This commentary is by Jim Andrews, a herpetologist, conservationist and educator who lives in Salisbury.
I was reading the obituary of ecological economist Herman Daly last week. It reminded me of a short phone conversation I had with a candidate in the primary a few months ago. That conversation left me feeling that they did not fully comprehend the need to move toward an economic system that recognized the resource limits of our finite planet.
It seems clear to me that if we are to successfully address climate change and the many other threats to our life-support system, we need to upgrade from traditional economics to ecological economics. Ecological economics is informed by a knowledge of ecology as well as economics, and as such recognizes that our planet is finite, whereas traditional economics largely ignores impacts on our planet and its finite resources.
As a Vermont ecologist and educator, I repeatedly cite the three major threats to biodiversity in Vermont and around the globe as habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, and habitat degradation. Most ecologists and wildlife biologists agree that the primary drivers of these three threats are human population growth and increasing resource use per capita.
Readers may be familiar with the I=PAT formula often cited by ecologists, where I is humanity’s negative impact on the environment, P is the size of our human population, A is affluence (resource use per capita) and T is the use of technology to minimize impacts.
Traditional economists and many others have long hoped that improved technology alone would balance out the negative impacts of population growth and resource use per capita, but that has not been the case, and it is impossible in a finite world. An analogy would be believing that Vermont could provide all needed resources (minerals, wood, fiber, energy, etc.) and food for the state as long as we could develop technology that makes those resources go further.
Technology could help decrease the rate of destruction of Vermont, but to maintain healthy working ecosystems here for the long run, we would need to at least stabilize the number of people dependent on us and the amount of resources they each used.
To maintain working ecosystems, biodiversity, and our life-support system in Vermont (and around the world), we need to work to dispel the myth that a healthy economy requires population growth and increased consumption.
We should be embracing the stabilization of birth rates that is taking place in most developed countries (those with strong educational systems) as necessary and desirable. We need to be working to stabilize birth rates throughout the world.
Of course, this type of talk creates images of draconian limits on the number of children per family, strict immigration laws, or increased numbers of abortions. However, those approaches are not necessary. All that is needed is a commitment to the education of women (and men) throughout the world, including information on birth control, and availability of birth control methods if they should choose to use them.
The resource use issue also needs to be addressed worldwide, but we have to recognize that for many people in poor and underdeveloped countries (and for some people here), resource use needs to increase for them in order to provide them with a basic standard of living. Of course, that means that those already using more than their share of resources (most of us in Western nations) need to be cutting back on our consumption and use in order to stabilize our total resource demands.
Sadly, short- and long-term environmental impacts have not yet been integrated into traditional economic thinking. However, ecological economics does incorporate a knowledge of these impacts.
The Salisbury Conservation Commission invited ecological economist Jon Erickson of the UVM Gund Institute for Environment to speak here in Salisbury. He stressed the need to work toward a steady-state economy and degrowth.
These are new and scary ideas to many, but the limits of our current economic system have long been discussed by ecological economists such as the late Herman Daly (many books), Tim Jackson (“Prosperity Without Growth,” second edition, 2017), and Kate Raworth (“Donut Economics,” 2017).
However, even here in Vermont, politicians and media often repeat the myth that more people and more resource use is what we need to address our current social issues, where in truth, they make these issues more difficult to deal with. Jon Erickson has recently added his own book (The Progress Illusion: Reclaiming Our Future from the Fairytale of Economics, 2022) to the list of titles trying to move us toward sustainability.
I strongly believe that, when the opportunities present themselves, we all need to help move our state, our country, and our planet away from the perpetual growth myth, and toward a sustainable and science-based ecological economic system that recognizes the need for world population stabilization, and stabilization and redistribution of the planet’s limited resources while meeting everyone’s basic needs.