Journey of the Universe weaves together the discoveries of the evolutionary sciences together with humanities such as history, philosophy, art, and religion. This course draws on the Journey of the Universe Conversations, a series of 20 interviews with scientists and environmentalists. The first 10 interviews are with scientists and historians who deepen our understanding of the evolutionary process of universe, Earth, and humans. The second 10 interviews are with environmentalists, teachers, and artists who explore the connections between the universe story and the practices for a flourishing Earth community.
Ecological Economics (Richard Norgaard)
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From the course by Yale University
Journey Conversations: Weaving Knowledge and Action
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Yale University
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Course 2 of 4 in the Specialization Journey of the Universe: A Story for Our Times
From the lesson
Becoming a Planetary Presence: Communities, Cities, and Economics
The story of the isolated neutron’s quick decay and the neutron+proton’s long term stability as an illustration of the synergistic effects that will take place in Eco-cities. In ways we can only guess at, these new mutually enhancing relationships will lead to a qualitatively new vitality.
Meet the Instructors
Mary Evelyn TuckerSenior Lecturer and Senior Research Scholar
Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
John GrimSenior Lecturer and Senior Research Scholar
Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
[MUSIC]
Tick, welcome it's so good to see you again.
>> Wonderful to be here Mary Evelyn.
>> You've been one of the leaders in ecological economics.
You've been involved in the IPCC report, the millennial ecosystem assessment.
We'd like to begin to draw in your knowledge here.
And a simple question but can you give us a feeling for
how economics systems developed over the last 20,000 years in human history?
>> Well yeah 20,000 years that should be no problem.
It's really important to keep in mind that from the vast majority of human history,
over 99% of human history we lived as hunter and gatherers.
We were living in groups of 50 people to 200 people,
maybe a few more but it was a much more egalitarian system.
A system in which everybody knew what everybody else was doing,
everybody shared the same myths.
Life was commonly lived as a group.
And it was about 15 to 20,000 years ago,
it happened different times and slowly over time.
And we began to learn how to use the soil, seeds, sun and began agriculture,
began to be much more productive in how we interacted with the land.
And that productivity, that increase in productivity, allowed for
differentiation, for specialization.
For some people to gain immense amounts of power, for other people to become artists,
for some to be philosophers but also warriors.
So good or bad things came with agriculture.
But agriculture was immensely important in transforming human civilization, and
the whole idea of what would become an economy.
Because you began to get people specializing in tasks.
And it's important to understand that agriculture continued to improve,
and it improved largely through trial and error.
Basically we went from a population of five million people to 500
million people simply by expanding agriculture and learning by doing.
And 500 million people is about when the scientific revolution comes and
modernization as we think of it begins to affect the economy.
>> And at that point, what happens?
This is a big shift, isn't it?
>> Well, the shift again is not quick, for the first several hundred years.
But beginning about 150 years ago, it definitely speeds up dramatically.
It speeds up dramatically with the steam engine and
then eventually the internal combustion engine, the conversion to fossil fuels,
petroleum especially but started with coal of course.
But the capture of a whole new source of energy
is immensely important to the building of the economy we have.
The other that's really important is while markets existed for
a long time, we began to really understand and
think about markets as a way of deliberately structuring human society.
They became part of national policies to develop markets not just market exist but
that we actually encourage their development.
And literally through the expansion of the market, through the expansion of
the industrial processes, in the 20th century the world economy goes 25 fold.
An immense expansion of human activity.
>> And give us a feeling for this market-based economy as it developed.
Well and most important thing is that it allows for specialization.
It allows for some people to do the highly specialized task and
then exchange their wares and exchange their services.
So just by the specialization and then the economies of scale and then the trade,
we go from people who were able to pretty much subsist almost on their
own on a farm, to a society in which we have immensely more material goods.
But we're no longer able to subsist on our own, we no longer know how to grow our own
food, we no longer know how to build our own homes, we have to,
we are dependent on each other in very intricate ways.
And so we become depended on the economy itself.
So this is a dramatic transformation and it's, my parents grew up on a farm,
my parents knew how to grow food and process food and
repair their own vehicles but I learned some of that as a child and
now I look inside the hood of a car and well, that's it.
I'm dependent on others.
>> And this happened very quickly as you said.
