ST-21 Ecological Economics
Dennis Bradley1
Draft, Draft, Draft, Draft, Draft, Draft, Draft
3/3/96
A major theme of the ESW was the need for scientists and managers to come together to accelerate the development and implementation of a scientifically sound basis for Ecosystem Management (EM). And this wasn't only because urgent needs for action have outrun our knowledge just this once. The ESW recognized that the dynamic interactions of coevolving ecosystems and human societies in a context of rapid economic change and population growth represents more in the nature of a crisis: The problems we face as ecosystem managers are unique in both the scope of our concerns--troubling and accelerating changes in global ecosystem conditions--and in the nature of what is at stake--the implications of such conditions upon the very survival of the human race. We are coming to grips with the fact that human societies depend literally for everything on the vigor and productivity of ecosystems--but even more--on their continued integrity. Further, the size of such a problem and its emergent character precludes science ever 'catching up:' No matter how hard we try, our knowledge will always lag an evolving reality--one we no doubt influence but hardly control. The best we can likely hope for are practically adequate tools in reasonably short order while we jointly lay the ground work for a more theoretically adequate understanding that might come later. Finally, and due in part to absolute limitations in our science, such a practical adequacy necessarily requires strategies that marshall other kinds of knowledge in addition to science. We refer to various ethical, moral, and aesthetic perspectives and insights.
This is especially true for an area like EE which, in a real sense, amounts to nothing less that a reconstruction of the material, biological, and ecological basis of a central societal function--its material reproduction centered in its economic activities. At the same time, because an economy is only one function of a social system, such a reconstruction will require us to incorporate an already existing and highly developed social science of which economics--in its dominant yet largely self-appointed role as the exemplar for social science--has too often ignored: Current economic actions and their social and cultural underpinnings are deeply entrenched--despite their inadequacies--and may be destructive of the very worlds they claim to support. For much economic theory and practice does not describe the way the world is and must always be--as is justifiably claimed for physics--but represents on ongoing historical process that often amounts to little more than an ideology supporting the status quo. Despite problems with conventional economics however, people will not relinquish their comfortable but problematic worldviews and biases without a fight.
If this were not difficult enough, we hear constant complaints from even those managers and lay publics who most sense the need for a more realistic understanding that we as scientists must 'simplify' our explanations, as if it were simply a matter of wishing complexity away. If simple explanations and actions must suffice, despite evidence to the contrary, we are in deep trouble indeed. A good case can be made that current problems, surely arising from how we first conceptualize and then treat ecosystems and their embedded societies in attempting to meet human expectations, are due in large part to gross over-simplifications of what is undoubtedly very complex. So in the following, we feel that 'pulling punches' regarding the difficulty of what we are attempting to accomplish would be foolish. If we are serious about EM, addressing its problems will require hard intellectual work by all sides--scientists, practitioners, and especially the lay-public.
The purpose of the ESW, representing a concurrence of many federal land management agencies and national environmental groups, was to address a set of problems long in their development but only recently considered at the national and international level: Large human populations coupled with unprecedented per capita increases in industrial production and consumption--at least in the West and the North--are placing ecosystems at grave risk on a global scale. Despite such overuse and even destruction, however, ecosystems cannot be left alone while we ponder the problems at leisure--there is simply no where else to turn for food, materials, and energy. Thus, and ready or not, we must continue to use ecosystems, even as we strive for better ways to manage them. The question for ecosystem managers is: Can we learn to qualitatively and quantitatively restructure the ways we impact ecosystems before their inherent resilience and productivity (properties which themselves also contribute to change) are damaged beyond repair? And this must involve advances not only in the material and biological sciences but in the social sciences.
Such a statement presupposes: (1) A view of the nature of our difficulties; (2) The extent to which we can actually come to understand ecosystem-human interactions more realistically; (3) From these two considerations, some estimation of the extent to which we may be able to turn such knowledge into practice, and as a result; (2) What these all imply about the directions in which we might best seek to more realistically manage ecosystems to the benefit of all. The following description of what EE is about and how it might assist in this task, attempts to lay out these presuppositions and several related problems more clearly. To say the least, EE sees the natural and social worlds in a dramatically different way from CE and the modern societies which its worldviews--for good or ill--have largely shaped.
Following such a description, however, we believe that some additional matters must be revisited. The problems with CE lie not only within its inadequate view of human-ecosystem interactions but reflect larger issues that trouble all the topics addressed by the ESW. Chief among these is the crucial question of how we might integrate the natural and social sciences--Jack Ward Thomas' encouraging remarks about their necessary partnership, notwithstanding. This shortcoming turns on the absence of discussions at the outset of the ESW about the need for a systems view; the fundamental differences between various kinds of systems and their linkages; and what these differences imply for the problem of integrating the two domains of the natural and the social world. Such a systematic and systemic beginning could have highlighted why we lack a coherent scientific approach to such apparently disparate domains as physical phenomena or cultures and how we might address if not resolve what are problems of the first order. Despite this no doubt, understandable failure of the ESW, and the fact that some other higher level group ought to address it, we will make the attempt.
