SOME ECOLOGICAL ECONOMISTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Mark LindleyUniversity of Hyderabad School of Economics

26 September 2014

(The abbreviation “IMHO” will stand for “in my humble opinion”.)

Frederick Soddy (1877-1956)

A concerned scientist

It was mainly in the 1920s and ’30s that Soddy wrote about economics. Otherwise he wrote mainly about chemistry. He won a Nobel Prize in 1922 for research on isotopes and radioactivity.

He took up economics because he was distressed by what was happening economically after World War I:

“We have to find out how it comes about that science, which, without economic exhaustion, provided the sinews of war for the most colossal and destructive conflict in history, ... has not yet abolished poverty and degrading conditions of living from our midst in the piping times of peace.”

He was impressed, like Gandhi, by the non-monetary concept of wealth in John Ruskin’s Unto This Last (1860).Most economists have regarded him as a crank – and his writings on economics are cranky – but the keystone of his economic thinking, his concept of “virtual wealth”,is practically the same as James Tobin’s concept of “fidu-ciary issue”, and his main proposal for reform was made also by the top American economists of the 1920s, Irving Fisher and Frank Knight (Milton Friedman’s teacher).

Let me explain briefly the ecological-economics aspect of the issue. Monetary growth in the modern world is routinely achieved by fractional-reserve banking (banks lending money – and thus creating new debts – beyond the amounts which have been deposited). The original units of measure for that new money are thus negative (and, in fact, negative numbers were invented, long ago, mainly for the purpose of registering debts in account books), but the debtors – the people and institutions

that have borrowed the money – can use it to pay for real material transformations of natural resources (sources & sinks): transformations which are now beginning to result in (a) ominous exhaustion of non-renewable natural sour-ces of chemicals vital to Humankind, (b) dangerous levels of over-exploitation of renewable ones, (c) ecologically dangerous overloading of sinks, etc. There are real limits to the potentially available amounts of quite a few kinds of natural resources (sources and sinks) that are indis-

pensable for material human welfare, but there is no limit to the amount of money which can be created (by borrowing from banks practicing fractional-reserve banking) to spend on using them up too fast. Soddy –profound scientist that he was – understood this, and it is the main point of his 1926 book (presaging the crash of 1929): Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt: The Solution of the Economic Paradox.

Since I have mentioned natural limits and monetary limit-lessness, let me add a relevant mathematical digression. Some mathematicians are “finitists”, denying the validity (at least in certain contexts) of the concept of infinity. And, a few of them are “ultrafinitists”, critical not only of infinity but also of very big numbers. At a conference of mathematical colleagues, the obvious “how-to-draw-the-line” objection was put to an eminent ultrafinitist,

Alexander Esenin-Volpin: In the sequence 21, 22, 23..., which was the first number that he would rule out? He asked the questioner to be more specific. “OK. Does 21 exist?” – After a momentary delay he said yes. – “Well then, how about 22?” After a delay twice as long: “Yes.” “23?” After a delay again twice as long: “Yes.” This was enough for the mathematicians to get the point that in certain real contexts, finitism implies

ultrafinitism. (Of course the demonstration doesn’t depend on powers of 2; it could just as well use, say, powers of 1½.) Ultrafinitism is IMHO relevant to Sod-dy’s scientific argument, even though a kind of infinity is needed to explain calculus.)

I am including Soddy in this lecture (although theterm “ecological economics” didn’t exist in the first half of the 20th century) because (a) he had a basic qualification for an ecological economist – namely grasp of the relevant natural science – and because of (b) the relevance to ecological economics (which he also grasped) of his objection to fractional-reserve banking. He said:

"Debts are subject to the laws of mathematics rather than [to the laws of] physics. Unlike [physical mat-erial] wealth, which is subject to the laws of thermo-dynamics, debts do not rot with old age and are not consumed in the process of living. On the contrary, they grow at so much percent per annum, by the well-known mathematical laws of simple and com-pound interest.... It is this underlying confusion between [material] wealth and debt that has made such a tragedy of the scientific era."