Many of us had ancestors who did grow up on farms and
knew how to grow their own food.
>> Of course, it was just immensely quickly,
from basically through the 20th century.
And the same sort of transformations are happening in China today and India.today.
In many parts of the world, they're going through these very rapid transformation
from being in a farm community, near subsistence,
or self-sufficient farming to a situation
where you're living in Delhi or Mexico City in a highly interdependent economy.
>> So off of the land, into cities, into market based economies,
into more material goods into specializations.
>> Yes.
>> What's the result of this?
>> Well, part of the result is that we no longer understand how we relate to
soil, to seeds, to sunlight.
That's been lost and that's immensely important.
Part of the problem is we have difficulty talking with each other.
We're now economies of lawyers, and truck drivers, and hairdressers,
and filmmakers, and grocers, and a few farmers.
Not many, but we still have a few.
But we're all having very different experiential knowledge now.
And so our common language has been reduced
to sort of a common language that we share on the television set.
But even that is becoming fairly, fairly minimal.
And this allows for a rise of a whole lot of nonsense and
misinformation that is extremely destructive.
>> About nonsense and misinformation, or?
>> About the nature of how we relate to the environment.
When I was a child, when you were a child, we thought scientists were our
path to freedom, our path to understanding the science was this wonderful thing.
It had all sorts of difficulties with specialization, but we respected science.
And today we can have people who say,
scientists are a bunch of eggheads who don't understand anything.
There are many problems with science.
But we're in a situation now,
where common understanding is becoming shallower and shallower.
>> And we don't have a shared understanding, maybe.
>> It takes a lot of work to get a shared understanding.
>> Yeah. >> It's easy to accuse others of
not knowing anything.
It's hard to share what we know.
>> Yeah, but in terms of economic systems and this rapid growth from hunter,
gatherers and farming system to urbanization and
new economies, market based economies.
So there's been a cost, a movement from the land.
Tell us about the economic systems and
what is that drives our present economic systems toward globalization in fact?
I call it economism.
It's sort of a secular religion.
It's sort of the myths that we have today.
And in the myths that we have about the economy.
And we need a way of explaining the world in which we live.
And to some extent, the discipline of economics is about the world we live in.
But there's also a public discourse about the world we live in
that also includes myths about how markets work, or believes about how markets work.
Beliefs about goals of why we're here.
And it's this system of economism that is driving the system we're in.
And we're all sort of working around it and trying to deal with it.
>> So it's a world view?
>> It's become a world view that is shared between countries.
And that world view, there very definitely includes the idea of economic growth,
that with a growing economy, we can all be better off.
And the evidence is quite to the contrary.
We've certainly had variants in which we've had
economic growth in which we have become better off,
but we're in a period now in which the economy again seems to be picking up, but
we have at least 10% unemployment and probably 20% unemployment.
And yet, the economy looks like it's doing fine.
>> Again, sort of a disjunct between
what are values that are being missed by this world view.
>> Basically we've gotten into this situation where the economy itself
has a life of it's own.
It has a purpose of it's own.
Instead of thinking of the economy as a means to human improvement,
to see that we have enough food for
everybody, to see that we have housing, to see what we have healthcare.
We instead say this wold be bad for the economy if we were to do x.
Or it would be bad for the economy if we were to help the poor too much.
Or it would be bad for the economy if we tried to save the environment.
This doesn't make any sense at all.
But this is the collection of myths that have grown up as we have given the economy
a standing of its own.
>> So especially economic growth, isn't it no limits,
a sense of progress all boats will rise.
We can go forward with growth.
>> All of this is part of this set of myths that make up economism.
But a lot of it is also free market fundamentalism, the idea
that we are dependent upon markets, then markets make the best decisions.
And that we collectively, through government can't govern ourselves as well.
And so we reduced all the regulations that used to protect us.
We minimized the ability of government to enforce regulations.
We reduced the safety net of unemployment benefits.
And all of this so the economy would grow better.
>> Right, and laissez faire approach.
>> The Laissez fair.
The economy may be doing fine, but
we're not doing well, and nature is not doing well.
>> Well, so we are at this critical point, we're not doing well,
nature is not doing well.
S.
So you've been part of a movement that's trying to address this, right?
Ecological economics.
