Our entire economic system is fundamentally
dependent upon the functional integrity of natural and living systems that are
losing patience with us. That is to say, these systems have a limited capacity
to tolerate human extraction from them and excretion of waste products and
byproducts into them, and human economic activity worldwide is colliding with
those limits.
Why? The reasons are many, but
one key factor is our deep ontological misprision. A hallmark of the modern era
is that we think of the human realm as set apart from the rest of the world and
that we can manipulate it, engineer it, as we see fit in accordance with what
we find meaningful and valuable. We are still wedded to that worldview and seem
blindly determined to pursue it to its logical extremes. Biophysical systems,
even when they are scientifically well understood, are mistakenly seen as things we live off of, not as places we live within.
It is essential to change our way
of thinking about economics. In the past, the main contention has been between
those who emphasize efficiency and those who emphasize equity; or between those
who stress growth and those who stress just redistribution of existing wealth;
or between those who own and control capital and those who own mainly their own
labor and skills. These arguments are not passé, by any means; the struggle for
fairness and equality has not been won.
But a new struggle must be, and
is being, added to it. A new perspective is emerging to infuse and inform our
normative discourse about economics, power, and justice. Let us call this
perspective the new “ecological political economy.” It places economic activity
in the context of the operation of physical and biological systems. It includes
the important subfield of economics known as ecological economics, but is
broader in the way it brings ethical and governance issues together with
economic ones, hence the return to the traditional phrase, political economy.
Ecological political economy
calls us to take into account the fact that the planetary systems that support
life in its most fundamental physical, chemical, and organic manifestations
have boundaries, tolerances, and thresholds. These boundaries should—and
ultimately will—constrain the extractive and the excretory activity of human
individuals and societies. What individuals do one at a time is important, but the
social, institutional level is an essential focus here because the effects of human
action are greatly magnified by the collective capacity of institutionally
structured economies and technologies. As planetary boundaries are approached
(or exceeded), ecosystem functions are undermined and overwhelmed, thereby
rendering them—and the social systems that depend upon them—less able to
support either human or natural communities that are flourishing and healthy, diverse
and resilient. No longer are only justice and dignity at stake, now minimally
decent survival is in question, as well.
There can be only one conclusion.
Our accelerating, global extractive assault on planetary resources and
ecosystems, as well as the unprecedented extensions of our technologic reach, do
not truly represent progress and the triumph of human freedom or the human
destiny. Why not? For one thing, as is by now familiar, they are not
sustainable or viable as a road to the future. No less important, but less
often noted, is the fact that technological advance and extractive assault contain
an inner contradiction. While seeming to extend human freedom, they are laying
the groundwork for its repression; while seemingly representing the advanced
expression of human capability, they are actually undermining what is most
precious in humanness.
To find a healed relationship
between humans and nature, how then should we think about humanness? I suggest
that two ideas help lead us in a fruitful direction: First, the intertwined notions
of innovative human agency and developmental capability—humans are remarkably
good at doing new things, and they can improve or get better at what they do. Second,
the normative imperative to treat the individual human being as a person—it is
of great ethical value to be (and to be allowed to be) an acting, doing subject,
rather than merely living as an object that is acted upon and done to. In
short, humans are able to comprehend themselves as beings who become, as
purposive agents who can live—and should live—without external domination. From
this follows the awareness that the world
can be otherwise than it has been in the past and is now. One might say
that the concepts of freedom and human rights were invented to take the moral
measure of such a being, once humankind had discovered (or reinvented) itself
it this way.
In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt developed an anatomy of our
humanness along these lines, using a suggestive but rather idiosyncratic
terminology. According to Arendt, human beings are (1) creatures of “labor” who
are subject to the biological rhythms of their organic needs; (2) practitioners
of “work” who are subject to the creative encounter between natural materials
and imaginative form; and (3) performers of “action,” especially speech acts or
communicative acts, through participation in the deliberative process of
shaping common meanings in the public, symbolic order.
The failure to live within
planetary boundaries and limits—thereby turning our back on our interdependency
with the earth and our own earthly, creaturely condition—will fundamentally
threaten and transform the dimensions of labor, work, and action. Labor will
produce illness rather than health. Creative work will become increasingly
unavailable and unavailing. Action will devolve into bargaining and positioning
for strategic advantage. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, precisely
those baleful transformations in the human condition, this hobbling of human
possibility, seem well advanced.
So we would do well not to
underestimate the task facing ecological political economy. It is both an
ontological reorientation and an ethical innovation. It goes beyond the
physical and life sciences in a descriptive sense and implicates the normative
foundations of social order and human agency. Ecological political economics is
a new story and a new conceptual framework within which we must make public
policy and reform in the major structures of our society. It is the narrative
of a journey of discovery concerning how to imagine, construct, comprehend, and
govern a new form of social order that will achieve justice and empower
flourishing life and living.
Ecological political economy, in
other words, is a search for a “public philosophy” suitable to the
unprecedented challenges of our time. A public philosophy provides normative guidance
and a context for the legitimation of governance and public policy. It can also
provide a framework for the formation of democratic consensus through
participatory deliberation. Grounded in solid natural and social scientific
knowledge, as it ideally should be, a public philosophy is emergent and
dynamic, not dogmatic. It reflects an ethical vision of what the ends of
economic agency and democratic citizenship should be. All
economies, including a future ecological one, will appropriate natural matter
and energy and, through labor,
transform them into products for human use and exchange. And for this the
coordination and organization of very large numbers of people, a vast massing
of human agency, will be required in agriculture, mining and manufacturing,
science and technology, transportation, construction, and the like. Such
coordination requires a sense of common purpose, and a public philosophy is
essential in the imagination and discovery of what that purpose should be.