Here is a delightful IMHO example of Soddy’s cranki-ness as a writer on economics:

“Orthodox economics has never yet been anything but the class economics of the owners of debts. If its writers ever attempted any wider social applications, they made themselves simply ridiculous, as when one [of them] solemnly looked forward to the millenniumarriving [paradise on Earth] through the accumulation of so much [monetary] capital that everyone would be well off and comfortable, presumably by living on the interest of their mutual indebtednesses.”

J.C. Kumarappa (1892-1960)

Mahatma Gandhi’s economist

(I wrote a book about him.My friends and I call him “Ku”.)

1928 1953

I will discuss him as an ecological economist. My book gives a broad account of him as an economist and as an anti-imperialist. Prof. Solo-mon Victus has written about him as an unusual Christian theologian.

Ku was born and raised in Tanjore, became a char-tered accountant in London, and then a professor at a business school in Bombay, and then earned an M.A. degree in economics in New York, where his teachers included (1) a professor who gave him a top grade for disagreeing effectively with his own strongly held view that the science of economics did not have to be normative, and (2) the professor who had mentored Ambedkar’s first doctorate.

In 1929-30 Gandhi had Ku’s graduate thesis published in five languages. (The English book title was Public Finance and Our Poverty.) In the mid 1930s they co-founded the All-India Village Industries Association, which Ku administered honestly but not very effec-tively. He did, however, design, organise and write up four major studies, based on household surveys, of economic conditions in various parts of rural India. He may have had a more detailed statistical familiarity with India’s villages than anyone else has ever had.

Other Gandhians writing about economics focused on distributive justice, but Ku’s Economy of Permanence (1945) and many of his other publications broadened Gandhian economic thought by paying due attention also to ecological issues. That book title, if understood in a secular way – and such was Ku’s understanding —implies an ecological outlook :

"Human life rarely reaches even a hundred years while ... to measure the life of Nature will run into astronomical figures.... It is in this relative sense that we speak of 'an economy of permanence'."

Material (as distinct from monetary) reckonings are characteristic of ecological economics. Ku reckoned how 77,000 acres of land (66,600 in crops, plus 15% for "seed and waste") could provide 100,000 people with a balanced vegetarian diet of some 2850 calories per day, and enough cotton for their clothing. Here is a slightly simplified version of the table he drew up:

Ku said that:

“For transferring purchasing-power, money and credit are unsurpassed. [But] an honest exchange ... should also include transfers of human and moral values. These last two are not represented in a money trans-action.... The old Indian system of distribution was a

combination of money and barter exchange, where humane considerations had a place.”

In the early 1940s he devised a normative scale of five kinds of economic comportment – “predatory”, “para-sitical”, “enterprising”, “communal” and “service-ori-ented” – whereby good and bad can be assessed as a matter of moving up or down in that scale. For example:

“When a mother nurses ... her children, all the return she gets is the joy of seeing them well fed and happy; that is her ‘wage’. From this [service-oriented eco-nomic activity] there is a fall to the ‘economy of enter-prise’ when a wet-nurse feeds the baby.... When the extravagant claims [made in behalf of] of [synthetic] baby foods do not bear any close relation to facts, we go right down to the ‘parasitic economy’ where the profit made is the overruling consideration irrespective of any harm that may befall the baby.”

In a later book, Gandhian Economic Thought (1951), Ku distinguished between “home industry” such as cooking or sewing for members of the same household, “village industry” for distribution and consumption mainly with-in the same village, and “cottage industry” producing commodities the consumption of which might take place anywhere. He felt that village industry is more efficient, transportation-wise and in terms of transaction costs, than mass-production factories. In the 1930s he said:

“While the plant that transforms raw materials into consum-able articles is located in some one place, the ... raw materi-als are gathered from the places of their origin and brought together to feed the machinery ... at a speed demanded by the technical requirements ... for production at an ‘economic speed’.... [And then] when the goods have been produced they have to be sold. Again the problems of routes, ports, steamships and political control of peoples have to be faced. Exchange, customs and other financial and political barriers have to be regulated to provide the necessary facilities. All this can be done only at the point of the bayonet.”

