Summary: We will consider economic aspects of the disabling analysis. Professor Hayes has written a paper on this topic that can be downloaded here.
How can the economy be harnessed to serve sustainability? What makes this question so ironic is that the growth in the physical scale of the economy under the prevailing regime of economic globalization has depleted resources, destroyed ecosystems, overwhelmed natural waste disposal sinks, waged war on subsistence cultures, and produced shocking maldistribution of wealth and income. How, then, can the economy be turned around to reinforce sustainable development rather than to destroy ecosystems, resource endowments, and indigenous cultures? This alchemy must be resolved to promote sustainability.
Ecological economics takes up the challenge of working out a functional analysis from which to base public policy and normative legitimacy. The global economy, a robust engine of change, must generate sustainable development rather than amplify entropy. The USA, the single most powerful economy in history, must be given foremost consideration. With only 4.5% of the world's people, the USA consumes about 25% of global resources and produces the same proportion of greenhouse gases. The USA dominates the Bretton Woods institutions--the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization--which shape the global economy, enforcing its ideology of neo-liberalism.
What is an economy? The national economy is measured as the monetized market value of the total amount of goods and services produced in a nation. Probe the language and we discover that the term “economy” derives from the Greek oikonomia, household management, based on oikos, "house," and nemein, "manage." Now consider the etymologically related term, “ecology,” which is defined as "the branch of biology concerned with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings." Ecology also derives from the ancient Greek term oikos, but instead of management, focuses on logos, "reason" (Oxford English Dictionary).
We must unravel these critical terms, ecology and economy. Confusing them will fog our analysis. Which should precede the other? Surely, we must understand the home of humanity before we muster the audacity to manage it. The sheer complexity should daunt us and make us prudent. However, this is not the case. In the last century and more, economy has obviously trumped ecology, to the detriment of the earth. This imbalance cannot be sustained. This implies that at some time in the future a threshold will be crossed and the economy/ecology will crash. We do not know when.
Scrutinize ends and means. Management of the human house, economics, implies the administration of means, a service function. The purpose of the economy is to serve humanity and the expanded human "house,"--our planet--not the obverse. Ends must come before means. Means must be subordinate to ends. Ecology should precede economics.
Consider the imperative of the economy to grow. We recognize that many humans, particularly those living in the industrialized temperate climatic zones, have greatly, but unevenly, benefited from economic growth, enshrining economic growth as a prize worthy of emulation by others, what Sachs calls "copycat development." Six billion people driving SUVs cannot happen; the earth cannot support such recklessness. The hubris of economics cannot endure. Hence, we must explore more deeply the nexus between the management of the human house, economy, and our understanding of its internal relations, ecology. Harmonizing this essential distinction must ground any approach to the economy that supports sustainability, even if that strategy originates from outside economics per se.
In all these instances, the prevailing hierarchy of economy and ecology must be inverted: Means define ends and reason restrains the will to control. This brings us back to our initial question: How can the economy be harnessed to serve sustainability? How economics can be made congruent with ecology is the challenge that the Brundtland Commission posed when it defined the mission of sustainable development. Economics, like technology, must serve sustainability, and ends must be defined in terms of culture and nature through open, participatory, ethical discourse, reinforcing democracy and transparency.
Sustainability should not reinforce the privileged position of economics, but should spark an inclusive conversation. The emerging field of eco-economics does attempt to reconcile ecology with economics, building an intelligible and critical bridge between science and social thought. Further, eco-economics lends itself to both normative considerations and prescriptive analysis, enlarging the scope of sustainability analysis to include ethics and public policy. The emerging field of eco-economy drives the discourse of sustainability further away from the dominance of economics.
The essay in this course by Wolfgang Sachs exemplifies the truth inherent in inverting economics and ecology and in listening to other voices and stories. For example, Sachs realizes that copycat development, the replication of the economic development practices of the global rich, will surely lead to global ruin: more poverty within vast ecological catastrophe. Orthodox western economics can neither be extended to the majority of the earth's human inhabitants nor can it be sustained indefinitely by the 20% or so who enjoy its cornucopia. Sachs reveals the parasitical political character of global capitalism masquerading as shared economic development.