Thus, while the following charge is a simplifications and thus somewhat unfair, two aspects of conventional economic (CE) worldviews--of the so-called natural world and a social world--are at least partly responsible for current EM difficulties. First, and based on long-standing and overly optimistic views about the fundamental predictability and understandability of the material world, CE envisions the world as largely (at least eventually) controllable by humans. Second, CE and based largely on its Utilitarian perspective, views humans and their interactions with each other as largely reducible to individual, preference-driven market transactions: Such 'atomistic' or ontologically separate individuals have no more necessary connections to others beyond such a market than, say one oxygen atom may have with other oxygen atoms with which it may interact. Indeed, with such a view Society is nothing more than a convenient way to speak of two or more individuals. Again however, these long-standing perspectives of modern life have received major blows from a number of directions and the ESW was one attempt to take more of this evidence into account.
Over the past several decades resource scientists have become painfully aware that Nature is not a factory, nor can it be molded into one. Nature's central features--especially those we consider economic resources--result from coevolving processes that respond to various animate and inanimate forces through processes of creation and reorganization. The variety of structures or ecosystems that constitute the natural world are thus far more than simply elaborate machines. At the same time, the perspective of humans and human societies supported by the mechanical worldview has also been recognized as woefully inadequate for the challenges of resource management in the coming millennium. For far from running the 'machinery of nature' from a 'privileged position' outside the system, humans have evolved within the very processes that have given rise to the marvelous diversity and complexity of what we have come to call the 'natural world.' In short, 'human nature' is not merely a convenient metaphor acknowledging the evolutionary roots of Homo Sapiens; it also situates humans as forever part of, as opposed to 'distinct from' those evolutionary processes.
First, EE sees the need to encompass fundamental imperatives concerning physical (matter and energy) and ecological (including the biological and sociological) systems that, while enabling as well as constraining life, are largely 'outside' human control or alteration: Physical laws are 'laws of impossibility' and are (at least at this juncture) unassailable. The laws of thermodynamics and their force in living and non-living systems have, for example, been largely ignored by CE. As a result, many kinds of large-scale economic activities that once seemed sustainable because of our scientific prowess (and therefore, legitimate) may turn out after all to be unsustainable (which is to say, illegitimate) as seen from such new perspectives of the interconnectedness and fundamentally limited physical and social worlds. Second, EE embraces crucial sociological insights which sees individuals as arising and maturing not only through their own efforts--which are certainly real enough--but also through social structures and processes that are as necessary to human development as matter and energy. In other words, EE recognizes that individuals are not ontologically prior to society: Despite deep differences between such entities, humans and their societies are mutually necessary and reinforcing. Third, and perhaps most important, recognizing the intertwined trajectory of individuals and their societies, characterized chiefly by the unique human capacity for self-reflection and reason, and embodied in culture and language, EE sees humans as driven not only by material needs but also by meaning and significance. In short, because EE sees the problems of managing ecosystems sustainably as necessarily incorporating both physical, biological, ecological, and as well as sociological realities, "managing nature" inevitably involves "managing ourselves."
As we have seen, the outmoded perspectives of CE and ERE reflect a conceptual heritage in which the natural world, as well as the significance of our technological achievements, were interpreted in terms of once useful but now exhausted metaphors of welloiled machines and factories. For a time, these simple mechanical metaphors for Nature and Society seemed justified: Our discovery of regularities in natural processes supported such an image and our unprecedented success in applying this knowledge appeared to ensure a 'freedom' from the age-old challenge of meeting basic material necessities. Indeed, these developments seemed sufficient in themselves to develop the "good society." We now recognize however, that the mechanical world view--while undoubtedly central to the development of modern societies and improved standards of living--not only cannot deliver the kind of 'material freedom' it envisions, but may actually be eroding the ability of human individuals and societies to achieve a degree of material freedom that is sustainable in the long run.
Within the past few years, natural and social scientists have begun to join forces in an effort to articulate a holistic resource management perspective called EM (EM). Briefly, EM, as does EE, recognizes a coevolving hierarchy of physical, chemical, biological, ecological, and human systems driven both by material and energy fluxes as well as human intentions and aspirations. EM thus focuses on the unfolding of natural processes in systems within systems, and on the differing temporal and spatial scales at which these systems are organized. In addition to a more sophisticated recognition of the interdependency of ecological processes, EM also attempts to place humans in a more realistic relationship to the natural world. In contrast to the mechanical worldview of the past, a key tenet of what has come to be called the human dimensions (HD) of EM is that human individuals and societies are simultaneously emergent from, and part of, the natural world (or equivalently, the Ecosystem).
Such an undertaking entails explicitly recognizing at the outset that how we as humans relate to one another--and such relations may be understood by conceptualizing human groups and/or societies as social systems--can and will have significant impacts on the Ecosystem. Because of this, efforts focused exclusively on the natural scientific underpinnings of ecosystems cannot in themselves provide an adequate basis for EM. What is needed is an integrated understanding of ecosystems, human individuals, and social systems, and their interrelationships. Such knowledge must also account for the fact that humans inherently possess the ability to articulate a host of meanings and values embodying the significance of ecosystems to human life, and that such meanings both enable and motivate human interactions with the Ecosystem. This reinforces the notion that understanding human social systems, including their relationship to the natural world as part of an integrated approach to EM, must take us beyond the realm of theories and descriptions anchored exclusively in biophysics.