Ku was far less savvy about the natural sciences than a 21st-century ecological economist has to be, but he had far more regard for them than market economists normally do. He urged, for instance, that government send out “soil doctors” to analyse local soils and advise farmers as to how much of this & that to apply by way of artificial fertilizer. (So much for Hayek’s belief in the supreme wisdom of the scientifically ignorant “man on the spot” when adopting new techniques!)

Because of Ku’s seminal role in the pre-history of eco-logical economics, and because I dislike hagiography, I would like to see “Gandhian economic thought” de-fined, not as “what the Mahatma said”, but as an ap-proach whereby (1) market economics is understood to be merely part of ecological economics:

— and therefore welfare is understood to depend far less on American-style affluence than on sus-tainability:

HumanWelfare

Adequate ________________ EcologicalConsumption Sustainability

↑21st-century

opportunity-costissue

— and (2) since big uncertainties will inevitably characterize 21st-century life, large-scale operations are understood to be inherently dangerous, and so:

– Small is BEAUTIFUL! –

— and (3) for similar reasons, non-violence is to be systematically preferred to violence.

E. F. Schumacher (1911-77)

The father of “appropriate technology”

before after

Keynes said in 1946, “If my mantle is to fall on anyone, it would only be [Xxxx] or Fritz Schumacher. [Xxxx] can do anything with figures, but Schumacher can make them sing.”

Schumacher was German-born. (His father was the Professor of Economics at the University of Berlin.) He studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and then settled in England after a few years as an investment banker and university teacher in the USA.

He was interned at an isolated British farm for most of World War II. (He was anti-Nazi but his brother-in-law was in charge of Germany’s programme to develop the atom bomb.) Keynes got him out, and from 1950 to 1970 Schumacher was the top economic advisor to the nationalized British coal industry (which is not to say that the Coal Board followed all his advice). Already in 1945 he had told his wife:

“In England we are fighting for a system of govern-ment and economic administration that is based on the notion that every human being matters. We are fighting against ... callousness towards the ordinary man.”

In 1955 he took a three-months leave of absence from the Coal Board to visit Burma and advise the govern-ment there on economic development. While he was there, he came to believe that

“Gandhi ... [had] laid the foundation for a system of economics.”

Schumacher said that

“Local, short-distance transportation should receive every encouragement, but long hauls should be dis-couraged” – and he said that “A Buddhist economy would make ‘the distinction between "renewable“ and "non-renewable resources"’. A civilization based on renewable resources, such as the products of forestry and agriculture, is by this fact alone superior to one built on nonrenewable resources, such as oil, coal, metal, etc.”

Back in London the next year he declared: “We must now live without war, ... [and] on income rather than capital (exhaustion of fossil fuels, etc.). Both these tasks require the attainment of a higher level of con-sciousness, called AHIMSA.... If we want to preserve human civilization we must learn ‘nonviolence’ in all activities – not only politics but also economics, medi-cine, agriculture, horticulture, industry, etc.”

It is IMHO very likely that during his residence in Burma in a Buddhist monastery he had read Ku’s Economy of Permanence. When citing it he would call Ku “a Buddhist philosopher”.

Schumacher set out the idea of “intermediate tech-nology” – later replaced with the term “appropriate technology” – in a 1962 report to the Indian Planning Commission, in which he (like Ku before him) empha-sized that India was far better supplied with labourthan with monetary capital. He called for “inter-mediate industrial technology” to harness the labour surplus.

His Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (published in 1973, soon after an article of his which was entitled “The Economics of Permanence”) had an impact on enlightened public opinion in England and to some extent in the USA during the next 10-15 years.

The book has four main parts: on the “modern world”, on the *then+ “third world”, on various types of re-sources (land, the minerals used in industry, nuclear energy, “technology with a human face”, etc.) and on organization and ownership. In the first chapter he said:

“Mankind ... in the last hundred years has ... broken into Nature’s larder and now is emptying it out at a breathtaking speed.... Modern man ... talks of a battle with Nature, forgetting that if he won the battle, he would find himself in the losing side.... [The] two primary factors in the economy [are] food and fuel.”

