Green Economics: Expanding the Circle of Influence

The glib phrase ‘economics for people and planet’ is one that green economists frequently use to describe how what they propose for the world’s economy is different. It is really shorthand for expressing a need to move beyond the narrow view of the economy as it is currently organised. So many perspectives are never considered by a system of economics that privileges white, wealthy, western men (see the extraordinary picture of the Bretton Woods conference). The way the global economy is organised can be seen as an extension of a colonial system whereby the resources and people of most of the planet are harnessed to improve the living standards of the minority of people who live in the privileged West. On the one hand, the rights of people living in the global South to an equal share in the planet’s resources should be respected. On the other, their approach to economics, especially that of indigenous societies which have managed to survive within their environments for thousands of years, has much to recommend it and much we may learn from. While we do not glorify low living standards we do see the value in learning from the South.

Even within western societies there are gross inequalities between people. The system of patriarchy has ensured that the majority of resources are controlled by men. Most of the world’s poor are women. The male dominance of the economy has resulted in a situation where women form 70 per cent of the world’s poor and own only 1% of the world’s assets (Amnesty International). According to UNFPA (2005), on a global basis women earn only 50% of what mean earn. And in spite of equal pay legislation in the UK and US the pay gap between the genders persists. Green economics also extends the circle of concern beyond our single species to consider the whole system of planet earth with all its complex ecology and its diverse species. As an illustration of the narrowness of the current approach to policy-making we can use the thought experiment of the Parliament of All Beings (see earlier post).

Policy-makers are happy to use the word ‘exploit’ when talking about resources such as oil or minerals. Yet for green economists exploitation of the planet’s resources is as unacceptable as exploitation of the people who live on the planet. The failure to respect the planet has led to problems as diverse as climate change and desertification. In order to address these problems green economists suggest that we need a completely different attitude towards meeting our needs that involves respecting ecology and living in balance with the planet.

Another short phrase that encapsulates something important about green economics is ‘beyond supply and demand to meeting people’s needs’. This contains an explicit criticism of the discipline of economics with its obsession with graphs and mathematics and its inability to look out of the window and see what is really happening in the world. Green economics begins with people and their concerns rather than with theories or mathematical constructions of reality. Conventional economics will provide a graph with two straight lines representing ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ and then apply this to the complex relationships which are entailed by the production and exchange of goods. Green economics calls for a richer and deeper understanding of people, their relationships, and how they behave and are motivated. The ‘needs’ we are concerned about are not merely physical needs but also psychological and spiritual needs.

The word ‘holism’ sums up the way in which we have to learn to see the big picture when making economic decisions. The absence of holistic thinking is clear in modern policy-making, where crime is punished by incarceration without attempting to understand how an economic system which dangles tempting baubles in front of those who cannot afford them and deprives them of the means of meeting their deeper needs is simply generating this crime. A similar comment can be made in the case of health, where pollution creates ill health which is then cured by producing pharmaceuticals the production of which simply generates more pollution. From a green perspective we need to see the whole picture before we can solve any of these problems.

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So what is green economics?

I feel it may be time to offer some thoughts about what green economics actually means. In a practical sense, my favourite green economists (we are a fairly select group so far!) are Richard Douthwaite (find out more from the Feasta website) and James Robertson, who was a founder member of the New Economics Foundation and has his own archive of work available at http://www.jamesrobertson.com/.

From a theoretical point of view I find the insights of ecofeminism really helpful. Here are three important principles from which we can build a sustainable system of economics:

• Immanence: the source of the sacred in all aspects of the planet and her people;
• Interconnectedness: a belief in the inevitable relationship between all these aspects of the sacred, closely supported by the science of ecology;
• Unity-in-diversity: the need to respect difference and to value the whole as requiring all of its different parts.