We now take seriously the possibility that our technological achievements in manipulating nature for our own purposes may be endangering the ecological foundations from which all our material resources are ultimately derived. For a mechanical worldview assumes that resources exploited and transformed by fisheries, forests, farms, and factories are largely creations of our own efforts, rather than also dependent upon the largely self-organized and accidental results of evolving ecological processes we barely understand. At the same time, we now recognize that the reduction of humans to consumers and workers, so characteristic of the mechanical worldview, has placed foundational social processes and structures at risk. Consumers are seen as important largely in how well they fulfill an economy's requirements for aggregate demand, while workers are seen as mere instruments in the production process, functional equivalents of pressure gauges or conveyors. As a result, we often interpret important connections between natural resources and our collective ability to adapt and survive in ways that largely reduce social well-being to narrow abstractions about resource supplies, consumer aggregates, or interchangeable workers. Taking these insights together, the objective of the ESW in its efforts to articulate EM is to develop both the science and wisdom to manage ecosystems sustainably. And this in turn, requires the sustainable management of ourselves and our societies.
The recent anthology Ecosystem Health (Costanza et al., eds. 1992) focused on developing an operational standard of ecosystem health as a desired endpoint of ecosystem (or environmental) management. Their general approach reflects a consensus among participants in two workshops upon which the above anthology is based and is outlined in an introductory overview by Haskell et al. (1992:1-19) and a concluding chapter by Costanza (1992: 239-256). Both endorse a definition of ecosystem health via analogy with concepts derived from human individual health. The analogy reflects the fact that both ecosystems and human individuals are complex systems which achieve a functional balance among the structures and processes of which they are composed, and between the environment and their bodies. However, while Costanza observed that physicians possess both a relatively well-specified model of a 'healthy' individual, as well as a compendium of described symptoms and diseases and variety of diagnostic tools, no such model or compendium are yet available to those who would practice 'ecological medicine'.
Costanza summarizes his overall strategy as follows: Derive a general concept of complex system health--that is, one applicable to any type or level of system--from the field of human health and medical practice; and then use that concept of complex system health to define ecosystem health (and presumably, the health of any other kind of system as well). A statement of this strategy, the index for complex system health, and the applied definition of ecosystem health, may be found in Table 1a.
Figure 1a. Health as a general concept for complex systems and ecosystems.
|
HI=(V)(O)(R) [Complex system health] |
Economic system Ecosystem (HI) Population Organism Organ Cell |
________| ..............| ..............| _______|====>Ecosystem/Economic system health |
Figure 1b. General index for system health and hierarchy of system levels to which index may be independently applied. ( Source: Constanza 1992: 243; 248-249 and modified for presentation)
The hierarchy of systems that ensures comprehensibility relative to the application of the index for complex system health (of which ecosystem health is one level distant) is depicted in Figure 1b. He observes that an index of complex system health (HI) must encompass the key features that contribute to the sustainability of the system. In effect, the sustainability or health of any complex system is defined as its vigor or activity weighted by indices for relative organization and resilience. The index thus incorporates components representing process, structure, and system-environment interactions, respectively.
Considering each in turn: The health of any complex system has frequently been linked to its overall complexity, of which, for ecosystems, diversity is often seen as one manifestation. As Costanza observes, complexity and/or diversity have been viewed as predictors of stability or resiliency (which themselves have been proposed as measures of ecosystem health). Diversity, however, is simply an enumeration of the number of system parts; and the more encompassing index of organization (O) is proposed to encompass diversity within a complexity which consists not only of the number of parts but their relationships, which together comprise the structure or organization of the system. Organization may also incorporate the normative notion of a "proper" balance among system components (or even levels of systems).
The concept of resilience ( R ) reflects the notion that "healthy organisms have the ability to withstand disease organisms. They are resilient and recover quickly after a perturbation. Hence this leads to a definition of health as the ability to recover from stress" (p. 246). It is not surprising, therefore, that one common definition of health is the absence of disease. But as Costanza continues, this doesn't consider the system's organization or level of activity. A dead system is no doubt resistant (but not resilient) to stress. Here also the analogy with the healthy human body is not satisfactory either. For in understanding the latter, the concept of homeostasis is employed to describe mechanisms that return the system to equilibrium in the face of any and all disturbances. This is also why the concept of 'stability', although surely capturing an important aspect of system health, is inadequate in itself; and sustainability is preferable in its implication of ongoing active processes as a key factor that enables a dynamic kind of stability to occur. In light of the above, the key health index component of resiliency is intended to encompass the fact that "systems are healthy if they can absorb stress and use it creatively rather than simply resisting it and maintaining their former configurations." (p. 246).
The relevance of a system's organization and resilience for overall system health depend upon their influence on, and degree to which they are shaped by the system's overall level of activity or vigor (V). The latter may be specified in terms of energy flows, metabolic rates, and so on; as well as in terms of energy differentials reflecting a system's available energy and that required for its maintenance. This index of system health thus represents a tool for assessing the health of any complex system in terms of its "vigor or activity weighted by indices for relative organization and resilience."
The above exemplifies how the more general index of complex system health may be applied to ecosystems in the effort to assess ecosystem health. Moreover, the analogy to human health is also relevant to practical as well as substantive concerns. That is, the practice of human medicine supplies not only the overall concept of health but also a procedure or sequence of steps for assessing health. These include: a) identify symptoms; b) identify and measure vital signs; c) make a provisional diagnosis; d) conduct tests to verify the diagnosis; e) make a prognosis; and f) prescribe a treatment (Haskell et al., 1992:10). As noted earlier, while such a model of health assessment is indeed applicable to ecosystems, ecologists do not have the benefit of a compendium of diseases and/or stresses with classifications of associated symptoms. The above steps do however, suggest a way of proceeding despite this limitation. As the above authors continue (p. 13):
After a list of stresses and symptoms is compiled, the next step is to develop a series of quick diagnostic tests that will enable the ecologist to detect stress early (before the ecosystem begins to retrogress) and recommend action. Once a compendium of diseases has been compiled and diagnostic tools have been developed, we can then practice "preventive" medicine."