(Not “capital” and “labour”!)

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1906-94)

Often called “G-R”

As sharp as a knife…

G-R took his doctorate at Harvard under Joseph Schum-peter. His fellow doctoral candidates there included John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Sweezy and Paul Samuelson (whose high regard for him was due in part to the fact that some of the theoretical inventions which people routinely attribute to Samuelson were actually due to G-R – whom Samuelson himself honestly credited).

G-R had extraordinarily sharp mathematical skills, and loved to scold other economists for their mathem-atical shortcomings. (I will describe later a couple of rudimentary examples.) This made him unpopular.

One of his books, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), describes the history and nature of science more perceptively IMHO than does Thomas Kuhn’s far more fashionable The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Here are three of the many bracing insights to be found in G-R’s book:

(1) In a theoretical discussion of “novelty by combina-tion”, the fact that the known “laws” of social science have little predictive power is related the fact that the “laws” of chemistry have less predictive power than do those of physics:

“The rules that are now used for predicting the quali-ties of a substance from its chemical formula are spotty. Moreover, most of them have been established by purely empirical procedures and, hence, are less likely [than the known laws of physics] to carry much weight beyond the cases actually observed....

“For a chemist the behavior of a newly obtained com-pound may display [therefore] many novelties. Yet, once this chemical compound has been synthesized, the next time the chemist prepares it he will no longer be confronted by another novelty by combination: matter, at the physico-chemical level, is uniform. More often than not, [however,] this permanence is absent from the organic and superorganic domain[s] [of reality]. For a glaring yet simple example:

In some human societies, the bride is bought, in others she brings a dowry into the new family, and in still others there is no [such] matrimonial trans-action of any sort.”

So much for the “positive” economists’ proud analogy between market-economics and physics!

(2) G-R made good use of Alfred Lotka’s distinction (1956) between endosomatic and exosomatic instruments. (Lotka had in the 1920s founded mathematical biology.) “Endosomatic” means “within (or part of) the biological body”; “exosomatic” means external to it. A bird’s fea-thers, wings, beak and lungs are endosomatic. Garments, houses, shovels, ploughs, mills, stoves, spears, needles, guns, spinning wheels, looms etc., exosomatic.

A related distinction is between (a) endosomatic uses of energy (i.e. within the bodies of biological organisms: for instance, the uses of chemical energy (derived from eating and breathing) to maintain a certain temperature in warm-blooded animals, or to make muscles function,etc.) and (b) exosomatic uses of energy (consuming fuels, or in windmills, dams, tide-powered devices etc.).

(3) G-R understood that complete retrieval and reuse of economically useful matter once it has been dispersed or chemically transformed is impossible. But there are a couple of terminological problems here. (a) He offered this precept as a proposed “Fourth Law of Thermo-dynamics”, but since it’s not about the dispersal of energy (as willy-nilly heat incapable of doing physical work) but about material substances, it doesn’t sound

like a law of “thermodynamics”. However, (b) if that problem exists merely because the prefix “thermo-” should no longer be part of the name of this part of physics, then maybe the “Second Law” covers the matter (Herman Daly has assured me of this; but I am still doubtful about it) and so there’s no need for G-R’s “Fourth Law”.

Here are three problems of another kind in G-R’s writing:

(1) His thinking was so elaborate and so venturesome that one can always find things to criticize. For instance, he was IMHO misled by intellectual passion when he called the Entropy Law “an evolutionary law” and thus implicitly misrepresented what Darwin and others have meant by “evolution”. Related to this point is the fact that G-R’s theoretical concept of “long term” was some-times too long for an economist.

(2) He contributed a glowing “Afterword” to a journal-istically popularizing book, Jeremy Rifkin’s and Ted How-ard’s Entropy: A New World View (1971), and thereby exposed himself to disdain from ideological opponents. He had not reckoned with the subsequent, very lavishly funded attacks worldwide on the environmental move-ment.

