Is any nation on Earth taking seriously the need for a true-cost economy, where we live sustainably in a steady state? I have been working with Randy Hayes, founder of the Rainforest Action Network and executive director of Foundation Earth, on a report card to determine if Canada might be such a nation. The report card reveals whether Canada is setting the example for how to run a country sustainably in the 21st century, or following the path of maximal exploitation of natural resources (the path followed by most nations and urged by the World Bank, IMF, WTO, and growth-obsessed economists).

We chose to examine Canada in part because of its history of compassion and global concern. Canada also has abundant natural ecosystems, lots of land and fresh water, and a relatively small population. This combination of assets puts Canadians in a better position than most to set policies for achieving a sustainable economy.

The report card, scheduled for release in June by Foundation Earth, grades the administration of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, as well as the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, on key actions and policies in economics, ecology, and equity. It will present grades in sixteen categories.

Canada has the potential to achieve high marks across all categories (in fact, the report card highlights initiatives around the world that show what can be done to earn high grades). But much to our chagrin, we found that instead of taking actions to enhance the health of people and the planet, Canada has been reverting to the crass and outdated ways of cowboy economics: “exploit now, answer questions later.” The Harper administration receives failing grades in most of the sixteen categories, while Alberta and British Columbia do only slightly better. Although Vancouver, Toronto, and other locales have undertaken a number of sustainable economic initiatives, the Harper administration is promoting overly exploitative projects in most areas.

Given the collapse of leadership in the U.S. on innovative ecological and economic policy, Canada could have emerged as a worldwide leader on the shift to clean energy. The nation could have rejected mega-extraction projects that pollute the air and water and damage or destroy forests, grasslands, rivers, lakes, mountains, and valleys.

Instead, Canada is following the U.S.’s lead and dropping the ball. For example, Harper could have extended British Columbia’s carbon tax law of 2008 to the rest of the country. Sweden adopted a carbon tax in 1991 with good results. Harper could have pushed for extensive solar energy in Alberta and Saskatchewan where cities such as Edmonton, Calgary, and Regina have equal or better solar potential than Rome, Italy. Germany and Denmark have shown that northern nations can lead the way on solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources.

To get a sense of the grades we’re compiling in the report card, here’s a rundown of four categories:

1. Climate Disruption and Pollution

On climate policies, Canada is ranked 58th out of 61 nations that the European Climate Action Network analyzed. Only Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Kazakhstan ranked worse. This woeful ranking stems from projects like the Enbridge pipeline. Harper has pushed for this pipeline project that would carry tar sands oil across British Columbia to the port of Kitimat where supertankers would attempt to navigate difficult channels (and jeopardize the province’s magnificent northern coastline).

By removing protections from 99% of Canada’s natural water bodies, Harper has left 30,000 lakes and rivers vulnerable to corporate pollution. The Prime Minister has also sought to weaken water pollution standards and given permission to use more lakes as dumpsites.

2. Women’s Rights

When it comes to empowerment of women, Canada under Harper has fallen three places in the Global Gender Gap Index and now ranks 21st. Harper cut funding for the Status of Women department by 38% and closed twelve of its sixteen regional offices.

3. Rights of Indigenous People

In January 2006, Harper cancelled the Kelowna Accord, a historic agreement to clean up pollution that is poisoning First Nation people. The Harper government, along with some provincial governments, has systematically failed to respect indigenous rights and has cheered energy projects that severely impact the health of native people, their lands, and their waters.

4. Science-Based Decision Making

Reminiscent of an Orwellian state, Harper’s administration has eliminated scientific programs and refused to regard scientific findings on toxic contamination and the health of forests, fisheries, and oceans. Harper has led an outright assault on environmental groups, allocating millions to the charitable tax agency harassing these organizations.

Key institutions carrying out scientific work on the health of the Earth have been gutted and even shuttered, including the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory in the High Arctic, the Experimental Lakes Area (an extraordinary 58-lake research venue in western Ontario), the national program on contaminants in marine mammals, and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

All scientific research in the National Parks has been terminated, and Environment Canada has cancelled its work on climate adaptation by laying off all eighteen scientists in the program. Top experts on ocean pollutants, marine mammals, contaminants in the St. Lawrence River, toxic flame retardants, and endocrine disruptors in fish have been dismissed.

The report card on Canada under the Harper administration will inform people of these disgraceful changes. Canada is moving farther and farther from a sustainable economy and is now a record-setting polluter where the gap between rich and poor is widening; where women, First Nations, and conservationists are under major attack; and where energy and mining companies are given a blank check to pillage the nation and the planet.

Many have tried to influence Harper to do what’s best for the environment and the economy over the long run. If the saying is true that, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink,” then maybe it’s time to put Harper out to political pasture. Although with the policies he’s been supporting, he might have a tough time finding drinkable water in that pasture.

At 400 parts per million, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached a menacing milestone. We’ve failed to get a handle on our addiction to fossil fuel, and now we’re in desperate need of solutions for preventing runaway climate change. There is no magic pill for curing the climate threat — real solutions involve the difficult work of changing the way we run the economy. It’s time to make a transition to a renewable-energy economy that respects the waste-absorption capabilities of the atmosphere.

As logical and desirable as this transition sounds to some, faux solutions seem to be more popular. Many people find it easier to accept ideas in line with the our growth-obsessed, technophilic economy rather than face the fact that the conventional economic approach has become obsolete.  Two of the faux solutions would be laughable as oxymorons if they weren’t able to attract such serious support.

The phrase “clean coal” implies that miners have struck it rich — that they’ve found a seam of coal that, when burned, produces only a lemony fresh, green vapor. Wouldn’t “clean coal” make an excellent air freshener? “Clean coal” could be useful for all sorts of things in a pinch:

Mom: “Oh no! The baby just spit up on herself, and we’re all out of soap.”

Dad: “Don’t worry, honey, we’ve got some clean coal right here.”

