Capitalism and the Environment

When right-wing pundits and corporate flacks compare environmentalists to watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside), they mean it as a slur.

But when eco-socialists look at the wider environmental movement, they see a big green tomato that had better ripen up, and soon. Hybridizing the analyses of Karl Marx with those of modern-day ecological economists, they maintain that we'll never stop degrading the ecosphere unless we tackle capitalism and the unsustainable growth that lies at its core. For at least one part of their argument -- that economic growth is out of control -- eco-socialists can call on plenty of mainstream backup. For example, the Oakland, Calif.-based group Redefining Progress reports that in 2000, human consumption and waste production had reached its highest point ever, exceeding by 15 percent the planet's biological capacity to produce and absorb.

Capitalism's back-door exit.That we are beginning to burst the seams of the ecosphere would have come as no surprise to Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. An economist at Vanderbilt University from 1950 to 1976, Georgescu-Roegen showed that the entire economic process can be represented by just two factors: a front-door entrance for resources -- concentrated energy and highly ordered materials -- and a back-door exit for wastes. An economy's only product, he argued, is nonmaterial "enjoyment of life," which can be accumulated only as memories.

The implications of Georgescu-Roegen's analysis are profound and unavoidable: Provided our species survives, there lies somewhere in its future another Stone Age, and the faster our economic growth, the steeper the decline will be. The next Stone Age will be bleaker and more toxic than the last, and there will be no shot at a comeback.

Georgescu-Roegen's 1971 book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process was read widely and hailed as a seminal work. Then most economists stuffed it onto their bookshelves to be consulted no more. Its message was simply too dismal even for the dismal science.

But a brave few, known as ecological economists, have taken Georgescu-Roegen seriously. [Editor's note: See a series of Grist articles on ecological economists.] Starting with Herman Daly's 1977 classic Steady-State Economics, they have spent decades drawing up blueprints for an economic system that could push that new Stone Age into the immeasurably remote future, while ensuring that the intervening years are humane, even comfortable.

In a recent textbook, Ecological Economics, Daly and coauthor Joshua Farley do not urge the demolition and rebuilding of whole economies, but rather the "stretching and bending" of existing institutions, in order to squeeze them inside the planet's ecosystems in a way that does as little damage as possible.