Talk:Green economics

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There has been no copyright violation. The version that WordIQ caches is an old Wikipedia version that has unjustifiably been deleted by vandals possibly with ideological motivations or possibly after merging with environmental economics. The WordIQ version lists many authorities who made contributions specifically "Miriam Kennet, Volker Heinemann, Murray Bookchin, Lewis Mumford,, Rachel Carson, Brian Tokar, E. F. Schumacher, Robert Costanza" (very important, see Trucost and TEEB which follow his methodology), "Lynn Margulis, David Korten, Buckminster Fuller, Herman Daly, Donella Meadows, Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, Hunter Lovins, Kirkpatrick Sale, Jane Jacobs, and Robin Hanson." Any rewrite of this article should make reference to those authors' works as references though there's a good list on the WordIQ page.

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Green economics - Definition

Green economics loosely defines a theory of economics by which an economy is considered to be component of the ecosystem in which it resides. A holistic approach to the subject is typical, such that economic ideas are commingled with any number of other subjects, depending on the particular theorist. Proponents of feminism, postmodernism, the ecology movement, peace movement, Green movement, green anarchism and the anti-globalization movement have used the term to describe very different ideas. Accordingly, green economics has been viewed as external to mainstream economics, although there are varying degrees of diffusion and debate on what are the points of contention. It is thus preferable to refer to a loose school of "green economists" rather than any single "green economics".

Contents [showhide] 1 Green is non-neoclassical 2 Tendencies and factions 3 Life versus not 4 Ecologies produce, people create, local is more reliable 5 Small is beautiful 6 Can green go global? 7 Can green fight global? 8 Biology versus buying 9 Value of life 10 Are humans infinitely precious? 11 Influences and opponents 12 See also 13 External links Green is non-neoclassical

Neoclassical economics represents the main body of modern economics. Neoclassical economists begin with a set of assumptions that enable a mathematical treatment of the subject. The typical assumptions take societal preferences as fixed, rather than allowing them to evolve within the analysis. This co-evolution of ecological, environmental, and economic systems is a focus of green economics.

The greens are often confused both with political Greens and with mainstream environmental economists. The green economists share broader ecological and social concerns, including a distrust of capitalism itself, that lie outside the mainstream concerns of the neoclasssical subfields environmental economics, resource economics, and sustainable development.

The school of green economics could be considered one aspect of a broader school of Post Autistic Economics. Tendencies and factions

Various subgroups of these economists avoid the label green or Green in part to avoid association with political Green Parties and their broader goals. Often these use the term ecological economics.

This article covers those who have extended this analysis or reject measures of global "sustainability" - few of whom now use the older terms or accept Natural Capitalism. Those who focus clearly and only on sustainability are a distinct group concerned with environmental finance - the use of financial instruments to set up incentives to save ecology, especially endangered species or fragile ecoregions. Life versus not

What seems to define green economists most clearly is the rejection of all analyses of factors of production or means of production that fail to clearly and fundamentally distinguish between living (nature, persons)and non-living (financial, social, instructional, infrastructural) roles in a productive process. Some have detailed critiques of "Fordism" (after Henry Ford) and "productivism", as best developed by Alain Lipietz of the French Greens. They characterize the belief in such concepts as "economic growth" as a delusion, an ideology, and worse, as they disrupt and destroy ecological growth in life support capacity of a natural ecosystem: air and water filtering, food production, fiber growth. These often characterize their work as "social ecology" and may employ the Marxist analysis of means of production.

However, there is also a strain of "right greens" who emphasize the role of tax, trade, and tariff laws in encouraging destructive behavior - they often characterize "dirty subsidy" or "dirty money" as the problem - and seek to change banking rather than social values. Ecologies produce, people create, local is more reliable

Three assumptions that seem to be universal among green economists are:

1. That living ecoregions are better valued as service-producing natural capital than as passive natural resources. 2. That creative "enterprise" or individual capital must be differentiated from more general ideas or analyses of human capital or human resources, as what characterizes both evolution and intelligence is an unpredictable and creative movement towards greater energy economy, e.g. a tree spans a volume so as to most effectively convert available light to energy using its leaves. 3. That local measurements are almost always better than global ones, and scale of measures must match the scale of the commons being managed.

Small is beautiful

Of these three assumptions, the third is the oldest, and was first codified clearly in E. F. Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful". It emphasized the value of a local point of view, like that of gardening, that would require "use-value" or "service value" to be assessed in context of a living ecoregion or economic process, and would de-emphasize the value of resource, commodity or product measures. In addition many de-emphasize protest, notably Brian Milani who has contributed significantly to a green micro-economics, e.g. of eco-villages, and notes that "efforts to encourage nature appreciation and environmental protection often reinforce the chasm between the human economy and non-human nature."