“Clean coal” is just plain coal. It’s true that some varieties of coal produce less noxious emissions (e.g., less sulfur or mercury) than others, but none of them are clean. “Clean coal” is an abbreviation of the less poetic “clean coal technology,” a phrase that’s been around since the 1980s. A U.S. Department of Energy report from that decade explains that clean coal technologies are “systems that can offer significant benefits when used to generate power, control pollution, or to convert coal into other alternative energy products.” The report also offers this honest assessment:

There is no point in pretending that coal is what it is not, nor that it is not what it is. Coal is naturally endowed with the elements and minerals of the living organisms that define its primordial origins, and that means the carbon for which it is valued. But, to some degree, it also means sulfur, and nitrogen, and incombustible impurities. It is an incontrovertible fact that the uncontrolled burning of coal will release into the environment carbon dioxide (CO2), sulfur dioxide (SO2), oxides of nitrogen (NOx), particulate matter, and ash.

It is the business of the Clean Coal Technology Program to develop the means of burning this coal with attendant minimal emissions of these undesirable pollutants; we know that there can never be none. So, if not literally “clean” coal, then certainly we mean “cleaner” coal, and it is in this sense that the Program uses the shorthand term, Clean Coal Technology.

But that honesty is lost in the advertising and lobbying that mining and power generation corporations have funded to promote “clean coal.” As the prominent linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakeoff has noted, the imagery of “clean coal” can seep into the subconscious mind and affect attitudes toward coal.

At 400 parts per million, the time for oxymorons has passed.

Even more seductive than “clean coal” is the wishful thinking of “sustainable growth.” Economic growth has become the highest priority for almost every nation on Earth. Politicians compete with one another to see who can promise the fastest growth. Newscasters report rising economic indicators with glee. Economists in both government and academia promote an agenda of endless growth. But the continuous ramping up of production and consumption comes with severe costs — 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (and the associated climate destabilization) is but one among many. Take, for instance, the spate of species extinctions. Or the billions of people living in poverty. Or any number of other global-scale environmental and social problems. Even the most dedicated worshippers at the altar of growth recognize some of these problems. That’s why adjectives seem to be sprouting like mushrooms in front of “growth.” People regularly utter the phrase “sustainable growth,” along with its slightly less oxymoronic cousins, “green growth” and “smart growth.” But just as “clean coal” is really just coal, “sustainable growth” is really just growth.

No doubt that green technologies can help. A household with compact fluorescent light bulbs, or even LED bulbs, consumes less electricity and generates a smaller footprint. But if the number of houses continuously increases, even though they have smaller footprints, they combine into a larger overall footprint. David Owen explores this “rebound effect” in his recent book, The Conundrum. Technology and greater efficiency are not enough on their own. We can’t consume our way to sustainability — we have to shift our aim from an ever bigger economy to a right-sized economy. As Albert Bartlett, the physicist and activist, has said:

Smart growth destroys the environment. Dumb growth destroys the environment. The only difference is that smart growth does it with good taste. It’s like booking passage on the Titanic. Whether you go first-class or steerage, the result is the same.

It’s tempting to accept the clever slogans and magical “solutions” that bombard us all the time. After all, it sounds like “clean coal” is just the resource to power “sustainable growth.” You can have your cake and eat it too! But at 400 parts per million, the time for self deception and denial has passed.  So has the time for buying moronic oxymorons.

Writing a book is like going on a journey. You explore the terrain, make discoveries, meet interesting people, and maybe learn new languages. The longer the book-writing, the longer the journey.

Supply Shock was a long journey; here is a short travelogue.

I set out in the fall of 2000 to explore the world of environmental and economic sustainability: fresh, feeling strong, and relatively young (at least for this type of journey). Not only was I out to explore the world, but change it! I’d seen enough already to know my mission: revolutionize the way the world dealt with economic growth.

Two earlier journeys — Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train and The Endangered Species Act — had taught me quite thoroughly about the fundamental conflict between economic growth and environmental protection. That was plenty of learning for instilling the mission. But there was literally and figuratively a world to explore, to learn the ways of pursuing the mission.

Not that I got to see much of the world literally. As Herman Daly put it in the foreword to Supply Shock, this was a book financed by the “Czech Foundation” — my nights, weekends, and leave from the “day job” with the U.S. government. No gondolas in Venice on this journey. However, I did spend at least a little time on focused study and conferencing in places as far flung as Poland and Ukraine, India and Thailand, Brazil and Colombia, with odd stops at places like the London Zoo (to speak about biodiversity loss) and La Décroissance conferences in Paris and Barcelona.

More importantly, however, I toured the worlds of the “worldly philosophers,” as Robert Heilbroner called the classical economists. The vessel of choice was the classic text, complemented by the invaluable exegeses of the economic historians. I toured their worlds as well as those of the Marxists, Georgists, and just about every other economic scholar united with an “ist.”

But the journey was far from restricted to the hallways of economic history. In fact, I spent much more time in the raw elements of physical and biological science, collecting the theoretical rare metals needed to patch up the holes in the conventional worldview of economic growth. The rarest of all was the one required to demonstrate, once and for all, that there is no reconciling the fundamental conflict between economic growth and environmental protection. (You’ll find it in Chapter 8.)

Sailing back and forth between the two continents of science and economics, I encountered diverse islands populated by anthropologists, theologians, the Council of Economic Advisers, national income accountants, World Bank demonstrators, politicians of all stripes, political appointees of all philosophies, and the UN General Assembly. They were all part of the journey; all part of Supply Shock.

For the most part it was a lonely journey, rowing upstream one day and riding into the wind the next. Hardly anyone out there in the political world wants you coming to their town on words of “limits to growth” or “steady state economics.” Virtually all politicians, most political appointees, and a lot of publishers allow only the happy horses of win-win rhetoric. There are precious few campsites for the truth about why we can’t have our cake and eat it too. For one cold and weary rider, New Society Publishers was green grass, fresh water, and dry firewood.

Now if you are an unlucky rider — I mean author — the keyboard eventually becomes an unwelcome sight. This is not a happy development. This is like the steering wheel looking bad to the race car driver, or the fly rod looking ugly to the fisherman. Ruthlessly enough, however, thumbs, wrists, and elbows tell you it’s time to hole up for the proverbial winter. It’s either that or learn voice recognition softwear – “correct that… software.”