Within this process, the index of system health is intended to provide a means of incorporating a variety of key ecosystem variables within the broad components (V, O, R) which together contribute to a healthy, and therefore sustainable ecosystem. The preceding discussion has important implications for any efforts to articulate a standard for ecosystem health and are worth summarizing here.
1) Since humans are emergent from the Ecosystem, it will remain worthwhile to distinguish the health of human societies (which may be conceptualized as social systems), and the individuals who participate in them, from the health of the natural world or Ecosystem.
(a) This by no means involves endorsing the now-exhausted mechanical world view of humans as, in effect, 'outside of the Ecosystem.'
(b) It implies, rather, that the levels of the human dimension (i.e., body as organism, person, society, culture {see Lewis 1995}) are, like all levels of the systemic hierarchy, emergent.
(c) Human individuals (as persons) and societies have emergent properties, which the standard(s) of health must encompass. From the very definition of emergence, these standards cannot be derived exclusively from levels of biological system (i.e., the Ecosystem, the human body as organism).
(d) Amongst the most important emergent property of humans systems (at the level of person and society) not found at the levels of ecosystem or human body as organism is the phenomenon of meaning and significance.
2) Since humans are part of the Ecosystem, any standard for ecosystem health must integrate in some way human individual and social health within a broader, more encompassing standard for ecosystem health. This suggests that the structure of this broader standard might resemble the following:
|
a) Individual b) Societal |
________| ..............| ..............| _______|====> Ecosystem Health (Integrative criteria) |
(a) The integrative (more encompassing) standard must be 'cross-hierarchical,' i.e., it will have to operate across all levels of system hierarchy in the sense of incorporating the effects / outcomes of what goes on at each level insofar as it contributes to the status of the most comprehensive level--the Ecosystem., of which humans are a part.
(b) The form of such an integrative standard (qualitative, quantitative, etc.) needs to be determined empirically; it will likely, however, be largely qualitative in nature.
In the case of plants, this refers to the leaf surface (or other light collection structure and the physiological processes it services) and the atmospheric sink into which it must necessarily dump its waste (the air and water evaporating and circulating from its underside). Plants are able to convert only a very small percentage of the solar energy into carbohydrates and other products because the differences between the upper and lower surface of the leaf are only a few degrees Kelvin apart. In contrast, an automobile engine can convert about 30 percent of its fuel into work due to the much larger temperature differences inside and outside the engine. But of course, for both plants and cars, the losses, although representing a 'cost' to operation, aren't really 'lost' but remain in the environment and may not only be useless, but harmful: By raising the general temperature of the sink, such losses may reduce the efficiency of all subsequent plant and engine operations.
This raises another key thermodynamics issue: Despite justifiable attempts to reduce waste in every economic process--and this would include our efforts to manage ecosystems--the Laws of Thermodynamics not only restrict the absolute efficiency that may be achieved. Most important, both waste matter and energy, far from being 'unfortunate' or undesirable--thus, to be eliminated--are in fact necessary for any economic work to occur! In other words, without waste and a sink to dump it in, development would be impossible! While waste may be reduced through careful process analysis and design, it is the environment as viewed as a sink which ultimately limits this reduction. Such thermodynamic matters are a central concern of EE but do not exhaust them. As Georgescu-Roegan (1971) put it, matter matters too. The key point here, and one which will resurface often, is not that CE or ERE have been completely unaware of these energetic and material limitations, but that their full implications continue to be ignored.
The role of energy in modern capitalistic societies for example, is not merely a matter of their material scarcity or abundance. Indeed, because energy is of such central importance to modern economic life, its supply while surely influenced by market structures and processes, has been deemed too important to be left to mere economists. In a sense, its role might be compared to the statement attributed to Clausewitz, the 19th Century Prussian military strategist: "War is far too important a matter to be left to generals." The prices paid for energy and the non-priced externalities, are not straightforward problems to be 'solved' by the 'market.' Perhaps as for no other commodity on the planet, energy prices are primarily the result of a thinly and ideologically disguised willingness by the developed nations to use (overwhelming?) economic power and military force to gain the benefits of fossil energy regardless of environmental or social costs--costs borne largely by the undeveloped world. Again, as for no other commodity on the planet, and the one on which so many modern developments can almost single-handedly be attributed to, the role of energy, and its treatment in the market is perhaps the best evidence for the empty claim for the market's 'social neutrality.'
But problems of social justice and legitimacy notwithstanding, it has been the availability of such vast amounts of fossil and nuclear energy in a mere century and a half that have provided the primary means to unprecedented (at least in human history) ecosystem alterations. Obviously, such transformations have also had immense positive effects on the lives of many, including generations to come. However, such impacts must be addressed with more functionally complete descriptions and explanations of the nature of ecosystems and their various components, structures, and processes they effect. In particular how fluxes of matter and energy provide the material basis for their emergence and evolution from a largely inanimate world. Surely, we know that ecosystems have been altered and even destroyed by economic activity. Less clear is whether we have really learned to enhance resource possibilities for the long term--as foresters and other resource scientists have often claimed. But eventually and at minimum, EE hopes to understand how various internal and external interactions come to support human societies and how these might be maintained. Ecologists are justifiably the source of ecosystem knowledge, although their corresponding understanding of an economy (as well as a larger society) and how it seeks to meet human needs with ecosystem resources may hopefully have a positive--that is to say realistic--effect on how they conceptualize ecosystems. Perhaps with a more economic view of the 'needs' of an economy, ecologists may develop more appropriate functional explanations for what makes an ecosystem tick, or most important what may lead to its greater usefulness to human societies over the long term.