He argues that "The environmental movement in particular should put more emphasis on establishing an educational network that both formalizes its educational tasks and systemizes connections with the rest of the community. But this, of course, assumes that the environmental movement becomes more aware of, and proactive about, economic alternatives."

This bottom-up approach seems to mirror that which successfully promoted the emotionalist moral philosophy of Adam Smith and the classical economists, "that eventually caused fundamental changes in politics, culture, religion, and conceptions of human nature." A revolution not of politicians and theorists, but of gardeners, shop-keepers, and purchasers. Can green go global?

At the other scale extreme is the view of Goldsmith, that scientific understanding of human bodies, cognition, and Earth's ecology, constitutes "a single order" and "a single set of laws, whose generalities apply equally well to biological organisms, vernacular societies and ecosystems and to Gaia herself." Such views seem to inspire the Global Greens who believe that centralized measurements can perhaps be reformed, in line with a general ethic that emphasizes "Earth First" (the name of one influential NGO) and social and economic measurements as only secondary.

This "recognition that economy is nested within society which is nested within ecology, and that ecological flows (e.g. watersheds, air flows, gene flows) determine political power and bodily service relationships" is seen as pivotal by other greens who see The Enlightenment as being over, and a new movement, The Embodiment, replacing it on a cultural level. Can green fight global?

This is a common theme among Greens in general, who have a broad critique of dominator culture and monoculture which has flowered in the anti-globalization movement to unite with other critics of global capitalism.

Some, following systems biology, differentiate "between Plant (energy-binding), Animal (space-binding), Human (time-binding) and Truth-binding mechanisms" among which they variously count religion, banking, capitalism and economics itself. Whether greens will ever agree on a single "truth-binding" political economy remains a matter of controversy. Biology versus buying

There is, as yet, no clear agreement between greens even on basic terms of reference. Difficulty of measuring diverse "ecological flows" makes the field also diverse. It is generally impossible to distinguish green economists, ecology theorists and systems theorists, as the green analysis deliberately uses metaphors from natural capital to describe or design infrastructural capital, i.e. employing biomimicry in the broadest sense. A good summary of attitudes is that of Lynn Margulis who holds that ethics, economics, and biology are indistinguishable, and that all three apply to any study of ecology: "economists study the way that humans make a living, and biologists study how all other species make a living."

She also claims that certain tenets of biology are incompatible with ecology: Darwinian evolution "is totally wrong. It's wrong like infectious medicine was wrong before Pasteur. It's wrong like phrenology is wrong. Every major tenet of it is wrong," she writes, in Kevin Kelly's book "Out of Control : The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World".

Green economists vary drastically in how much they question conventional biology and ethics, how reliant they are on cognitive science as a neutral point of view for their micro-economics of human purchasing. Most however are committed to "moral purchasing" regimes that generally deny the value of nation-states or corporations to diffuse responsibility for moral harms done by one's consumption and purchase habits. Value of life

One holy grail of green economists is a theory of why humans see value in such commodities as gold, and why they habitually reward social and sexual fitness (i.e. appearances) strongly over ecological fitness (i.e. energy efficiency, survival) whenever they have the luxury to build complex financial systems. This parallels and opposes the ambition of neoclassical economics to find parallels in radically autonomous physics and chemistry - but the two views are complementary, and come together in such doctrines as Natural Capitalism, which seems to reflect both green and neoclassical constraints.

A less ambitious field is environmental finance which seeks to justify biodiversity directly as a unit of stored value, e.g. a rainforest standard replace the gold standard. Some refer to this as a "biosecurity standard" or "biosafety standard" of value, but these are not yet common usage - instead a broad strategy of using conventional financial instruments to save ecology deemed unique or irreplaceable has developed, without any agreement on any one standard of biodiversity's value. Are humans infinitely precious?

However, some of these ambitions parallel and oppose the ambition of the United Religions Initiative, generic global ethics and humanism to place an infinitely high value on human life - and thus, as the greens see it, a constantly-decreasing value on other life.

Indeed, a dramatic fact highlighted by the IPCC is that a human life in developed nations is valued 15x higher than in the developing nations - measured strictly in terms of ability to pay to prevent global climate change. Most political Greens reject such an analysis as hopelessly unsustainable given modern terrorism and asymmetric warfare, but what seems to characterize green economists as a class is a willingness to work with such outrageous commodifying assumptions.