If you’re just lucky enough, however, your book is done before then. So, directly from the intellectually herky-jerky throes of voice-recognition learning land, I offer my opinion that it is time for you to go out and grab your own copy of Supply Shock. In the reading another journey begins — your journey.

Bon voyage!

In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin wrote that “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” This single line succinctly describes a recently conceptualized psychological phenomenon called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. David Dunning and Justin Kruger, two researchers from Cornell University, have concluded that there is an inverse relationship between a person’s knowledge and skill level in a particular area and the person’s self-rated ability to perform in the area. Dunning and Kruger argue that people who are unknowledgeable and unskilled at performing an activity are also unable to recognize their own incompetence, which is why they tend to overestimate the quality of their performance when asked to self-evaluate. (Likewise, those individuals who are highly knowledgeable and highly skilled tend to underestimate their performance when asked to self-evaluate.)

Enter the economics discipline. Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that economic activity is exceeding environmental limits and destabilizing both global and local ecosystems, demonstrably flawed pro-growth economic theory continues to be touted as the cure to our ailments. Could the collective of practicing economists, policy-makers, economics professors, and economics students all be suffering from something akin to the Dunning-Kruger Effect? As a community, are these individuals so unknowledgeable about the environmental consequences of pro-growth economic activity that they tend to systematically overestimate the discipline’s environmental performance?

A good place to start investigating these questions would be in the departments of economics at higher education institutions. After all, economic knowledge and skills are taught and cultivated at universities. Suppose, for example, that an economics department offers a course which introduces and analyzes the scientific evidence that economic activity has surpassed environmental limits. The students — those future economists, policy-makers, and professors — would then have critical knowledge of the environmental consequences of economic activity. On the other hand, if the department does not offer any ecologically-minded courses or address the limits to growth, the students would be unknowledgeable about the environmental consequences of economic activity and would therefore, as per the Dunning-Kruger Effect, overestimate their discipline’s environmental performance.

To determine which universities to survey for ecologically-minded courses, it is reasonable to look at the US News and World Report’s highest ranked economics departments. While the rating methodology is frequently criticized and debated, departments undoubtedly want to be placed at the top of the US News listings. A high ranking means more prestige for both the university and its graduates, and the department is seen as an influential leader in the field.  Other lower-ranked departments can aspire to achieve the same standard of excellence. So if you want to find a representative sample of courses being offered in the leading economics departments, looking at the US News and World Report cream of the crop is a useful approach. The top ten economics graduate programs are:

1. Harvard University,
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
3. Princeton University,
4. University of Chicago,
5. Stanford University,
6. University of California-Berkeley,
7. Northwestern University,
8. Yale University,
9. University of Pennsylvania, and
10. Columbia University.

I visited the websites of each of these economics departments and looked at the descriptions of courses for both the undergraduate and graduate programs. For the 2012-2013 academic year in all ten of these departments, only one single course presented alternative economic theories through alternative learning methods. The one-off course entitled “Buddhist Economics” was a seven-week-long sophomore seminar at UC Berkeley taught by Dr. Clair Brown. Eight students enrolled. They read and discussed works by E.F. Schumacher, Richard Norgaard, and Amartya Sen in order to reconceptualize economics from a Buddhist perspective. Students kept weekly journals detailing instances where neoclassical economics transgressed Buddhist economic principles in their lives, and they even had the opportunity to practice meditation with Anam Thubten, founder of a local Buddhist temple.

Yet Dr. Brown’s course was the exception rather than the rule. For all the other economics departments surveyed, no other course focused solely on the environmental consequences of economic activity or the limits-to-growth critique. Most departments offer a course called “Environmental Economics,” but the content centers on traditional cost-benefit and public policy approaches to resolving natural resource problems such as negative externalities, public goods underinvestment, and other market failures. Moreover, in introductory courses for micro and macroeconomics, ecologically-minded economic theory and knowledge is woefully absent. This claim is supported by a recently published paper in which the author, Tom Green, reviewed the most popular introductory level economics textbooks and found that the causal relationship between economic activity and environmental consequence was either systematically ignored or underrepresented.

This warning from Adbusters can be inserted into textbooks.

Economics departments are churning out graduates who are blissfully ignorant of their discipline’s environmental performance. According to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, these graduates will tend to overestimate the ability of the pro-growth economic paradigm to operate without causing serious environmental damage. This conclusion is disconcerting because these graduates are the future economists, policy-makers, and professors who will contribute to decisions about the scale of economic activity. If, because of their incomplete economics training, they are so incompetent that they cannot recognize their own discipline’s poor environmental performance, then they are likely to continue to make the same mistakes that created the current set of environmental crises. A rapid and massive reevaluation of economics curriculums which takes into account ecologically-minded theory, methods, and knowledge is desperately needed. Dr. Clair Brown’s course is a good place to look for inspiration. Whatever is done, it is clear that “ignorant,” “incompetent” and “unknowledgeable” should not be the adjectives used to characterize the future’s most influential decision makers.

Economics departments must be compelled to integrate ecological considerations into their courses. Professors, department heads, and deans will not voluntarily take action. For decades now, limits-to-growth theorists have been following the Quaker dictum by “speaking truth to power.” Unfortunately, the neoclassical economics discipline and its gatekeepers are either deaf or not listening. I propose an alternative strategy, what I call “speaking truth to people.” When the fall semester begins here at the University of Delaware, I will print a warning label on notecards and place them in the economics textbooks as they sit on the shelves in campus bookstores. Hopefully, this technique will start some discussions among economics students and, with some luck, lead to more direct action and calls for reform, perhaps something like the student walkout that occurred in Gregory Mankiw’s class at Harvard. Economics departments will supply ecologically-minded courses, but only if the students demand them first. Without demand, there is no supply. I learned that logic in my microeconomics course at college.

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Philip Barnes is a doctoral student at the University of Delaware School of Public Policy and Administration.  He is also the host of the Beyond Rhetoric radio program.

Speaking out about human overpopulation is not an easy thing, as I have been told that people get offended. I have not personally experienced offending anyone, but perhaps those folks have been too polite to tell me. I have not read any studies that prove people are offended, but perhaps I have missed them. If I offend you in this video, please let me know.