(Andrew Rowell’s Green Backlash: Global Subversion of the Environmental Movement (Routledge, 1996) and Sharon Beder’s Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism (1997) predate by ten years the USA’s “Tea Party” Movement.)

(3) In discussing “non-renewables” (which Ku in the 1940s had called “buckets”), G-R used a term, “available energy”, which various physicists have used to mean various things, whereas there existed among physicists an unambiguous term, “exergy”, for what he meant. This little terminological snafu has IMHO tended to hinder effective communication between ecological economists and physicists.

G-R published in 1972 the following set of political and cultural recommendations:

“First, the production of all instruments of war ... should be prohibited.... Second, underdeveloped nations must be aided to arrive as quickly as possible at a good (not luxurious) life.... Third, mankind should gradually lower its population to a level that could be adequately fed ... by organic agriculture.... Fourth, until either the direct use of solar energy becomes a general convenience

or controlled [atomic] fusion is achieved, all waste of energy – by overheating, overcooling, overspeeding, overlighting, etc. – should be carefully avoided.... Fifth, we must cure ourselves of the morbid craving for extra-vagant gadgetry, splendidly illustrated by such a contra-dictory item as the golf-cart.... Sixth, we must also get rid of fashion.... Manufacturers will then have to focus on durability.... Seventh,... durable goods must be made

more durable by being designed so as to be repairable. …Eighth, ... we must come to realize that an important prerequisite for a good life is a substantial amount of leisure spent in an intelligent manner.”

In the last paragraph of that essay, a sense of despair as to whether “addiction to exosomatic comfort” could be overcome led G-R to envisage Humankind and in-deed life on Earth as facing a very serious predicament:

“Perhaps, the destiny of man is to have a short, but fiery, exciting and extravagant life.... Let other spe-cies – the amoebas, for instance – which have no spiritual ambitions, inherit an earth still bathed in plenty of sunshine.”

I promised to describe some rudimentary examples of G-R scolding other economists for mathematical short-comings. I will take them from a brilliant essay of his entitled “Man and Production”.

Here are three equations which look similar but have quite different kinds of meaning:

Q = F (X, Y, Z, ...)

q = Ф (x, y, z, ...)

P = f (a, b, c, ...)

(1) In the first equation, Q = F (X, Y, Z, ...), all the letters except “F” stand for sums. (Capital letters for totals is a convention of mathematical notation.) If “Q” refers to cars, then the equation means that to produce a certain number of cars would require certain amounts of this and that factor of production. (These latter amounts will have to be calculated later in other equations. They

are, at this stage of the theory, “unknown” quantities, and that’s why they are represented by the last few letters of the alphabet. It’s a convention (due to Des-cartes) to use “x”, “y” and “z” for numerical quantitiesthat need to be reckoned. But, and this is important for clear theoretical thinking, an equation of this kind with capital letters (for sums) says nothing about how fast the production would happen. If it’s about getting 100

cars, the production could just as well be, as far as this kind of equation indicates, a matter of producing one car per year for a century, or a matter of producing one per hour in 10 ten-hour working days. Both ways are covered alike by such an equation as Q = F (X, Y, Z, ...).

(2) In the equation “ q = Ф (x, y, z, ...) ”, G-R used, not “F”, but the analogous letter in the Greek alphabet, to indicate that the phrase “is a function of” can have various different kinds of meaning. Here the small let-ters “x”, “y”, and “z” stand for rates of flow per unit of time. If “q” refers to a number of “cars produced per day or per week” (and of course one number for the

daily rate implies a certain other number for the weekly rate, depending on how many workdays per week you reckon on), then on the other side of the solved equa-tion you would write a number for the rate at which monetary capital has to be invested, other numbers

for the rates at which the work force has to perform various tasks, and yet other numbers for the rates at

which certain resources from the Earth – such as metal, water, sand (for making the walls and floors of the fac-tories) and so on – would have to be supplied.