In effect, humans cannot be treated differently from great apes or whales or any other keystone species, for the green analysis to have integrity. As with other species, society must then set a finite value on what it will do to avoid losing a human life. Otherwise, humans seeking survival at all costs in ever-growing numbers must ultimately overcome sustainability on all levels and cannibalize the Earth's natural capital into "resources". Influences and opponents

Important economists and systems theorists who have contributed analyses to the body of green economics include E. F. Schumacher, Robert Costanza, Lynn Margulis, David Korten, Buckminster Fuller, Herman Daly, Donella Meadows, Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, Hunter Lovins, Brian Milani, Marilyn Waring, Jane Jacobs, Robin Hanson and Amartya Sen. Some of these are more associated with anarchism or libertarianism but any green theory generally favors all "local measures" over "global measures", so the affinity is inevitable. Local measurement of ecological conditions and integrity replacing trust in centralized institutions (such as the IMF, World Bank, WTO, BIS, WIPO or UN) is a key green theme.

There are also a significant number of ethicists, scientists (particularly linguists and complexity theorists), political scientists, postmodernists and journalists whose work has contributed to a broad green political economy. The list includes Edward O. Wilson, George Lakoff, Rushworth Kidder, Peter Singer, Alain Lipietz, Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, Jean Baudrillard, Carol Moore, Liane Gabora, Richard Thaler, Robert Mundell, and others whose behavioral finance, cognitive psychology, cognitive science and chaos theory have helped to trace out the limits of predictable process.

Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert have attempted to define a restricted, purely economic model which does not contain any mechanisms for dealing with ecological issues, but are hopeful that others may extend the model to deal with ecological issues. A debate attempting to clarify how this model, the participatory economics model, relates to the "social ecology" model, is linked below. See also

* Important publications in green economics

External links

* "Green Economics Institute,Economics as if people mattered" (http://www.greeneconomics.org.uk/) * "The International Journal of Green Economics" (http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalID=158) * Environmental Macroeconomics Bibliography (http://www.gwagner.net/work/environmental_macroeconomics.html) * "Beyond Environmental Protection", Brian Milani, 2001 (http://www.greeneconomics.net/EnvironEducation.html) * Eco-Village network of the Americas (http://www.ecovillage.org/) * "Living Ecologically" topics (http://www.geocities.com/serenadetx/Ecology/Pages/topics2.html) * Scientists for Global Responsibility (http://www.sgr.org.uk/SftE.html) * Emotionalist Moral Philosophy (http://65.107.211.206/philosophy/phil4.html) * Global Commons Institute (http://www.gci.org.uk) * critique of centralism (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Annotations/TOTALFRE.0.html) * Global Resource Bank (http://www.grb.net) * Goldsmith and his Gaian hierarchy (http://www.savanne.ch/right-left-materials/gaian-hierachy.html) * "The Embodiment" trends list - note trend 4 (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the-embodiment) * "A Tale of Two Botanies" - Lovins and Lovins (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/botanies.html) * Genesis of Eden Diversity encyclopedia (http://www.dhushara.com/book/diversit/sac2.htm) * Debate to disentangle Participatory Economics and Social Ecology

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Green Economics is a new academic discipline that is build on environmental, ecological and post-autistic economics as well as feminist and stakeholder theory, welfare economics, development economics moves beyond them to create a discipline that seeks to nurture radically new alternatives based on intergenerational, social and environmental justice as well as concern for non human species and biosphere [1].

Green Economics positions economics within a very long-term, earth-wide, holistic context of reality as a part of nature. It also incorporates and celebrates 'difference', diversity, equity and inclusiveness within its concepts of society and community. Its philosophy is to manage economics for nature as usual, rather than to manage the environment for business as usual [2].

Green Economics is concerned with establishing definitions of an overall well- being for all, people, other species and the planet, rather than deriving simplistic quantitative statistics. A distinction is made between hidden destruction currently calculated as economic “growth” and is contrasted with our new definitions of true growth which is an abundance of natural resources for people and growth in and of nature. Its long–term outlook reflects the evolution of societies within archaeological and paleontological time frames, which provides better tools for understanding problems such as climate change than current conventions and short term business cycles[3].

Green Economics is not mainstream Green Economics reclaims economics from the preserve of purely quantitative measurement and the assumptions of a “homo economicus” perspective and creates an inherently multi-disciplinary economics which is informed by qualitative and quantitative data from natural and earth sciences. In this way Green Economics is an entirely new approach. This stands in sharp contrast to the reductionist and overly quantitative mathematics and assumptions on which conventional mainstream research is based.

Green Economics is influenced by its historic roots concerned with the problem that existing structures are defined or seen as value free and objective whereas they are in fact a particular value or ideology based concept that just happened to be the starting point for the development of the society. A strong belief in the benefits of evolution of society renders this new discipline truly innovative and it works to replace the existing ideologies and conventions with a wider set of options. It does so by accepting that ultimately a value free social science is not possible but in accepting this fact the discipline is therefore less normatively biased than conventional economic thinking which bases its claim to be value free because it is predicated on maintenance of the status quo and reflects majority thinking. Furthermore, all innovations in society were once in a minority position.