I once asked the executive director of the Rainforest Action Network why RAN didn’t discuss the huge number of people on the planet as a factor in rainforest devastation and encourage smaller human families, as everyone in that nonprofit organization probably understands that the demand for resources from 7 billion people on the planet is causing extensive damage to the earth. They know that if the UN projection of 10 billion people on the planet by 2050 is right, it will be disastrous for forests everywhere. She admitted, abashedly, that she did not want to alienate donors.

RAN is an organization whose members break into corporate offices and hang banners out the windows excoriating Big Oil, yet they are afraid to talk about human overpopulation in their pamphlets or on their website. If RAN won’t admit the link between diminishing natural resources and a population that grows by 220,000 people every day, then what large environmental organization will?

It turns out, none.

Is it really impolite to promote smaller families?

Even within the population community, there is disagreement on how to approach the topic of lowering fertility. Some activists believe that the word “overpopulation” is too strong, even though by all accounts the world IS overpopulated: An article in the journal Nature reports that the global groundwater footprint is about 3.5 times the actual amount we have in our aquifers. Scientists have estimated that humans consume 50% more of the earth’s resources than she is able to restore each year. If people continue to consume the planet’s resources at this rate, by 2030 humanity will need two planets worth of resources to support the world’s population.

My message is clear: I recommend one child per couple to lower the population, avert future famines, and avoid wars over water. If that sounds radical, then maybe it is time for radicalism. In a culture that bemoans a falling fertility rate because it will damage the economy — instead of praising smaller families because it means less crowding, more nature and better quality of life for all — there is great need for more voices of sanity. Voices like Edward Abbey who said, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

For those of us in the United States, this message is especially important. Although our families average 2 kids per couple, our consumption outweighs that of larger families in Africa and Asia. The average American consumes 20 times more resources than someone from Mozambique and generates 169 times more carbon dioxide than a Bangladeshi. We have even outdone ourselves: a family of four today lives in a house twice as large as one the family would have occupied in 1950.

I believe that we must stabilize and then lower the world population if humans are to survive on this planet. If advocating a culture that encourages smaller families is offensive, then I must offend. Too much is at stake to be polite.

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Alexandra Paul is an internationally recognized actress and an environmental and social activist.  To hear Alexandra speak about overpopulation, please see her TEDx video.

An earlier version appeared in Conservation Biology, August 1999, Vol. 13 No. 4, pp. 693-94.

Ecological economics of course has roots in ecology and biology as well as in economics. Most of ecological economists’ and steady-state economists’ time has been well-spent correcting economics in the light of biology and ecology. And there is still more to do in this direction. However, we should be careful to avoid importing some deep metaphysical biases frequent in biology, along with its scientific truths.

According to biologists the existence of any species is an accident, and its continued survival is always subject to cancellation by the all-powerful process of random mutation and natural selection as it occurs anywhere in the interdependent ecosystem. This blind process, over long time periods, is held to explain not only the evolution of all living things from a presumed common ancestor, but also, in some versions, the “spontaneous generation” of the common ancestor itself from the “primordial chemical soup.” For human beings in particular, random mutation and natural selection are thought to determine not only such characteristics as eye color and height, but also intelligence, consciousness, morality, and capacity for rational thought. Neo-Darwinism has been extrapolated from a good explanation of many facts to the universal explanation of everything.

Powerful though it certainly is, the neo-Darwinist theory cannot explain consciousness and purpose. Even in the realm of materialism it faces some serious glitches. I refer to the problem of how it happens that many interdependent parts of a complex organ, each of which has no independent survival value, can both occur and be retained until the whole organ is assembled into a complete functioning unit, which only then can contribute to survival and thus be selected. Also there is the anomaly of altruism. Kin selection does not explain Mother Theresa or Oscar Schindler, and in any case is now disputed among biologists. But let me leave all that for future debate. My point for now is that biologists/ecologists who teach a materialist neo-Darwinist worldview to sophomores on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and then devote their Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays to pleading with Congress and the public to enact policies to save this or that endangered species are in the tight grip of a serious inconsistency.

Naturally the public asks the biologists what purpose would be served by saving certain threatened species? Since many leading biologists, as scientific materialists, claim not to believe in purpose (either in the sense of cosmic telos, or mere individual preferences that are independently causative in the physical world) this is not an easy question for them to answer. They tell us about biodiversity, and ecosystem stability and resilience, and about a presumed instinct of biophilia that we (who systematically drive other species to extinction) are nevertheless alleged to posses, encoded in our genes. But the biologists cannot affirm any of these descriptive concepts as an abiding purpose, or an objective value, because doing so would contradict the fundamental assumption of their science. For example, biophilia could be appealed to as a virtue, a persuasive value rather than a wishfully imagined part of the deterministic genetic code. But that would be to admit purpose. Instead, biologists try to find some overlooked mechanistic cause that will make us do what we believe we ought to do, but can’t logically advocate without acknowledging the reality of purpose. Absent purpose and value, the biologists’ appeals to Congress and the public for conservation are both logically and emotionally feeble.

Others have called attention to this problem in the past. The term “lurking inconsistency”, as well as its meaning, is taken from Alfred North Whitehead (Science and the Modern World, 1925, p.76) who expressed it in the following passage that repays careful reading:

A scientific realism, based on mechanism, is conjoined with an unwavering belief in the world of men and of the higher animals as being composed of self-determining organisms. This radical inconsistency at the basis of modern thought accounts for much that is half-hearted and wavering in our civilization… …It enfeebles [thought], by reason of the inconsistency lurking in the background… …For instance, the enterprises produced by the individualistic energy of the European peoples presuppose physical actions directed to final causes. But the science which is employed in their development is based on a philosophy which asserts that physical causation is supreme, and which disjoins the physical cause from the final end. It is not popular to dwell on the absolute contradiction here involved.