Following the same approach as above, EE seeks to understand the fundamental characteristics of social systems (based as above, on underlying physical and ecological systems from which they emerged, and to which they are in a real sense, subservient) that both enable and constrain all activities within them. A central dimension of every society--seen as a system--is an economy. This entails the institutions and knowledge for using the environment to materially reproduce the society and its individuals. However, this situating of economics as only one part of a social system is necessary because humans are motivated not only by biophysical requirements but by those characteristics that most distinguish humans from all other animals: Meaning and significance as embodied in language and the capacity for many kinds of reason and judgment.
Other dimensions of the social system (as laid out by Talcott Parsons (1949) and still relevant although superseded in many ways) are community, polity, and culture. Functionally, these other dimensions can be said to: (a) maintain the solidarity of the group in the face of forces which tend to disintegrate the group; (b) establish and enforce various norms to guide both individual and collective actions in the process of achieving mutually agreed upon ends; and (c) maintain relatively stable patterns of shared meanings and significance from one generation to the next. These will be described in more detail later. But taken together, all four function combine to do something else which economics generally ignores in its rush to reduce everything to individual preferences: And this is to reproduce a society immaterially. Such a different kind of reproduction refers to various social system structures and processes that are as necessary to the survival of its individuals as the food and shelter on which the economy focuses.
The above was necessary to lay the groundwork for a deeper consideration of a fundamental notion of meaning in the broadest sense and which at the same time is of central importance to economics: value. In economics as elsewhere, value refers to the notions of what is valuable as well as the action of valuing--but especially of choosing among scarce material means to achieve stated material ends and eventually acting on these values. But if, as we just said, meanings encompass all kinds of actions, and that many actions, while perhaps not of central economic importance, may nevertheless be related in some indirect way to (1) what things we consider as valuable, (2) how we value such things, and most important, (3) what influence these values have on actions--robust or otherwise--then we cannot simply attempt to restrict our considerations of value to only 'economic' meanings..
In the current situation, where various aspects of ecosystems are coming to assume an importance to many that goes far beyond their economic significance, it is precisely these other aspects of value and their neglect by economics that has caused so much concern, even to the development of the new discipline of EE. For example, consider various recent attempts to reduce the 'value' of all species to their instrumental value (or lack thereof) in the economy. Ironically, one can argue that the reason why many of these non-economic (might one say 'anti-economic') concerns now have such force is that we can 'see' as never before that their previous neglect, while ostensibly only entailing various important yet 'immaterial' aspects of an ideal society, can now be seen to have direct and material consequences on the likelihood that our reproduction of society in all its dimensions will be successful! By not considering, for example, all the implications of an ever evolving nature not only on necessary material processes but on necessary human cognitive processes; implications perhaps even accelerated by economic actions too narrowly construed, could be tragic.
In addition, because neoclassical economics rests largely on the notion of autonomous individuals--surely a worthy premise, but a very significant and unrealistic abstraction--an atomization of human interests parallels its itemization of forest ecosystem outputs. While this no doubt also helps achieve efficient resource use for at least some purposes (Bromley 1991), it depends for its justification on an ideology that individual ownership of economic resources is itself, alone, sufficient both to ensure society's survival and to achieve humanity's highest aspirations. Nevertheless, such a position is untenable for it precludes recognizing other key factors influencing the stability and integrity of social systems, except as those requirements could be represented as simple aggregates of individual economic utilities. As a result, economists increasingly considered other so-called institutional factors that regard economic activity as only one aspect of a more complex social whole.
Yet despite many important institutionalist efforts, a simpler vision of economic activity often prevails in practical affairs as well as in policy decisions. Taken together, such an aggregation of atomized interests paralleled by a limited itemization of forest ecosystem components frequently results in decisions that encompass a mere shadow of an ecosystem's holistic features (i.e., its integrity) and therefore inadequately reflect their full significance to humans. We now realize that many ecosystem goods and services, non-economic values, and future potentials thereby depend on the continued integrity of forests as functioning ecosystems. At the same time, real collective or social interests that are essential to the integrity of society, and thereby the health of real individuals, are also disregarded
Such a strategy, however well-intentioned, still shares the difficulties mentioned earlier: Among them; (1) the limited applicability of economic values for managing ecosystems since we don't fully understand how an ecosystem underpins or contributes to an economy; (2) problems in accounting for an ecosystem's potential to satisfy other social values or more to the point, to inspire other social actions that nevertheless may also contribute to a society's material success; (3) value aggregations and comparisons across space and time--especially the difficulties relating an action to its possible consequence across the globe, or estimating an ecosystem's "potential" value to future generations, and (4) limits inherent in the social institutions such as property rights and contracts that underpin market and non-market values (Anon. 1992, Hausman 1993, Cicchetti and Wilde 1992, Kahneman and Knetsch 1992, Peterson and Peterson 1993, Redclift 1993, Sagoff 1993).
