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ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS
Herschel Hardin Leadership Campaign
Policy Circular 6 • July 11, 1995 |
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Ecological economics should be a leading element of our political strategy. As one environmental writer put it, "the environment should be a big ticket economic item," up front with other major economic issues. All economic and other decisions should be measured against their impact on the environment and how they serve the environment. Similarly, environmental protection and reconstruction should be a major part of our party's image and identity.
Philosophically, this is not a departure for us at all. Ecological political economy is a direct expression of democratic socialism. It recognizes that the land we live on and the air we breathe are primary and should not be subordinated to mere economic devices. By the same token, there should be no need for environmentalists to have a Green Party. The NDP should fully incorporate ecological values.
By and large the NDP has been an environmentally conscious party. One would expect that. There is one more necessary step to be taken, however: the development of an ecological political economy proper as a key element of our party's vision.
Some of the possible mechanisms for developing this new kind of economy are well known in environmental circles:
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Revise statistics to take into account environmental damage and depletion of natural resources. Measurements of how our economy is doing should fully take into consideration damage to the environment, depletion of non renewable resources, and the using up of renewable resources faster than they are being replaced. If they don't, we may, as one ecological economist wrote, "be pushing the economy down while we think we are building it up."
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Remove subsidies for resource exploitation. This includes indirect subsidies like tax concessions.
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Invest in "natural capital." Reverse the depletion of renewable resources such as fisheries, forests, and environmental resources. Reserve large, unexploited ecosystems in order to preserve biological diversity.
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Implement the "precautionary principle" in dealing with environmental risk. Scientists cannot predict with absolute certainty the exact impact of pesticides, herbicides, and other toxins, although they may have a good idea that serious damage will be done. If we wait for absolute certainty, it will be too late. The "precautionary principle" states that we should act in anticipation instead.
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Include environmental costs. Through "ecological taxes," charge commodities with the full environmental and recycling costs incurred by their production.
These sample administrative measures, however, only beg the larger issue at the heart of ecological economics the need for collective action that goes well beyond technical measurements and adjustments. We should not be doing harm to the environment in the first place. Dealing with pollution, the over consumption of resources, the pressures of population, and threats to bio diversity requires active community decision making based on a rooted sense of civic responsibility.
Creating new work
Ecological economics in practice means creating more work rather than less, but it is a different kind of work, ranging from environmental reconstruction to the development of environmental technologies. This means, in turn, shifting people from old kinds of work to new kinds of work. This is one of our greatest challenges as a society. Moving from automobile use to public transit in large urban centres requires the same kind of transfer of resources and profound change of thinking.
Much of this new work, particularly of environmental reconstruction, will be in the public sector. This means a shift in financial resources to the public sector another great challenge to us politically. We have to demythologize the idea that the market is everything and that the public sector is somehow illegitimate and just a burden on taxpayers.
International aspects
Our relationship with other nations is part of the equation, since ultimately all environmental issues are global. Ecology should be a leading element of our external affairs activity, as different from our current obsession with trade. This raises the deeper issue of sharing. In the end, on a finite planet, sharing is what environmentalism finally comes down to.
Trading arrangements like NAFTA also come into it. There is more at stake for us, in opposing NAFTA, than protecting environ-mental standards. NAFTA and other such constructions are based on the idea of one big, integrated world in which we no longer belong to countries except in a sentimental way. Ecological economics, on the other hand, assumes healthy nation states which have the sovereignty to act for the common good within their borders. This doesn't lessen the need for international co operation. The international community in this model, however, is a "community of communities" of vital nation states co operating to solve global problems.
The media and cultural battle
Ecological economics also depends on open, democratic mass media. Currently television, the most powerful medium in history, is captive to a propaganda system commercials which promotes the consumption of goods as an overarching value. There is no "right of reply." Environmental values are downgraded in the process. Newspapers have regular "service" sections on business and finance but no equivalent sections on environmental practices.
Ecological economics in all these aspects takes for granted the leading value of collective action. It sweeps market dogma off the table. This is another, profound way in which democratic socialism shows itself to be more relevant than ever and suited to the politics of the future.
For related issues, see Policy Circular 13, "Public sector: holding heads high"; Policy Circular 10, "The Post Propaganda Society"; and Policy Circular 11A, "Making Media An Issue." |
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