In other words, our scientific understanding of nature is based on mechanism, on material and efficient causation with no room for final cause, for teleology or purpose. Yet we ourselves, and higher animals in general, directly experience purpose, and, within limits, act in a self-determining manner. If we are part of nature then so is purpose; if purpose is not part of nature then neither, in at least one significant way, are we. Elsewhere Whitehead put the contradiction more pointedly: “Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.” Biologist Charles Birch, a keen student of Whitehead, has restated the lurking inconsistency in his insightful book On Purpose: “[Purpose] has become the central problem for contemporary thought because of the mismatch in modernism between how we think of ourselves and how we think and act in relation to the rest of the world”. Clearly, not all biologists are guilty of the lurking inconsistency.

The directly experienced reality of purpose or final cause must, in the view of materialism, be an “epiphenomenon” — an illusion which itself was selected because of the reproductive advantage that it chanced to confer on those under its spell. It is odd that the illusion of purpose should be thought to confer a selective advantage in the real biophysical world, while purpose itself is held to be a non-causative epiphenomenon — but that is the neo-Darwinist’s problem, not mine. The policy implication of the materialist dogma that purpose is not causative is laissez faire beyond the most libertarian economist’s wildest model. The only “policy” consistent with this view is, “let it happen as it will anyway.” Is it too much to ask the neo-Darwinist to speculate about the possibility that the survival value of neo-Darwinism itself has become negative for the species that really believes it as a metaphysical worldview? Does not this lurking inconsistency have lethal consequences for policy of any kind?

Teleology has its limits, of course, and from the Enlightenment onward it is evident that materialism has constituted an enormously powerful research paradigm for biology. The temptation to elevate a successful research paradigm to the level of a metaphysical worldview is perhaps irresistible. But materialism too has its limits. To deny the reality of our most immediately direct and universal experience (that of purpose) because it doesn’t fit the presuppositions of methodological materialism, is profoundly anti-empirical. To then refuse to recognize the devastating logical and moral consequences that result from the denial of purpose is anti-rational. For those of us who consider science a rational and empirical enterprise, this is extremely troubling. That people already unembarrassed by the fact that their major intellectual purpose is to deny the reality of purpose should now want to concern themselves deeply with the relative valuation of accidental pieces of their purposeless world is incoherence compounded.

One cannot rescue neo-Darwinism from the domain of purposeless and randomness by pointing to the role of natural selection. Selection may sound purposeful, but in the accepted theory of natural selection chance dominates. Random mutation provides the menu from which natural selection “chooses” by the criterion of the odds of surviving and reproducing in a randomly changing environment (consisting of randomly changing geophysical conditions, and other species that are also randomly evolving). It is a metaphysics of chance all the way down.

The relevance of the lurking inconsistency to conservation biology and steady-state economics should be evident — conservation and sustainable scale are, after all, purposes that are ruled out in a world governed only by chance.

If purpose does not exist then it is hard to imagine how we could experience the lure of value. To have a purpose means to serve an end, and value is imputed to whatever furthers attainment of that end. Alternatively, if there is objective value then surely the attainment of value should become a purpose. Neo-Darwinist biologists and ecologists, who deny the reality of purpose, owe it to the rest of us to remain silent about valuation — and conservation as well. If they simply cannot remain silent, then they must rethink their deterministic materialism. Distinguished philosopher Thomas Nagel has offered to help them in his recent book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinist Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly Wrong. But his “help” requires more recantation than the naturalists can bear, and, even though Nagel is a fellow atheist, he has been excommunicated from the Church of Neo-Darwinism for heresy.

Economists, unlike many biologists, do not usually go to the extreme of denying the existence of purpose. They recognize purpose in attenuated form under the rubric of individual preferences and do not generally consider them to be illusory. However, preferences are thought to be purely subjective, so that one person’s preferences are as good as another’s. Unlike public facts, private preferences cannot be right or wrong — there is, by assumption, no objective standard of value by which preferences can be judged. Nevertheless, according to economists, individual preferences are the ultimate standard of value. Witness economists’ attempts to value species by asking consumers how much they would be willing to pay to save a threatened species, or how much they would accept in compensation for the species’ disappearance. The fact that the two methods of this “contingent valuation” give different answers only adds comic relief to the underlying tragedy, which is the reduction of value to taste weighted by income.

Economics too suffers from the lurking inconsistency, but not to the extent that biology does. Purpose has not been excluded, just reduced to the level of tastes. But even an unexamined and unworthy purpose, such as unconstrained aggregate satisfaction of uninstructed private tastes weighted by income — GDP growth forever– will dominate in the absence of purpose. So, in the public policy forum, economists with their attenuated, subjective concept of purpose (which at least is thought to be causative) will dominate the neo-Darwinist ecologists who are still crippled by the self-inflicted purpose of proving that they are purposeless. Consequently GDP growth will continue to dominate conservation.

Whitehead’s observation that, “it is not popular to dwell on the absolute contradiction here involved,” remains true 85 years later. This willful neglect has allowed the lurking inconsistency to metastasize into the marrow of modernity. The Enlightenment, with its rejection of teleology, certainly illuminated some hidden recesses of superstition in the so-called Dark Ages. But the angle of its cold light has also cast a deep shadow forward into the modern world, obscuring the reality of purpose. To conserve Creation we will first have to reclaim purpose from that darkness. I say Creation with a capital “C” advisedly, and not in denial of the facts of evolution. Rather, if we think that our world, our lives, and our conscious, self-reflective thinking are just a random happenstance of matter in motion — a temporary statistical fluke of multiplying infinitesimal probabilities by an infinite number of trials — then it is hard to see why we should make any sacrifice to maintain the capacity of the earth to support life, or from where we would get the inspiration to do so. This is the lurking inconsistency’s bottom-line consequence for conservation biology and steady-state economics. Our problem is not just faulty economics or biology; it is deep underlying metaphysical and philosophical contradiction.

A few weeks ago, air quality at the U.S. embassy in Beijing registered 755 on a scale to 500. A thick, choking haze enveloped the entire city. You couldn’t see from one high-rise office tower to the next; flights were cancelled, some highways were closed, schoolchildren were kept indoors, hospital admissions soared. China’s air quality problems aren’t limited to Beijing — a 2010 study found that air pollution led to 1.2 million premature deaths nationwide — and killer air is just one of the country’s ecological sorrows. One-half of its surface water is so polluted it can’t be treated to make it drinkable, and half of that is so bad it can’t even be used for industrial purposes. Seventy percent of the country’s rivers and lakes receive raw sewage or untreated industrial toxins. Cancer rates are up, and the country has been losing an area the size of Connecticut every year to desertification, brought on by unsustainable farming practices in grassland ecosystems.