The increasing attention accorded to natural resource accounting is a direct reflection of its promise to more realistically link economic expectations and performance to an ecosystem's productive capacity in ways that will enable us to extract a sufficiency of economic value while somehow maintaining ecosystem integrity. Harrison (1989), Bartelmus et al. (1992), and particularly Repetto et al. (1987, 1989), have made significant suggestions to this end. In Repetto's evaluations of the Indonesian and Costa Rican economies which are heavily dependent on exporting natural resources, when the forest and agricultural ecosystem capacities producing these exports were examined, net economic productivity--formerly seen as increasing dramatically--was either level or had declined! The reason: conventional measures of economic performance regard ecosystem inputs at zero cost. Ideally, a complete accounting would simultaneously determine the actual value of the income producing capacity of natural capital--which involves the economic values to the present generation; and its potential value--involving the economic value to future generations. Unfortunately, as with predicting emergent properties or reversing the irreversible, this is not possible. While we must assume something about the values of future generations, we must not assume too much. We shall return to the question of future generations presently.
In this light, we must recognize that people value ecosystems for many reasons, not only those reflecting economic need. And such non-economic reasons may nonetheless have economic consequences. We value ecosystems because they are necessary for all life, are resources for our survival, and are places of symbolic and aesthetic inspiration. Yet even though economic necessity is arguably an imperative of the first order, reflexive, longer-term perspectives made possible by the emergence of human consciousness, and institutionalized in society may prove to be more robust strategies for survival than simply meeting largely short-term basics. We refer to the ability of humans to incorporate reason and experience to evaluate--using many different criteria--the possibilities for unexpected hazards that instinctual tactics have no chance of anticipating. Short term views fall into this category. Such a more "complete" spectrum of values, when integrated in a suitable socialization process, can provide individuals and societies with both the constitutional and institutional support, respectively, for much longer-term views. Especially as compounded by huge populations, it may well be our ability or lack thereof, to integrate--some say to re-integrate--such wider arrays of values that will more likely lead to success in managing the earth's resources sustainably.
A particularly important category of value concerns the importance of ecosystems to the communal dimension of social life. In economics, such communal or societal values are too often seen as simply the aggregated sum of (quantifiable) forest values to its individual members. In its aggregate "sand pile" approach, the only point of reference from which value is derived is in terms of what something does for the 'utility' of individuals. These individually oriented utilities are then 'added up'--and this is another crucial point--it is only at this juncture that society as a point of reference is introduced. But social life is not that simple: Individuals do not 'relate' to society only when their values or preferences are 'added up' with those of others around them. Individuals are part of society from the moment they are born. Indeed, without the socialization processes of culture and language, they would not develop into individuals at all.
Taken together, narrower economic perspectives--value as only originating in impossibly autonomous individuals, who somehow arose without connections to a necessary and enabling culture and language, and value as limited to only an ecosystem's material commodities without recognizing how its organic integrity contributes to our survival--may well prove fatal. Costanza and Daly (1990) suggest that a Homo economicus differing radically from the pure individualist assumed by neoclassical economic theory, could enormously bolster the imperative to consider future generations. Indeed, it is the neoclassical assumption of a utility maximizing Homo economicus, allied with the notion that actual human behavior can be reduced to the implicit operation of an economic calculus, that while so powerful and useful at one level, is so unrealistic, even destructive when attempting to reproduce the social fabric.
Undoubtedly, such communal values exist and the 1992 Environmental Summit in Rio de Janeiro is only one piece of evidence for their emergence not only in small groups but also at the international level. Of course, many important questions remain: By what yardstick might communal values be measured? Whatever the criteria, these must explicitly recognize mechanisms, institutions, and evolutionary processes through which the validity and legitimacy of communal grounds of valuation take their place along side an equally important (but presently oversimplified) instrumental use of nature. At minimum this requires that the significance of ecosystems not only to an individual's utility (in terms of their own life histories and prospects) but also to maintaining and reproducing social relations, be the object of every asset valuation method.
In addition, it might be fruitful to examine a new book: A survey of ecological economics, edited by Rafaram Krishnan, Jonathan Harris and Neva Goodwin, Island Press, 384 p. It is an unusual and abstracted anthology of 'classic' EE papers and books. The abstracts vary in length from a few paragraphs to a few pages but capture the essence of these important contributions
The failure to consider the scale of our economic activity and the resulting entropy created is now manifest in a variety of ways more than ever before. Global climate changeeither through the indirect effect of carbon dioxide emissions, or the direct effects of waste heat associated with cities or other large industrial complexesis widely feared. Having said this however, there is also widespread disagreement concerning what the 2nd Law means in practice. O'Connor (1991) shows that difficulties interpreting the 2nd law exist even within Physics itself, but are especially problematic when attempts are made to apply it to social systems of which economic activity is a part. And in addition to questions of precisely "how" thermodynamics limits ecosystems, economic activities, and eventually social systems, there are even those who hold that GeorgescuRoegen's concerns are unwarranted in the face of human purpose (Khalil 1990, 1991, and Lozada 1991).
At a more practical level, Kummel (1989) used thermodynamic theory and data on energy use in The Netherlands, Japan, and West Germany in order to estimate the potential energy savings if a program of conservation were carried out. For the 2nd law allows one to calculate the efficiency attainablethe smaller the difference in temperature between a heat source and the sink in which it is disposed after use; the lower the limit on energy efficiency. Indeed, it is the potential temperature difference and the attainable efficiency that defines a "high quality" energy source. Given current energy uses, savings of 40 to 60 percent were in theory obtainable. But the savings varied widely. Curiously, West Germany's savings would not be as great, despite the high quality of its waste heat, because it was not near enough to those who might want it.