A public philosophy also holds a
moral mirror up to each one of us. It is not only a narrative of discovering a
new form of social order, it is also a narrative of discovering a new
self-identity and a new way to live. In the market-oriented
public philosophy dominant in the world today, the individual must live out the
following narrative,
the ideal of selfhood of homo economicus:
To survive and flourish, the economic self must fulfill (biological and
psychological) needs. To meet your needs, you must compete successfully to
extract value from the labor of others or to secure access to positions in
which your own labor can provide the necessary income. To compete, you must
understand and come to dominate the natural and social systems you inhabit. In
this narrative, the desire to acquire and consume is taken to be
psychologically unlimited. The individual then is compelled by its inner nature
and external circumstance to appropriate and strive to dominate both its social
and its natural environment. As a result, growth in the activities of extraction
and excretion knows no bounds and perforce overcomes all other considerations.
We hurtle toward barriers ahead
and apply the accelerator rather than the brakes. In this we have been taught
to understand ourselves as free and responsible members of society. We provide
for ourselves and our families. We pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and
stand on our own two feet. This story of selfhood is hollow and self-defeating.
It is a cathedral with no alter.
In contrast, the kind of self called
forth in an ecological political economy has a quite different narrative. We
don’t quite know yet how to foster the psycho-social development of such selves
or write their collective biography on a large scale. How may homo economicus (the self as gaming,
calculating maximizer of personal utility) be transformed into homo faber (the self as craftsman,
responsible for and respectful of his materials)? How can selves be nurtured so
as to become deliberative democratic citizens attentive to the common good and
obligations of trusteeship for the natural world? How can the current
neoliberal world of extractive liberty and possessive individualism be transformed
into a world of relational or communal liberty, solidarity, mutual compassion
and respect?
From these questions follow
equally searching ones about governance. How can an open, liberal society—one
in which each individual has a wide range of freedom and opportunity to live
his or her own life in their own way—also be an objectively sustainable,
healthy society that respects ecological boundaries and limits? How can state
power be kept to a minimum if each person is to be protected against collective
hazards over which he or she has virtually no control and only a paltry defense?
(The aftermath of Hurricane Sandy comes to mind, and even conservative,
anti-government politicians were calling for the federal government, that is
the American people as a whole, to be active and directive then.) These
questions indicate the dilemma of reconciling personal autonomy with the common
good. This dilemma has long been at the heart of modern politics, but today
arises in a new, unprecedented global form. It will be at the core of politics
in the transition from a neoliberal market political economy to an ecological
political economy, and then will remain in the ongoing governance of the
ecological political economy of the future.
Ecological political economy
demands a regime of social control that is not compatible with the life
narrative of homo economicus and with
the wide scope of individual and corporate freedom from (state) interference in
the use of extractive power that has been widespread among the affluent of the
developed world in the last century. What is the best way to frame this
issue—As a balancing or trade-off of conflicting values? As a regrettable but
necessary contraction of the sphere of individual freedom of choice made
necessary by ecosystemic limits? Or perhaps as a refinement—itself morally
positive and progressive—of our understanding of freedom? That is, a refinement
in our moral sensibility such that ecologically destructive behavior would not
be seen as a manifestation of freedom at all, but rather would come to be
repudiated as a manifestation of ignorance, irresponsibility, and alienation.
If we frame this problem as one of balancing values, then who controls the
scales? If we frame it as a devolution of freedom for the sake of survival,
then what level of coercion will be used against the recalcitrant, self-destructive
among us?
I believe that it will not be
through fear and the desire for security in an ecologically altered and
disrupted world (“global weirdness,” as Climate Central calls it) that the
public philosophy of ecological economics will be able to succeed. It will
succeed primarily through the positive inspiration and promise of a new kind of
freedom, meaning, and flourishing, The message of planetary boundaries is not
the bad news of less liberty and more sharp elbows, but the promise of a new,
more humanly fulfilling kind of liberty and mutuality. This new freedom and a
sense of solidarity can justify and motivate the kinds of social change needed
nationally and globally in the next generation.
In practice, this means that the
story line of a new public philosophy of ecological political economy must have
recourse to values and purposes that the members of these societies will
understand if they think and act like interdependent and relational
selves—“ecological selves,” and “ecological citizens,” if you please. Part of
the task of a new public philosophy, remember, is to shape this self-identity
and foster a moral imagination that can see the good and freedom in relational
terms. Its task is to re-member us. The present mainstream public philosophy over
the years has helped to build a population of possessive individualists through
its doctrines and through the institutions it has legitimated. Now we must be no
less intentional about the task of educating a new generation of social
persons. The time has come for economic knowledge and discourse to show all of
us, specialists and ordinary citizens alike, that our personal flourishing is
inextricably linked to the flourishing of others (justice) and to the
flourishing of the natural world (trusteeship). A new public philosophy and
democratic governance will have to appeal to a motivational structure that is
informed by what has been traditionally called “civic virtue,” and what today
might better be called civic trusteeship. For now, like it or not, we are each
entrusted with the well-being of the commonwealth. Ecological civic trusteeship
is not so much a role, or a legal status, as it is an orientation and a
disposition of living that is grounded in a sense of responsibility for
promoting and sustaining the common good of the human and biotic community as a
whole and its essential biophysical ground.
In order to tell a new story, a
new public philosophy will need a vocabulary of relational concepts, metaphors,
and images—solidarity, mutuality, reciprocity, community, care, place,
resilience—with which to map the journey to an ecological economy, democracy,
and self. This is a narrative to fashion and nurture an ecology of the mind and
of the heart.
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