In protest, Chinese people have begun taking to the streets in demonstrations that have increasingly become clashes, sometimes bloody, with riot police.

Between 1978 and 2008 the Chinese economy grew tenfold, outpacing the rest of the world. (For comparison: U.S. real GDP tripled in that period.) The growth has come at considerable and notorious cost in contaminated air and water and other “disamenities” — pulmonary disease, cancer, riots.

Are these the necessary costs of development? Of course not. So why is China paying them? As with most real-world questions there is no single answer, but one of the clearest, strongest, and saddest parts of a complete answer is this: China listened to the wrong economists.

Theorized relationship between pollution and income

Those economists are neither crazy nor blind. They can see the human cost of pollution and environmental degradation. But they’ve got a theory that reassures them the problem is only temporary and will fix itself: the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), which plots a supposed relationship between pollution and income as an upside-down U. Before development, this theory says, pollution levels are low; pollution then increases as economic activity and income both rise; and then, at some tipping point, pollution hits a peak and begins to decline with additional income, as a wealthier population demands and can afford better environmental quality.

This, the standard economics textbooks say, is “intuitively appealing.” And it is — if your intuition has been shaped by traditional economic theory. If ecological damage can always be reversed, and if environmental quality isn’t a God-given gift or a basic human right but a commodity like any other, then it makes sense to think that you can buy a better environment when you get more income. Implication: “Growth is the Key to Protecting the Environment, Not its Enemy,” as one article on the EKC puts it.

This logic leads to an absurd conclusion (always a bad sign for a theory): the reason we have climate change is that the richest countries the planet has ever seen are still not rich enough to afford the environmental good known as “climate stability.” Nor can the EKC be defended on empirical grounds, as good science. The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics acknowledges that most EKC studies “are designed to yield inverse-U-shaped pollution-income paths, and succeed [in doing so by] using a variety of assumptions and mechanisms” — an approach more consistent with preservation of a faith than with scientific inquiry.

The faith that’s at stake are the dogmas of infinite growth. If pollution doesn’t at some point decrease permanently as income increases, we have to admit that there are ecological limits to economic activity.

While the inverted U of the EKC does describe the relationship between some key pollutants and GDP growth in most developed countries, that finding has fatal conceptual flaws. “Key” pollutants are not all pollutants, and particular pollutants aren’t the sole and permanent marker of ecological degradation. Policies that control one kind of pollutant (and which thereby send its EKC down) may simply encourage a shift to manufacturing processes that produce other kinds of pollutants — ones that aren’t (yet) regulated and haven’t ever been measured, so there’s no possible way to chart their history on an EKC.

Beijing’s gamble with the EKC has become a health hazard (photo credit: AnimaSuri)

Another kind of shift establishes an EKC for a pollutant in one country because the manufacturing process itself moves somewhere else. No EKC study has ever definitively excluded the possibility of this “pollution haven” effect. If exporting a dirty industrial process to a country with little or no regulation is cheaper than meeting regulatory standards at home, why would a profit-maximizing company do anything else?

In the effort to shift an economy’s pollution footprint to another country, the EKC is a big help. It reassures the recipient nation that poisoned air and water are a necessary phase of economic development; that someday it too will be rich enough to restore the environmental quality it once had. What the EKC doesn’t say: ecosystems can be degraded past any hope of repair or reclamation, as many a previous civilization learned the hard way. It doesn’t say: loss of biodiversity is a definitive element of ecosystem degradation, and an EKC for it is a logical impossibility. It doesn’t say: we live on finite planet, and there’s no guarantee that when you want to restore your country’s environmental quality, you’ll be able to find fresh pollution havens willing to accept your economy’s footprint.

Thus, China. In 2005, Pan Yue, then the vice minister of environmental protection, lamented his country’s acceptance of the EKC: “The assumption [was] that the economic growth [we pursued] will give us the financial resources to cope with the crises surrounding the environment, raw materials, and population growth.” Whether China can now reverse the damage and outsource the pollution-dump services that its environment has been asked to provide remains to be seen. One thing is clear: other parts of that country’s ecological footprint are being exported. China is now shopping for farmland in Africa and long-term agricultural leases in South America because its degraded landscape can’t support the human population it holds.

Still, the EKC has its defenders and continues to be treated as a sturdy economic finding — probably because if the EKC isn’t true, then a discipline dedicated to infinite growth will have to face up to the fact that there are limits to what nature can give to us and to what it can absorb from us. Evidence and logic — and the air quality in Beijing — say that yes, there are limits. It’s time for economists to stop seeing the world through the distorting, poisonous haze of an unsupportable theory and to start seeing the world as it is. The fate of our civilization depends on it.

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Eric Zencey is a Fellow of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont. He is the author, most recently, of The Other Road to Serfdom and the Path to Sustainable Democracy, from which this essay is drawn.

Since reading Herman Daly’s “Nationalize Money, not Banks,” my head has been whirling with notions of how to help restructure the financial system to support a steady-state economy that respects ecological limits. The current system creates debt-based money by allowing banks to hold only a very small fraction of demand deposits while lending out the rest (with interest) to be re-deposited and then loaned out again (with interest), and on and on. Why is this so important? Besides according gratuitous profits to the private banks for producing money (a public resource that could just as easily be produced by a public institution), the fractional reserve system also creates a structural dependency on economic growth because, as Bill McKibben observes, “without the growth, you can’t pay off the interest.”

But the purpose here is not to repeat our dire situation. Instead, I want to share a plan that I’m using both to disentangle myself from the flawed financial system and to put pressure on the system to change. My plan consists of three steps.

Step 1: Get informed

“The process by which money is created is so simple the mind is repelled.” (John K. Galbraith)

Wow, did Daly say that the financial sector captures 40% of all profits in the United States? While I’m no authority on financial matters, I do have a master’s degree in economics and was even a teaching assistant for Macroeconomic Principles. Maybe I missed it, but I don’t ever recall hearing the term “seigniorage,” and we definitely didn’t focus students’ attention on the fact that “growing the money supply” is profitable. After reading “Nationalize Money, not Banks,” I was left with the familiar post-Daly feeling that I had been blind(ed) but was starting to see.

