Mark Sagoff)