Three narratives demonstrate these principles.
The following quotation from James Lovelock’s autobiography illustrates the principle of immanence:

Gaia: The meaning of that cloud-speckled ocean-blue sphere was made real to me by their newly won scientific information about the Earth and its sibling planets Mars and Venus. Suddenly, as a revelation, I saw the Earth as a living planet. The quest to know and understand our planet as one that behaves like something alive, and which has kept a home for us, has been the Grail that beckoned me ever since. It came to me suddenly, just like a flash of enlightenment, that to persist and keep stable, something must be regulating the atmosphere . . . My mind was well prepared emotionally and scientifically and it dawned on me that somehow life was regulating climate as well as chemistry. Suddenly the image of the Earth as a living organism. . . Emerged in my mind. At such moments, there is no time or place for such niceties as the qualification ‘of course it is not alive—it merely behaves as if it were,’

To get a sense of the principle of interconnectedness you have to use your own imagination. I expect that nearly all of us have, at one time or another, been in a car that has hit and killed a small animal while driving on a country road. A squirrel or badger or rabbit has rushed out of the hedgerow and under our wheels before we could do anything about it. It is the feeling that follows this experience that makes real for us our interconnectedness with other species. I challenge anybody not to feel a sense of shock and horror for the life destroyed.

The third principle of unity-in-diversity is severely neglected in our culture, which sets up either-or dichotomies constantly. A simple illustration in a context we are all familiar with comes from the North American Gitksan-Wet'suwet'en people as told by their tribal elder Marie Wilson:

A North American Indian philosopher has likened the relationship between women and men to the eagle, which soars to unbelievable heights and has tremendous power on two equal wings--one female, one male--carrying the body of life between them. The moment one is fractured or harmed in any way, then that powerful bird is doomed to remain on the earth and cannot reach those heights.

These principles are drawn from the ecofeminist wing of green economics. You can download a full discussion of the economic implications of adopting the ecofeminist perspective of the earth as our mother from my webpage on the theme: earthmother.

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The Parliament of All Beings

So, the worthy Kate Barker has allowed her rational and enumerising mind into another area of our national life. Not content with skating the surface of the inequity that is the ‘housing market’, as though something so essential to human well-being as the need for shelter could possible be bought and sold like a CD or piece of underwear, she has now passed judgement on the nature of the planning process. I have not looked at the report; nor shall I. It will be the usual hundreds of pages of text garnished with incomprehensible graphs assembled as weaponry rather than to facilitate understanding. Instead I invite you to consider how planning might be if we extended its concerns beyond the desires of property developers and the rich, beyond the needs of our fellow citizens in the wealthy North, beyond even the unrecognised and uncounted needs of our brothers and sisters of the South, and included all the species of planet earth. I invite you to consider the Parliament of All Beings.
The thought experiment of the Parliament of All Beings is an illustration of the narrowness of the current approach to policy-making. We begin by considering a national parliament in the UK or the USA, which is made up of representatives of a significant number of people in those countries, only excluding those who could not or will not vote or whose votes do not translate into seats. Now we imagine a world parliament, where each country sends a number of representatives so that all countries’ interests are equally represented. We now have a much broader-based and democratic way of deciding whether the solutions to Iraq’s problems will be solved by a US invasion, or about policies to tackle climate change. But now we need to extend this further, to include all the other species with whom we share this planet in our decision-making. We need a representative from the deep-sea fish, the deciduous trees, the arctic mammals, and so on. If we imagine putting to the vote in such a parliament the issue of a planning decision over an out-of-town-shopping centre, not to mention ten new nuclear power-stations, we begin to see how narrow our current decision-making structures are. In the case of most of what we do for economic reasons we would have just one vote against the collected votes of all the other species of planet earth.
The lesson of ecology is that, as species of the planet, we are all connected in a web of life. A Buddhist parable brings to life this rather stark and scientific lesson from ecology. During his meditation a devotee fantasises that he is eating a leg of lamb, an act proscribed by Buddhism where a strict adherence to vegetarianism is required. His spiritual master suggests that when this fantasy comes to him he draws a cross on the leg of lamb. The devotee follows the advice and, on returning to self-consciousness, is amazed to find the cross on his own arm. A more prosaic way of reaching the same sense of connection is to think about a time when you might have hit an animal or bird when driving your car. The sense of shock and horror that you have destroyed something so precious is the same no matter how insignificant the animal appears. Tweet