>> Yes. We founded ecological economics about 23
years ago or so.
It's a, still a minor effort in the larger picture, but a lot of the ideas out of
ecological economics are spreading into conventional economics, and
into the common understanding of what we need to do.
>> For example, what do we need to do?
>> Well, we do need to reexamine how we have thought about the economy.
And so ecological economics has a very critical goal of questioning some of
the basic culture of economics, even within the discipline of economics.
Which irritates my cohorts quite a bit.
But- >> I can imagine.
>> The system we're in is a system that is sort of reinforced
by a combination of academic discourse, political discourse, and
of course a corporate interest in having a certain discourse.
And ecological economics tries to pick that apart and see where
even basic economic reasoning has been violated in ways that we could correct.
>> For example how we include nature in?
>> How we include nature in thinking about our ability to grow,
or the limits to growth.
>> Or valuing it, or cost accounting.
Ecosystem services.
>> All of those ideas are developed within ecological economics and
then have been spreading into more general economic thinking.
>> Tell us just about one.
Like what does ecosystem services mean?
>> The idea of ecosystem services, I have very mixed views on this.
It's a wonderful metaphor.
Since we don't understand dirt as something that we've put seeds into and
crops come out of, how do you explain to people our relationship to nature?
And the idea of saying well,
think of ecosystems as providing services like doctors provide services or
lawyers provide services or teachers provide services, shoe repair people.
I guess we still have a few shoe repair people.
It's literally saying okay, we live inside an economy.
People have to understand nature through an economic metaphor
of thinking of nature as providing economic services or ecosystem services.
It's a very powerful metaphor, but it has the flip side that of course you're now
degrading nature by referring to it in economic terms.
And so
on one hand I say yes, ecosystem services is a way of getting people's attention.
But if you just stop with that idea and then don't take people further and
think about it more deeply and then get them to actually understand ecosystems,
then you stay within the economic metaphor.
And probably sort of reproduce many of the problems of the economy.
>> I find that so fascinating.
And at Yale many people are arguing we can only value nature from this point of view.
And there's others of us who are saying necessary but not sufficient.
>> Yes.
>> Which brings us into this kind of deeper sensibility of nature.
You've been a outdoor person.
You've rafted the great rivers of our country.
You took David Brower down and you've been deeply in love
with our fabulous West and nature as a whole.
So tell us then how can we bring that sense of beauty and
awe and aesthetics into the equation?
>> Well, I think people still have a tremendous sense of care.
Care for others, care for nature.
We don't care for old people because they provide us services, we care for
old people because we care for old people.
We care for their knowledge, we care for their company, we care for
the wisdom they can impart to us in.
And in my own classroom, I try to teach economics and the limits of economics, but
I also try to say, let's switch to a metaphor of care.
And the class just all of a sudden opens up.
Says, we can use another language.
A language of care.
And we do have other languages.
We do understand nature and we can talk about nature.
The problem is that we
have sort of switched increasingly into this economic mode of discourse.
And we need to draw out the other modes of discourse that we have.
The other languages we have.
>> There's more than one mode of knowing, or one mode of valuing here?
>> Yeah, there's certainly religious language as well as scientific languages.
There's certainly just the language we use at home.
>> Yes.
>> So.
>> Religious, poetic, metaphorical language and so on.
Give us a feel for coevolution as you understand it.
>> The amazing thing about coevolution, well, we have to start with evolution.
And usually when you talk about evolution, it's a particular species,
it's a tortoise.
And the tortoise is trying to expand its range, and
some individuals have the particular characteristics that allow them to
go into drier climates and they succeed in drier climates and reproduce.
And so nature is selecting tortoises to fit drier climates, and
this is how we get tortoises.
And this story is about a tortoise becoming better and
better at fitting in a drier climate.
And that's the easiest way to talk about evolution, but
evolution occurs in ecological systems.
Ecological systems have many other species.
And so the story really has to be told in terms of how do we fit in relation to
each other?
And if we're all coevolving,
all the species are coevolving in relation to each other, then there's no direction.
It's no longer just becoming better and better.
It's no longer this story of progress but a story of change.
But it also becomes a story of fitness of the whole system.
You begin to see how whole systems interlock and fit together.
And you think of an interlockedness and that doesn't change.