Fortunately, I received my copy of Enough is Enough in the mail shortly thereafter, and Chapter 8 (Enough Debt) provides more ideas on the issue of debt-based money creation and policies for reform. Also, issue no. 63 of the Real World Economics Review, a pluralist, open-access journal, offers excellent papers on the recent financial crises and money markets. So, having been acquainted with a number of alternatives to the current system, I was ready to roll on to the next step.

Step 2: Start worrying (more)

“Thus, our national circulating medium is now at the mercy of loan transactions of banks, which lend, not money, but promises to supply money they do not possess.” (Irving Fisher)

Cyprus recently joined Greece, Spain, Ireland and Portugal to become the 5th country in the Eurozone that has needed outside assistance to bail out its troubled financial sector. When the Cypriot authorities meet in early April to sign the agreement with representatives of the “Troika” (International Monetary Fund, European Commission and European Central Bank), every man, woman and child in Cyprus will effectively take out a €12,000 loan.

That sounds pretty bad, but actually, in the current system, the bailout should have been even bigger. In an unprecedented move that ought to shake the rotten foundations of the fractional reserve system, depositors holding more than €100,000 in Cyprus’ two largest banks have been subject to levies of 100% and 37.5%, respectively, in order to “recapitalize” their coffers. The original plan, voted down by the Cypriot parliament due in large part to public outrage, was to levy all depositors. This sends a very clear and ominous message to people (like me) holding deposits in the Eurozone: the governments of the Eurogroup — representing the world’s largest common market — have proven unwilling to fully guarantee demand deposits in this crisis. And if Europe can’t guarantee deposits, is there anywhere else that can really be considered safe?

Step 3: Take action

“The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.” (Lord Acton)

There are two simple avenues for someone like me (or you) to take action against the banks.

First, I plan to continue using my voice as a citizen to spread the word concerning the inherent instability of the fractional reserve system and get involved with efforts to promote an alternative vision of a financial system — one that serves the needs of the economy and society, while respecting the limits of a finite planet.

Second, and more immediately, I wanted to get my deposits out of the system ASAP. If enough people stash their money under the proverbial mattress, then banks should get a warning message from their balance sheets that they need to finance more of their loans with real equity and long-term bonds rather than debt.

However, I found that I couldn’t easily abandon my checking account because that’s where my employer deposits my salary and where companies bill me for utilities. As a working compromise, my partner and I closed our accounts with Bankia — the giant Spanish conglomerate that has siphoned away more than half of the €40bn in bailout funds spent by Spain so far — and started banking with Triodos Bank.

Although Triodos still creates debt-based money from our deposits, they lend it to initiatives that benefit people and the environment, and what’s more, they publish each and every loan made. They are co-founders of the Global Alliance on Banking for Values, a network of 22 “values-based banks” that have recently issued a declaration calling for greater transparency, sustainability and diversity in banking. Consider the following excerpt:

Banks play a critical role in the transition towards a more sustainable economy. Therefore social and ecological criteria must play a critical role in the creation and use of financial products. [...] Banks have to serve the real economy and include broader societal perspectives in their considerations.

Can you believe this is coming from a group of bankers managing more than $60 billion worth of assets?

My three-step plan isn’t exactly revolutionary, but it is helping to secure my own financial situation and putting pressure on the system at large. If enough of us take steps like these, the day will come when the Triodos perspective on banking is the norm.

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Andrew Fanning grew up on the blustery east coast of Canada where he eventually earned a master’s in economics. His interests include lots of things, especially the capacity of the planet to support life.

Robert F. Kennedy delivered a stunning speech 45 years ago at the very beginning of his ill-fated campaign for the office of U.S. President. He stressed the need for new measures of progress, and his devastating critique of the most influential economic measuring stick included this poetic paragraph:

[T]he gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

It appears that U.S. leaders and their statistically inclined appointees at the Bureau of Economic Analysis are finally catching on. Carl Lemniscate is the BEA’s head beancounter. His graying temples and baritone voice lend him an air of authority as he answers questions about why it took so long for the agency to produce a better measuring stick for American progress.

“The Bureau is a no-nonsense agency. When we see an opportunity to calculate additional economic figures, we get right on it. People just don’t realize how quickly we responded to Bobby Kennedy’s challenge. Why do you think we switched from gross national product to gross domestic product all the way back in 1991?”

Mr. Lemniscate is referring to the agency’s decision to use GDP instead of GNP as the primary measure of economic activity, a change that many economists and citizens have continued to criticize as failing to address Kennedy’s main concerns. Mr. Leminscate says, “I thought a totally objective measure like GDP would suffice, but it’s hard to satisfy everyone. Still, here at the Bureau, we serve the public.” A smile breaks across his face as he leans back in his swivel chair and says, “That’s why we’re so pleased with our three new measures of economic progress.”

In a press release issued earlier today, the Bureau of Economic Analysis introduced the public to GDI, CCI, and FEI. Mr. Lemniscate says, “I have to admit that at first I was against the idea of using measures other than GDP, but given the quality of these new ones, I’m all for it.”

GDI — Gross Domestic Imperviousness

The main plot in the story of progress is humanity’s domination of nature.  Thanks to the magic of economic growth and technological advancement, nature may soon become a distant memory from a bygone era.  Also thanks to technological advancement, there’s now a measure that can capture the essence of this domination.

With advancements in satellite sensors and data processing, analysts can produce detailed maps of impervious surfaces — those areas that have been turned into pavement, rooftops, and other manmade surfaces. GDI adds up the nation’s impervious square footage to provide an accurate indicator of humanity’s victory over untamed lands. Mr. Lemniscate says, “The brilliance of GDI is that it tells us how we’re creating real wealth by converting farmland, forests, grasslands, and other useless landscapes into highways, strip malls, muffler shops, ministorage, and other desirable suburbi-scapes.”

