Love Your Monsters_ Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene - Michael Shellenberger [31]
William Drury found no emergent properties, governing rules, or integration in the forests he studied.
I feel that ecosystems are largely extemporaneous and that most species (in what we often call a community) are superfluous to the operation of those sets of species between which we can clearly identify important interactions…. Once seen, most of the interactions are simple and direct. Complexity seems to be a figment of our imaginations driven by taking the ‘holistic’ view.”44
Simply put, the evidence does not support the idea that evolution applies on a system-wide scale. New ecosystems appear all the time; the species found at a place rarely coevolved there. Nearly anywhere one looks one finds species coming and going — many or most are recent arrivals. A group of 19 ecologists wrote in Nature, “Most human and natural communities now consist both of long-term residents and of new arrivals, and ecosystems are emerging that never existed before.”45
If creatures just show up at sites for their own reasons, which is usually the case, the concept of evolution does not apply even as a useful metaphor at the scale of the community or the ecosystem. As Drury argued, self-organizing adaptive ecological communities or systems that achieve and sustain a dynamic equilibrium are figments of the theoretical imagination driven by taking the holistic view. Just because places change — nature is continually in flux — does not mean they evolve. There is no dynamic order, force, or principle of self-organization that makes every hodgepodge a system.
5.
If the ecological foundations of ecological economics rested upon shaky ground, the economic foundations were no less problematic. Ecological economists have argued that because they cannot guarantee that growth is sustainable — that new technologies will save the day — we should (to quote the literature) “degrow” the economy.46 “Given our high level of uncertainty about this issue, it is irrational to bank on technology’s ability to remove resource constraints,” insisted Costanza. “This is why ecological economics assumes a prudently skeptical stance on technical progress.”47 Ecological economists argued that what they did not know about the ecological foundations of the economy could hurt us, and that we ignored their uncertainty at our peril. In other words, they appealed to their own ignorance about ecosystem structure and function to empower their “precautionary” position.
Mainstream macroeconomists — those who deal with indicators of economic performance such as employment, inflation, trade, productivity, and national competitiveness — generally reject this precautionary stance. Robert Solow, a Nobel laureate, spoke for many economists when he opined that if the future is like the past, “there will be prolonged and substantial reductions in natural-resource requirements per unit of real output.” He asked, “Why shouldn’t the productivity of most natural resources rise more or less steadily through time, like the productivity of labor?”48
By shifting the content of their warnings from resource exhaustion to system overload, ecological economists convinced few but themselves. Microeconomists swatted away the precautionary principles of ecological economists as easily as they had earlier dismissed the jeremiads of neo-Malthusians like Ehrlich. The answer mainstream economics gave to system overload was the same as its response to resource exhaustion: greater resource productivity and technological innovation.
By the 1980s, in response to some of the same challenges and opportunities that had inspired the creation of ecological economics, a group of mainstream welfare economists had founded the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. These neoclassical economists developed the field of mainstream environmental economics to provide their own analysis of and prescription for the environmental crisis. They rejected the thermodynamic theory