Malcolm and Brian, Thanks for your emails on economics and ecology. In reply to two excerpted comments...
Malcolm McCallum wrote: snip > Many business groups ignore = > environmental costs in their models and misforcast economic trends. = > When these are included, our economy is pretty unhealthy. Shifting = > these costs to the pollution producer actually stimulates the economy! = snip > Things like = > tradeable permits actually reduce pollution readily and quickly because = > it becomes more profitable for the company or individual to reduce = > emissions and sell their permit than to keep the permit. snip I have been thinking that ecological economics would actually lead to better economics, even from the perspective of the economists, with a few twists. As you suggest above, to deal with environmental costs can/could stimulate the economy for such indicators as activity, production, etc. (though maybe not with the simple, purely economic, non-environmentally-anchored dollars we have now). One way the benefits of ecological systems seems clear comes from considering models such as industrial ecology and approaches proposed by people like William McDonough. In these systems, production is integrated with consumption and recycling such that "waste = food" or waste in the sense of material that leaves the system in degraded, unproductive form is eliminated almost entirely and by design. Following this scheme, no new commodity would be designed and produced until a complementary process for retrieval and deconstruction and recycling were also ready to go. For McDonough and others the goal shifts from selling a material object to selling the functional value or service that comes from using that material object, with the idea that the actual material is destined to be returned to the production process for another round. So in a simple scan of this system (a system of closed material loops like a closed aquarium, or the biosphere) it seems to me that there is almost twice the "economic" activity (broadly considered as exchange, perhaps, and not traditional economic growth like GDP or total system throughput) involved, and it is also a 2-for-1 deal that also helps reduce or eliminate waste and the negative environmental consequences (and regulations and gaming the system, etc. etc.) that go along with our current system where we design and build production separate and dis-integrated from consumption and recycling. So I wonder - if the economists could see it this way, that it could be a major win-win or win-win-win or beyond, would they not become the leading proponents of ecological economics? Would such a system be more profitable (again it would have to be a broader or modified concept of profit, not just simple dollars)? I know there are many other issues involved (like distances between sites of production, consumption, recycle, etc. and "consumer" mindset and attitudes, etc.) but this potential seems worth exploring. Dan Fiscus -- Dan Fiscus Ecologist/Researcher/PhD student University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Appalachian Lab 301 Braddock Rd Frostburg, MD 21532 301-689-7121 (phone) http://al.umces.edu/~fiscus/research