Green Economics tries as an alternative to incorporate a wider set of potential behaviour and allows for systems and institutions to be designed so that this degree of freedom is maintained and rather than a particular set of rules accepted as unavoidable. Freedom, optimal, growth and justice are all terms that have a surprisingly intentional use in conventional economics. Terms like competition, are used as if competition itself is freedom, something that is desirable, where in fact competition only occurs when people cannot achieve all their goal simultaneously. Green Economics gives people back the sovereignty over their decisions and life rather than pushing the language used, not to mention the methodology, into areas where an objective assessment of the matter considered is no longer possible.

As it appears to be the case that the original spirit of the new value set, that gave rise to the wider green movement and finally to Green Economics, is as relevant as ever considering current issues that require addressing, it is of prime importance that this new discipline is developed further in the near future to balance the views and opinions publicised that are based on conventional thinking. It is of particular concern, as conventional economic thinking is always surrounded by scarcity up to the point that scarcity is actively promoted. This is in order to maintain a reality that can be explained within the existing framework and concepts. People are advised how to behave accordingly, so that with such outdated methods the current economic challenges will not be met. It should be emphasised that Green Economics is as a consequence not only developing an alternative view to economic issues that might or might not be normatively desired depending on the viewpoint. The research develops the tools and methods that are required to master todays economic problems in society. This is because conventional economics evolved in the nineteenth century in a different set of circumstances and was designed and is still designed to meet those previous needs and is unable to solve the problems of today. Green Economics is truly the future of economics not just a niche addition to the discourse[4]. Contents [hide]

* 1 Main features of Green Economics[5] * 2 Green versus ecological economics * 3 Influences and related theories * 4 References * 5 External Links

Main features of Green Economics[5]

• Attitude to nature-today we are looking at biodiversity • Attitude to science -green economics uses data from natural science to explain the economics of climate change • Ethic or moral values explicit-in mainstream economics their existence is denied or a given. • Alleviation and prevention of poverty is important aim • Social and environmental justice at core. • Holism Green versus ecological economics

A common misunderstanding is still that ‘Green’ is solely focused on the environment, whereas a “Green perspective” situates economics within the earth as a “given” and looks outward from that starting point. ” It then works to establish social and environmental justice simultaneously. Green Economics builds on Ecological Economics, which focuses on democratic accountability for the sake of the environment. However Green Economics, goes much further and develops these themes in order to achieve simultaneous social and environmental justice which it regards as inseparable parts of a whole[6]. This can result in apparently conflicting dilemmas, such as the sometimes conflicting interests of indigenous people and their rights to ownership of their local ecosystem services, as opposed for example to the rights of agencies to insist on conservation or those of the overall national population as a whole to exploit those resources. Green Economics acknowledges that the poor suffer more from environmental degradation, and are increasingly more likely to be environmental refugees- and more likely to suffer in such flooding scenarios as New Orleans. Therefore Green Economics aspires to solutions simultaneously addressing poverty, climate change and biodiversity within an equitable framework. Influences and related theories

Important contributors to green economic theory and analysis include Miriam Kennet, Volker Heinemann, Murray Bookchin, Lewis Mumford,, Rachel Carson, Brian Tokar, E. F. Schumacher, Robert Costanza, Lynn Margulis, David Korten, Buckminster Fuller, Herman Daly, Donella Meadows, Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, Hunter Lovins, Kirkpatrick Sale, Jane Jacobs, and Robin Hanson. Recently developed - The Green Economics Institute – has become one of the largest green networks in the world that specifically focused on reforming conventional economics and promoting green economics issues. The Green Economics Institute (GEI) founded by Miriam Kennet and Volker Heinemann critically discusses green alternatives in order to reform mainstream economics They work on campaigns for greening business, for alleviating and preventing poverty, for supply chain fairness openness and equity, and for the reform and integration of the academic and intellectual philosophy of economics in line with eco-logical reality. References

[1] Miriam Kennet, Volker Heinemann Green Economics: setting the scene. Aims, context, and philosophical underpinning of the distinctive new solutions offered by Green Economics, International Journal of Green Economics 2006 - Vol. 1, No.1/2 pp. 68 - 102 [2]Green Economics Institute, Miriam Kennet [3]Volker Heinemann, ‘What is Green Economics?’ The Green Economist Vol 2 Issue no 2 – Autumn 2007, Green Economics Institute, November 2007 External Links

Green Economics Institute