G-R specified on which page of which book the founder of econometrics had confused these first two kinds of equation. (Should he have studied diplomacy?)

(Let me mention here, by the way, that according toJoan Robinson, Hayek's argument in regard to invest-ment and capital “consisted in confusing the current rate of investment with the total stock of capital goods”.)

(3) Meanwhile, “ P = f (a, b, c, ...) ” merely says that production is due to a number of factors. G-R called it “a slick tautology” and described its widespread use (in textbooks) “for presenting ‘the production function’”. The equals-sign in this “equation” has no quantitative meaning. “P” stands for a commodity not specified quantitatively. The use of the first few letters of the alphabet (a, b, c...) means that at this point we don’t

anticipate solving, later in our theorizing, any equa-tions in order to reckon the amounts of those things. The quantities are presumed to be known; that’s why the letters are a, b, c... rather than x, y, z…. And, there is no indication, in regard to each of the supposed factors of production (a, b, c...), as to whether it is a flow or a fund – and yet that distinction is very im-portant in large-scale production, and equally so in ecological economics.

G-R’s career is surveyed very well at

www.rpi.edu/~gowdyj/mypapers/RSE1998.pdf

Herman Daly (1938 )

IMHO the best of the batch, especially for those of you who are

well versed in neoclassical economic theory

He took his doctorate in 1967 under G-R. His academic home since 1995 has been the University of Maryland (near Washington DC). Before that, he was for six years the “Senior Economist” in the “Environment Depart-ment” of the World Bank. He knows not just economic theory, but also how political insiders in the USA think.

Daly is great at using, with ecological-economic insight, various concepts basic to neoclassical market economics – not just “scarce resources” (the obvious first choice) but also linear throughput, rivalness, excludability and congestibility, marginal utility and diminishing marginal physical product, optimal scale, stock-flows and fund-services, substitutability and complementarity, elasticity

of demand and supply, market failure, externalities, public goods, intertemporal discounting, the IS-LM model, seigniorage, risk, uncertainty & intermediate conditions, asymmetric information flows, Tinbergen’s precept that every independent policy goal calls for an independent policy-instrument, etc. etc.

Here are a few examples:

From 1971: “Can't Get Enough of That Wonderful Stuff. The American people have been told by ... the President's Council of Economic Advisors that, ‘If it is agreed that economic output is a good thing it follows by definition that there is not enough of it.’ ...Has the learned council forgotten about diminishing marginal benefit and in-creasing marginal costs? ... Growth in GNP should cease when decreasing marginal benefits become equal to

increasing marginal costs. But there is no statistical series that attempts to measure the cost of GNP. This is growth mania, literally not counting the costs of growth. But the situation is even worse. We take the real costs of increasing GNP as measured by the de-fensive expenditures incurred to protect ourselves

from the unwanted side effects and [we] add these expenditures to GNP…. We count real costs as benefits. This is hypergrowthmania.”

From 1977: “The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.”

From 1994: “Economists have long advocated internal-izing external costs either by ... Pigouvian taxes ... or by Coasian redefinition of property rights.... A blunter, but much more operational instrument would be simply to shift our tax base away from labor and income on to throughput. We have to raise public revenue somehow, and the present system is highly distortionary in that

by taxing labor and income in the face of high unem-ployment in nearly all countries, we are discouraging exactly what we want more of. The present signal to firms is to shed labor, and substitute more capital and resource throughput, to the extent feasible. It would be better to economize on throughput because of the high external costs of its associated depletion and

pollution, and at the same time to use more labor because of the high social benefits associated with reducing unemployment.... The shift could be carried out gradually by a pre-announced schedule to minim-ize disruption. This shift should be a key part of struc-tural adjustment, but should be pioneered in the North. Indeed, sustainable development itself must

be achieved in the North first. It is absurd to expect any sacrifice for sustainability in the South if similar measures have not first been taken in the North. The major weakness in the World Bank's ability to foster environmentally sustainable development is that it [has] only had leverage over the South.... Some way must be found to push the North also.”