Applications of such models include; 1) Network analyses and energy intensities: A mix of inputs and outputs is a significant problem in economics and ecology. Research is examining the possibility of converting multiproduct accounts to a more convenient singleproduct account. Energy intensities (analogous to prices) might allow all of a systems output to be converted to a common "currency" for further analysis of various networks; 2) Geographical and economic connections: Interconnected ecosystem linkages may be able to be constructed by juxtaposing the accounting matrices of each in order to assemble a joint matrix for analysis. This could perhaps be done by appending an economic matrix to the biophysical matrix of its associated ecosystem. Various interchanges such as pollution or environmental services to the economy could be tracked. As a result, the economic "value" of the ecosystem could be estimated; 3) Model building and data enhancement: No model can ever be complete or entirely coherent and more detail is always desired. But even partial answers are needed now. Ecosystem accounting frameworks would be a sound basis for these models, both for constructing coefficients as well as verification; and 4) Research coordination: As research proposals are developed and reviewed, their comparison with the existing accounting system gaps would help assure that efforts do not ignore current needs more than necessary. This review would also avoid reinventing work already completed.
Other examples are: Odum (1983), Hall, Cleveland, and Kaufmann (1986), Costanza, Faber, Maxwell (1989),
Judson offers a fascinating summary suggesting that there may be a common ground upon which to integrate neoclassical and EE. He shows how socalled neoRicardian economic thought can be distinguished from neoclassical economics on the basis of three aspects of value; 1) macro versus micro; 2) objective versus subjective, and 3) dynamic versus static. The first aspect refers to the question whether the "starting point" of economics is "society" (The neoRicardian or macro view) or the "individual" (The neoclassical or micro view). The second aspect refers to the question of whether values have an objective basis; whether values "inhere" in resources and things (The neo Ricardian or objective view) or whether values merely reflect subjective preferences of individuals (The neoclassical or subjective view). What is meant by "inhere" will be discussed below. The third aspect refers to time. NeoRicardian analysis embraces an evolutionary, thermodynamic, and largely irreversible worldview, while neoclassical analysis is largely static, reversible, and based on change at the margin. While we know that both perspectives on each of these three points are relevant, and necessary, the initial view chosen makes a great difference when these theories are actually used to organize and operate a real society over the longrun.
Many of these new discussions were fueled by a 1960 paper by Sraffa which showed (for an admittedly simple but still relevant example) that for a macro economy producing commodities which move in a circular flow from one sector to the rest, that the economy will be entirely determinate, save for an inverse relation between the wage rate and the profit rate. He assumed a single price for each commodity type and a uniform rate of profit for this economy as a whole. The point is that the exchange value of every commodity in relation to all others, is set by the socio-technical conditions of production. And it occurs without any assumptions about tastes and preferences; about the balance of supply and demand; nor about the initial holdings of individuals or firms! That is, the values of commodities reflect their inherent value as components in subsequent economic activity. As a result, this socalled neoRicardian view challenges both Marxist and marginalist views.
This notion of inherent values sounds strangefor apparently only humans can assign values to things. But what is being suggested is that the properties of particular kinds of matter and the energy embodied in them are what makes ecosystem functions and human values realizable. Without these inherent features existing first, ecosystem applications or human values are mere value potentials. It is these inherent properties of this mattersuch as its energy content or its particular concentrated form which allow other ecosystem processes to use it and thereby persist.
Some critiques of an objective TOV are wellknown. First as GeorgescuRoegen (1971) pointed out, matter and energydespite Einsteinare not practical substitutes within ecosystems. Matter in all its qualitative varietyin particular its crucial macroscopic propertiesis also necessary. Second, these various expressions of objective valuewhether material or labor or energy focusedcannot be realized without an exchange relation of some sort whether between some ecosystem component or in some human economic exchange. That is, for either the basic exchanges of matter or energy considered by physics and characterizing unconscious ecosystem adaptation and evolution, or conscious human exchanges motivated by meanings and economic need, exchange realizes values what were formerly only objective or subjective value potentials.
The possibilities for integrating these value theories are apparently growing. Judson suggests that one way that objective and subjective values may be compatible is by distinguishing between basic goods and surplus or luxury goods; and between the short and longrun. Over the long run, the materials and energy embodied in resources and products more accurately reflect inherent or socalled natural values, in the sense that materials with high natural value are somehow more likely to meet the requirements of an ecosystem, thereby enabling it to adapt and survive. But in the short run, and for socalled "surplus" production, trivial or subjective preferences may hold sway as long as the surplus exists. As Judson points out in his end notes, these issues may help accommodate the question of distributiona topic long neglected by neoclassical economics.
Another important theme in discussions between EE and neoclassical economic theory concerns criticisms that neoclassical economics has not merely misunderstood the biophysical basis of production but completely ignored it in its preoccupation with admittedly elegant mathematical abstraction and notions of rational choice (Christensen 1989). A number of other criticisms are based on this apparently simple oversight. First regarding inputs, the neoclassical divisions of Land, Labor, and Capital are uselessly heterogeneous aggregates. Particular forms of matter, energy, and information flows and various physical structures and agents to mobilize them are required and must be treated in detail. Second, inputs are largely complementary and therefore, the marginal analysis characteristic of neoclassical economics is too abstract. Christensen says that the "Marginal products of individual capital goods simply do not exist." Third, sectors produce inputs that flow to other sectors. Thus, there is complementarity and interdependence between sectors as shown by the coevolution of economic activity. Christensen further points out that "Coevolution occurs when positive feedback initiates an ongoing reciprocal process of change between evolving systems or their components." The emergence of a coalironmachine complex in the British industrial revolution is an economic example. Fourth, neoclassical economics is criticized for ignoring crucial distinctions in the timing and other conditions of resource extraction and processing. And fifth, neoclassical economics' technological optimism is based on a crucial oversight. It has ignored the fact that stable or declining resource prices are due primarily to a coincidental (and necessarily short term) exponential increase in the availability and use of fossil fuels, and not primarily due to our technical prowessalthough this is certainly impressive enough.