But no, this is an interlocked story that changes that's both tight and changing.
>> Like a creative disequilibrium?
>> It's different than the typical dynamic mechanistic,
rocket taking off and being on a predictable course.
It's a systemic view, and yet, it's a view of a changing system, also.
So it's really quite unusual.
But it really does help us think about social systems and ecological systems.
And in particular I was looking at knowledge systems,
value systems, social organizational systems, technological systems, and
nature all sort of selecting on each other.
And it was a much better way to explain history and
to explain the uncertainties of the future than the dominant
Newtonian view that science is about predictability and
that we ought to be able to predict the future and control the system we're in.
This is much more about a system that is incredibly beautiful and
intricate but is not a system that's particularly easy to control.
>> It's complex, it's dynamic, it's changing.
>> Everything's dependent on each other, so.
>> Right, so this is such a rich idea for us to enter into,
especially as we move towards rearranging our economic systems, right?
Which is not going to be predictable necessarily, but give us a feel, again,
for ecological economics then, in our co-evolutionary framework.
>> Well ecological economics is many different ways of thinking together,
and so it incorporates the coevolutionary view.
It's a methodologically pluralistic field.
This is important, because ecology has many patterns of thinking.
You have population biology,
which is about the interactive interaction of predators and prey.
You have energetics, which is about energy flows through ecosystems.
You have food webs.
There's evolutionary ecology, which is really trying to combine
Evolutionary principles with ecological systems.
There's landscape ecology looking at ecosystems on a larger scale,
there's biogeochemical cycles that are usually applied at even larger scales.
So ecologists don't have a particular way of looking at ecosystems and
as they look at different problems and look at problems in different scales,
they kind of switch patterns of thinking.
But the patterns overlap and it's a much richer field.
And though ecologist would be very pleased if all their ways of thinking somehow
cohered, and there is one unified ecology, the fact is, we have many ecologies.
We also have many economics.
We have the neoclassical market model.
We have institutionalists who stress the underlying laws and regulations,
the levelists of the playing field.
There's Marxist economists who stress power in economic systems.
There's Austrians who look at the world with capital in particular.
There's multiple ways that economists work, but
economists themselves tend to be much more monistic.
They tend to say,
there's got to be one right way of understanding the economic system.
And so we have these conflicts between the different patterns of economic thinking.
And the economists don't speak to each other,
they don't go out in the field like ecologists and compare notes.
And ecological economics is trying to be this
rich conversation between the multiple patterns of understanding.
>> And also, they're trying to return people to a field ecology if you will.
As Thomas Bier used to say, there's no human economy without Earth's economy.
>> Exactly, no, this was basic from the beginning, that we definitely needed to
tie economics back into the environmental system and into the ecological system.
You cannot model the economy apart from nature.
>> Right, and that we're a subsystem, our economy, of nature's economy.
So how does the sense of story enter into this,
coming back to your feeling that you were telling a story.
And there's a larger story here, of the universe story.
>> I think by living in a science that is open as ecological economics,
as open as the sciences actually are, you need to be open to some larger story.
You need the ways of putting the pieces together.
And ecological economists do that by talking to each other,
by crossing these disciplines.
But in some sense we do hold a larger story, a sense that there is
a bigger story of the universe in which we are just playing our parts out.
And the ecological economists are a little bit more humble to this big
sense of a universal story, that we're living in a big
system and we need to be humble to that larger system.
The fact that we care is, I think critical to saving the earth,
to saving humanity, to saving any sense of being human.
And the amazing thing about economics was that Adam Smith said greed is
basically good.
Now Adam Smith wrote a very long book in which he puts a lot of modifiers to that
greed is good.
But still the message that was taken away was that caring about yourself,
acting in the market in your own interests,
helped everybody, helped the buyer and the seller.
And we have taken that message so far and put our care for
each other so far in the distance.
Not in our personal lives, because obviously we care.
Everybody, we can switch to a language of care and people all of a sudden tune in.
But in our political discourse, in so many of the ways in which we
are engaging with each other, we are using the economics language of greed,
of the economy is really important itself, rather than we are important,
other people are important, other species are important.
So care is really the path to being human, and
to being human within a larger system of other species and this great big story.
[MUSIC]
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