From 2004 (with Joshua Farley): “Should we tax energy and raise its price for the sake of inducing more effi-cient use, or should we subsidize energy and lower its price to help the poor? One instrument (price of energy) cannot serve two independent goals (increase efficiency, reduce poverty). We need a second instru-ment, say an income policy. Then we can tax energy for the sake of efficiency and distribute income (perhaps from the tax proceeds) to the poor for the sake of alleviating poverty.”

From the same textbook, a set of graphs (with line EC representing “ecological capacity” and reflecting a theoretical “biophysical equilibrium”:

From 2008: “I would ... advocate gradually increas-ing reserve requirements for banks.... If every dollar invested represented a dollar previously saved, we could restore the classical economists’ balance be-tween investment and abstinence. Far fewer stupid or crooked investments would be tolerated if abstin-ence had to precede investment.”

William Rees (1943 )and

Mathis Wackernagel (1962 )

The co-inventors of “ecological footprint”

The ecological footprint concept was first set out in detailin 1994 in Wackernagel’s Ph.D. thesis written under Rees’sguidance. It is a kind of index, for ecological economics, analogous to GNP and per-capita “cost of living” in marketeconomics. It is reckoned in terms of area (different kindsof area on the surface of the Earth) and not of money.

The ecological footprint of a given population is defined as

the total area of ecologically productive land and water(cropland, pasture, forest, marsh, river, sea, etc.) thatwould with prevailing technologies be required in orderto provide on a continuous basis the energy and mat-erials consumed by that population, and to absorb its wastes. A brilliant aspect of the ecological-footprint index is that for each nation, it can be estimated from data that have already been gathered for market eco-nomics. (It was thus useful in a decade before any

appreciable amount of funding was available for makingdirect strong-sustainability reckonings.) For instance, thepasture component of a nation’s ecological footprint canbe reckoned from the totals of how much money is beingspent annually in that country for dairy products and from estimating, for that complex of dairy products, how much pasture (not necessarily in the same country) is needed to produce those goods.

It’s also possible to reckon how much ecologically pro-ductive surface of various types is available within eachnation. The term for this in relation to national ecologicalfootprint is “national available bio-capacity”. The eco-logical footprint minus the available bio-capacity is the “ecological surplus or deficit”. And, by dividing each of these three numbers by the number of people living in the nation, one gets corresponding per-capita estimates. Here are some of them in hectares as of the mid-1990s:

Ecological Available Ecologicalfootprint: bio-capacity: surplus/deficit:

Australia 9.0 14.0 5.0

Canada 7.7 9.6 1.9

China 1.2 0.8 –0.4

Germany 5.3 1.9 –3.4

India 0.8 0.5 –0.3

Japan 4.3 0.9 –3.4

USA 10.3 6.7 –3.6

Earth 2.8 2.0 –0.8

(The ecological deficits for India and China are, of course, higher now than twenty years ago.)

Since the reckoning is in terms of two-dimensionalsurface area, it is inapplicable to aspects of depletion (for instance, of fossil fuels) or pollution (for instance, of air) which call for reckoning in terms of weight or vol-ume. But in spite of this lack of comprehensiveness, and notwithstanding the rough nature of the estimates (al-beit no more rough than some of those, such as for cost of living, that are commonly used in market economics),

“ecological footprint” summarizes a lot of useful informa-tion. It shows, for instance, that the “average” person living in the USA in the 1990s was contributing more than ten times as much as the “average” person in India was to a related worldwide “ecological deficit” which was in turn a partial indication of the extent to which Human-kind was using up, for current consumption, the finite natural capital offered by the Earth.

This concept suits the traditional economic theorist’s taste for reducing complex realities to a single scale of values. However, ecological economics in this century will IMHO

have to be of such a transdisciplinary nature, incorporating information from the natural sciences (as 20th-century medical science has done) as well as from various social sciences, that it will no more seek to describe an economy with a single number (such as ecological footprint or GDP) than medical doctors seek to describe a patient’s health with a single number.