CCI — Corporate Competitiveness Index

Competitiveness is the foundation of American progress. It’s the fuel that has driven America to the winner’s circle in the race for planetary supremacy. And no institution embodies the competitive spirit better than the publicly traded corporation. Even though corporations have trounced so many Main Street businesses and outcompeted all sorts of ecosystems in the cutthroat battle to maximize profits, competitiveness has been slipping. If America is going to retain its position as the highest-consuming nation, it needs a measure that can track competitiveness.

CCI is a composite of key statistics for each publicly traded corporation; it includes profit, degree of influence on political decisions, quantity of externalized costs, and percentage of tax liability avoided. Also dubbed the corporate bootprint, CCI quantifies the progress that occurs as corporations accumulate power and eradicate the need for less profitable institutions in society.

FEI — Financial Extraction Indicator

The FEI is akin to another of the Bureau’s measures — total wetland drainage (TWD) — but instead of calculating how much water is drawn out of worthless landscapes, it calculates how much financial wealth is extracted from real assets. Real assets tend to just sit there doing nothing. Take, for example, a house. Sure it offers shelter, warmth, and a place for a family to do whatever families do, but none of that provides market value. Financial institutions can and do change all that. For example, financiers can chop mortgages into sellable and re-sellable little bits. Before the financiers got involved, there was no money changing hands in the market, and the house had only one owner. Enter Wall Street, and we have money whipping around and thousands of anonymous absentee owners — a supremely creative wealth-generating scheme. With all the undisclosed fees and untraceable flows of money involved in such a process, financial institutions are able to accrue wealth that would have remained locked up in real assets.

The FEI aggregates all the instances in which financial institutions extract wealth from families, communities, and even natural areas — a true measure of how our most capable industry can wring wealth from assets held by others. One only needs to look at how the financial institutions handled the housing crisis to recognize that progress in America is synonymous with progress on Wall Street.

With FEI, CCI, and GDI, the Bureau of Economic Analysis has kicked off a new era. As Mr. Lemniscate says, “We manage what we measure. And you can bet we’ll be managing America a whole lot better now that GDP has a few sidekicks to help show off our national progress.”

Ecological economists, top scientists, and even a few financiers have put forth powerful arguments for moving to a steady state economy. Sometimes described as a true-cost economy, a sustainable economy, or a spaceship economy, the steady state offers a positive alternative to the delusion of endless growth.

Viewed from an environmental perspective, the need to transform the U.S. and global economic systems is becoming more urgent by the day — if you scan the headlines about global warming, biodiversity loss, and natural resource depletion, you’ll quickly get the picture. It turns out that the most important environmental policies of any nation are its economic policies. For example, there is no chance of stabilizing the ongoing climate chaos if the major economies of the world continue to reward fossil fuel usage and fail to include pollution externalities in their prices. In a true-cost economy, however, clean energy would be the cheapest, and fossil fuels would be too expensive to use.

Given the severity of the problems we face and the strong potential for steady state policies to solve them, the question is, “Why are nations failing to embrace this positive alternative?” There are many obstacles standing in the way of a sustainable economy. The skeptic would assert, “You are asking the most powerful nations in the world to change the cherished economic system they have been functioning under and embrace an economic system which no modern nation has ever used. It is a wild fantasy.”

There’s some merit to the skeptic’s argument — the suggested economic changes seem like a paradigm shift akin to those seen over the centuries in physics and astronomy. But given the unpredictability of paradigm shifts, we can encourage incremental steps toward an economic transformation.

A number of experts have laid out such steps. For instance, the economist Peter Victor has illustrated how Canada could achieve a sustainable economy. But even with a blueprint in hand, it’s questionable whether Canada or China or the U.S. or Brazil or India would ever start constructing such an economy.

Part of the problem stems from the international economic infrastructure. The continued push for economic expansion from global bodies such as the World Bank, the IMF , the G-8, the World Trade Organization, undermines intellectual support for the transformation from cowboy economies to spaceship economies.

Another obstacle comes from the extractive industries and the way they exert influence within governmental bureaucracies. These industries are propping up a business-as-usual approach to economics. If this approach continues, we can expect collapses around the world stemming from food and water riots, weather disasters, and ongoing erosion of life-support systems worldwide.

It’s tough to come up with plausible ways of overcoming these major obstacles, but three recent developments provide some much-needed hope. They may be long-shots for breaking through the resistance and spurring the transformation to a new true-cost economy, but they offer a chance.

Economic output and energy use are highly correlated. Data shown are for 175 countries in the year 2007. Sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration and the World Bank.

The first glimmer of hope is emerging from the energy changes happening in Germany, which has become the world’s leader in electricity produced from solar and wind sources. Germans are aiming to generate half of their electricity from renewable sources within ten years. If the most powerful economies in the world were to replicate Germany’s energy policy, it would not only be a shift in the energy sector, but also a monumental shift in economics, given the way economic growth and energy consumption are connected.

The second glimmer of hope comes from growing concern about caring for creation on the part of religious congregations from many faith traditions. More and more religious organizations, liberal and conservative, are pointing to the excessive consumption in the global economy as destroying God’s creation. What if Pope Francis surprised everyone and included population stabilization on his agenda. His text could align with Genesis by envisioning a flourishing of all life on earth. That is why the blessing “be fruitful and multiply” is first given explicitly to all the animals on the planet.

A third glimmer of hope is arising from the surge of public outrage over corporate tax dodging and subsidies. Stories of financial fraud and abuse are popping up in the news coverage. The Economist’s Special Report on Offshore Finance (February 16, 2013) highlights the trillions of dollars stashed in offshore tax havens.

It’s scandalous that some of the wealthiest corporations in the world, such as General Electric, Apple, and Google, are paying little or no income tax. It’s equally scandalous that U.S. corporations continue to receive taxpayer handouts. The anger and unrest spurred by this situation offers a good opportunity to change the way businesses operate.

The obstacles to a establishing a true-cost, steady state economy are daunting, but now’s the time to get on board with efforts to overcome them. People are responding to the challenge and taking positive actions all over the world. I’ve summarized three of my favorites here, and I’m hopeful that you know of plenty of other efforts to create an economy that will work for people and the planet.