Love Your Monsters_ Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene - Michael Shellenberger [34]
When partisans and opponents of environmental causes adopt the discourse of market failure and social externality, they co-opt their political fringes and tamp down the moral fervor of environmentalism, making the political conversation safe for expertise. Ecological economics has evolved into the more pro-environment wing of standard environmental economics. This has depleted the discipline of its initial energy. As long as the vocabulary of microeconomics, including cost-benefit analysis, remains the lingua franca of environmentalism, properly credentialed and preferably academic participants will have the policy debate to themselves. Evidently, this temptation proved to be too much for ecological economists.
7.
Ecological economics aimed to be revolutionary, but it is now ignored by the sciences it had hoped to transform. Both ecology and economics have changed, but not because of the rise of ecological economics. The science of ecology could not draw indefinitely on its roots in 18th century theodicy. As contemporary ecologists have abandoned theory for empiricism, ecology has returned to the long-suppressed view of Gleason, as Hubbell put it, that species are “largely thrown together by chance, history, and random dispersal.”61Species come and go. Ecological sites do not have a structure or a function. They have a history.
The science of economics has moved on as well. Just when ecological economics caved in to the normative framework of neoclassical welfarism, empirical work in behavioral and experimental economics profoundly undermined that approach. Empirically-minded economists turned to studying the behavior of institutions and individuals, rather than continuing to model abstract utility functions.
Ecological economists today try to put prices on ecosystem benefits and services. This effort by environmentalists is self-defeating. If environmental decisions are fundamentally framed as questions of economic welfare, public officials and the public itself will opt nearly every time for whatever policy promises more economic growth, more production, and more jobs. Moreover, in a world where human influence is as ancient as it is pervasive, it may be helpful to recognize that the natural environment where we live is less of an input than an output of economic activity.
Ecological economics today, its ambitions greatly diminished, has reached senescence; it provides an academic assisted-living facility for “Great Chain of Being” ecology and cost-benefit economics. A hybrid discipline, ecological economics crosses closet creationism with market fetishism. When ecological economists dispute the relative importance of intrinsic vs. instrumental value, the hybrid reverts to type.
The scientistic and self-referential controversies in which ecological economists engage drain away the moral power that once sustained environmentalism. This moral power may return if environmentalists employ science not to prescribe goals to society but to help society to achieve goals it already has. Environmentalists may then shape the natural environment of the future rather than model and monetize the environment of the past. /
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: The author gratefully acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation, Award No. 0924827. The views expressed are the author’s alone and not those of any funding agency.
ENDNOTES
1 For a history of the founding and early development of ecological economics, see Ropke, Inge. 2004. “The early history of modern ecological economics.” Ecological Economics. 50: 293-314.
2Quoted in Kenski, Henry C., 1985. “The President, Congress, and Interest Groups. Environmental Policy in the 97th Congress”, pp. 77-100 in Helen M. Ingram & R. Kenneth Godwin (eds.), Public Policy and the Natural Environment, Greenwich: JAI Press. 78.
3 See, for example, Hawken, Paul, Amory Lovins, and Hunter