The ecological economy

Can growth and sustainable ecology go hand In hand? Or does one cancel out the other? A financial slump could present stark choices

Picture a drunk so far gone that he’s bent on drinking himself sober.

It’s much like the behaviour of governments and central banks in Canada and the U.S. in the face of a looming North American recession, suggests Robert Costanza.


In response to an economic downturn caused by excesses of debt run up in pursuit of over-consumption, the banks have slashed interest rates and governments have cut sales taxes and offered tax rebates in hopes that people will spend more on stuff and services and thereby boost the economy back to full-throttle growth. Heaven forbid they should invest it in savings; it would be the ruination of the whole scheme.

“It’s crazy, insanity,” said Costanza, who is director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont. “Insanity means doing the same things and expecting a different result.”

It would seem not the best of times to be pushing the cause of ecological economics, of which Costanza is a prime mover.

He and his eco-economist cohorts preach against the classic doctrine of the dismal science. It disputes the long-standing assumption that the measure of a nation’s economic health and well-being of its society is a steadily growing gross national product. They argue that traditional economic accounting doesn’t factor in the cost of resource depletion and environmental damage involved in sustaining a perpetually burgeoning GNP.

In other words, the production of ever more “goods” is actually not a good thing. At worst, it’s said, it could ultimately lead to the end of the world as we know it.

The Gazette (Canada)