Robert Costanza (1950- )

Savvy, energetic, and not angry

To me he seems the least interesting of the wonderful group described in this lecture, but he may yet “get through” to the business and political community better than the others were able to do. (He doesn’t scold.) He may thus belong to the 21st century – and hence to you – more than to the 20th (when he was mentored by Her-man Daly); but in fact he was seminal in founding in the late 1980s the International Society for Ecological Eco-

nomics. He served as its first president, and for 12 years as the chief editor of its excellent journal, Ecological Economics (free-of-charge via the web if you prefer it so). He has been and remains a prolific author, and his writings are said to have been cited in more than 30,000 other scientific publications. (That number hints at the possibility that maybe a corner is being turned at last.) He was recently appointed Professor of Public Policy at the Australian National University.

Joan Martinez-Alier (1939 )

Academically accomplished, and an activist…

JMA’s home is the Spanish city of Barcelona, and he is a professor there of economics and economic history. He was a co-founder of the International Society for Eco-logical Economics. His many publications include Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South, written in collaboration with Ramachandra Guha. He is a senior academic figure in an international movement advo-cating, in the West, a period of economic degrowth (GNP-wise) for the sake of social justice and ecological sustain-ability.

JMA uses a broader concept than “ecological footprint” and “carbon footprint”. He and his associates call it “so-cial metabolism”. Just as an animal has a metabolism – breathing in a certain amount of air, eating and drinking certain amounts of this & that chemical substance, and expelling certain amounts as waste, so also does a hu-man society. JMA and his associates try to measure the whole thing in considerable detail, in terms of weight.

(The word “metabolism” is IMHO misleading here, as it implies that a human population is an organism; but this word is the standard English translation of a suitable German term, StoffwechseI, which was taken by Marx from a leading agronomist of his day, Justus von Liebig (who had invented artificial fertilizers). Wechsel means “change” or “exchange”. I translate StoffwechseI as “transformative exchanges of matter”.)

JMA and his colleagues publish interesting facts about transformative exchanges of matter between Humankind and the rest of Nature – for instance, that India has been using certain amounts of sand in recent years to con-struct all the new concrete buildings, and that even though we may think of petroleum and natural gas as more modern kinds of fossil fuel than coal, Humankind today is burning more coal than ever before.

According to the following graph (calculated in 2012 by JMA and colleagues) of India’s annual “total domestic material consumption” since 1961, broken down into four broad categories, the “social metabolism” in 2011 was four times as fast as it had been 50 years earlier, but the differ-ence in regard to biomass was less than half as much. The unit here is gigatonnes per year:

During that time, the population had more than doubled; so, the biomass aspect of the per-capita counterpart to “social metabolism” had declined. In the following graph the unit is tonnes per capita per year:

JMA not only teaches, and helps lead the ISEE and the Degrowth Movement, but also visits and communicates with people in various parts of the world – India, Latin America, Africa (you name it, he’s been there) – building up a worldwide coalition between, on the one hand, the intellectuals who understand about ecological eco-nomics and the need for degrowth, and, on the other hand, people with little money and little formal educa-

tion who nonetheless understand that their villages and their lives and the lives of their children are being damaged by someone else’s kind of economic develop-ment. Gradually more and more of those people are complaining and protesting. JMA’s most important IMHO publication is an article (2012) entitled “Environ-mental Justice and Economic Degrowth: An Alliance be-tween Two Movements”. It has section headings like

“Ecological Economics and Social Metabolism…”, “Peak Population: Love One Another More, and Do Not Multi-ply”, “The Environmentalism of the Poor”, “Against Cheap Exports and in Favor of Renewable Energy and Local Peo-ple”, “Controversies on Climate Justice”, “Peasant Agricul-ture Cools Down the Earth”, “Socially Sustainable Eco-nomic Degrowth” and “Conclusion: An Obvious Alliance”.

The article is full of historical information and citations.

Apart from academics, the website is www.ejolt.org.

P.S. For my comments on a 20th-century ecological econo-mist as great as any of these others – Kenneth Boulding – please google my name and “Distinguished Lecture”.