by Karen Telleen-Lawton, Noozhawk Columnist (read the original in Noozhawk by clicking here)
My favorite type of column dovetails an ecological topic with an economic one. It’s not a stretch: the words have the same root. Eco, from the Greek oikos, loosely translates “care of household.”
Ecology and economics both analyze the allocation and management of scarce resources. From an eco-perspective, how are we doing at managing the scare resource that is earth?
Essayist Nathaniel Rich shares in a recent New York Times article that we came close to solving the earth’s climate crisis in the decade from 1979-89.
His article, called Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, points out that the world’s major powers were just a few signatures shy of endorsing a binding, global framework to reduce carbon emissions.
Environmental progress since has been steady, albeit far too slow for the intractability of the issues.
Ecologists, scientists and citizens of every stripe are appalled by the present administration’s U-turn in virtually every area of caring for our natural resources.
Many problems concern the irreplaceability of earth’s resources and the genetic library of plant and animal species.
Economists, the other “eco” professionals, generally have a different perspective on resource protection.
Economists in a capitalist society allocate resources by marketplace. They attempt to apply this even to public goods such as oxygen production by vegetation, the health benefits of clean air, and marshes’ water filtering.
Cost benefit analysis is important in their toolkit, but this tool fails in valuing future benefits as well as these “free” services of nature.
Increasingly, though, economists and financial professionals recognize these deficiencies. Perhaps it is because long-term costs such as climate change “suddenly” have short-term cost implications.
Jeremy Grantham, cofounder and chief investment strategist of GMO, one of the world’s largest asset management firms, believes that human civilization is losing the race for human survival.
“Thirty years ago, the dire predictions of leading climate scientists were laughed at,” Grantham writes. “Now we watch these predictions coming true and ignore the data or pretend to.
“So, as the world starts to burn up, we twiddle our thumbs and talk about ‘just another heat wave!’ God help us.” Grantham concludes that people have never been good at dealing with long-term, slowly developing problems.
Long-term planning is difficult, to be sure, but I would differ with Grantham’s conclusion about where the blame lies.
The fact that some ancient civilizations lasted thousands of years belies this conclusion. We may not have wanted to be subjects in the Chinese, Egyptian, Byzantine, Roman or other empires, but those societies apparently planned for the long term.
Instead, the culprit is the idea that all markets can self-regulate. Democracies need to re-engineer market systems to account for the inefficiencies in valuing public goods, future good, and goods which fail the precautionary principle.
The good news is that these alternative “eco” perspectives are increasingly converging. Yes, the leadership deficits at the top are extreme. But in a representative democracy, we know how to fix that.
Long-term, we need to support science and fact-based education. Short-term, we need to care for our household by standing up to our leader and his followers for their poor governance.
This naked emperor can’t properly value our rich environmental heritage because he has no values.
Karen Telleen-Lawton, Noozhawk Columnist
Karen Telleen-Lawton is an eco-writer, sharing information and insights about economics and ecology, finances and the environment. Having recently retired from financial planning and advising, she spends more time exploring the outdoors — and reading and writing about it. The opinions expressed are her own.