Other good examples are: Proops (1989), Amir (1989), Maxwell and Randall (1989), Norgaard (1989), Binswanger, Faber, and Manstetten (1990), and Gowdy (1991).
The following is excerpted from an unpublished paper by Bradley et al. 1995. Forests as Natural Capital: Parallels, Problems, and Implications.
1. Wealth refers to material goods and services humans must use to survive and includes both those that come either directly from Nature, or from conscious human processes that combine their own labor, raw materials and energy, and Capital in the older sense as Technology. Such technology encompasses material knowledge, organizational skills, and various machines. But capital also encompasses society's cultural resources, for these play a central role in the creation of this knowledge and skill, as well as motivating and coordinating social action. In the dialectical way suggested above, some wealth requires human capital for its existence, yet without wealth, capital could not be produced. That is, wealth owes its origins to the ability of a society to find in Nature or to wrest from her by their own efforts, more than needed for immediate consumption. Some portion of the surplus must then be invested in capital assets to maintain current, or improve future, income possibilities and so on in a continuous evolutionary process. The output of these complementary capital and wealth producing processes--natural and human-made--is termed income.
2. Due to inexorable and universal thermodynamic processes, wealth and capital necessarily deteriorate even when continuously maintained at some "cost," which at minimum requires a reduction in current consumption. That is, the gross output of our productive efforts or of nature itself cannot be considered income to be consumed now: some must be saved to maintain this capacity or even better, invested in new and more powerful knowledge and processes--to be utilized in maintaining or even improving our quality of life. This recognition is the basis of complex institutions to achieve this end--institutions that are the basis for describing our society as Capitalistic.
Capital is usually distinguished from the other major factors of production mentioned above--Labor and Land--based on factor ownership. But the definition of Capital in this paper encompasses all the agents of the productive process, and is more in line with Adam Smith's vision (Schumpeter 1954). Smith recognized both machine and wage capital and saw the necessity to distribute any income so that both kinds of capital were maintained into the future. Just as machines (and the possibilities for their development and application) had to be maintained from gross income, so must wage laborers be "maintained" for the same material reasons. That is, such economic reasons were not akin to moral or ethical requirements--although such ramifications exist--but derive from the necessity to reproduce all the material agents of the productive process.
But one factor was still left out. The earlier views of Smith and Ricardo (as summarized by Schumpeter), and many economists since then, took the reproducibility of the third agent--Land--largely for granted. Land encompassed all those gifts that Nature provided gratis and its indestructibility was largely assumed. Yet, we know now better. As a result, can we not postulate that maintaining our potentials to develop new ways of doing things, necessarily apply not only to machine and wage capital but also to ecosystems, and even to the cultural, linguistic, and institutional fabric that form the backbone of every society? Although many difficulties arise when extending capital theory to all three domains, such a recognition may lead to an integrated understanding of ecosystems, their multifaceted and inseparable linkages with every society and its economy, and ultimately their role in the wider realization of individual and collective goals.
Such broader concerns, however, exceed the scope of this paper. Our primary focus concerns the idea and its value of viewing forests as natural capital. In so doing, we briefly consider forests from three aspects; all of which bear on their significance as capital. From the vantage of Ecology, forests are terrestrial ecosystems with trees as their most obvious component, but that also include many other plants, animals, microbes, and a complex abiotic foundation. Fueled by solar energy, such systems of species, structures, and processes persist and evolve over time by transforming and recycling various biotic and abiotic components under a wide variety of environmental conditions. Of course, forests are only one of a great many kinds of ecosystems--one level of biophysical structure--within a complex and evolutionary hierarchy of interrelated organizations.
From the perspective of Economics, forests are one kind of resource that is central to human survival. Using a special language of markets and exchange, economics envisions a world of human individuals motivated largely by self-interest, exchanging resources they own or control for those owned by others. Further, all individuals either consume such resources immediately, save them for future consumption, or "invest" them in the broadest sense to enhance future consumption possibilities.
From the vantage of Psychology and Sociology, forests and other ecosystems serve many functions in our individual and collective activities, among the most important, as we have seen, is the economic. However, this economic importance by no means exhausts the meanings of forests. Forests as natural settings for human relations and as immaterial reservoirs of symbolic and aesthetic significance to individual and collective identities are no less important in determining the future trajectory of human societies than the material processes on which ecology and economics focus. Thus, while the individualistic emphasis underpinning, even dominating, current economic thought may be an understandable starting point, it is now apparent that human possibilities are constrained by ecosystem features and properties in ways not widely articulated. Further complications arise when we recognize that both ecosystem possibilities and limitations, derived in part from the laws of thermodynamics and physics, are themselves evolving and cannot be described exhaustively beforehand. Equally important, forests and other aspects of the natural world, are not significant to humans solely by virtue of their contributions to our material reproduction: Nature serves as a central source of analogy and metaphor which provide essential meanings of what it is to be human. Such meanings involving moral, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions--and also evolving as we learn more about Nature and ourselves--serve essential functions in our social and individual reproduction and therefore, cannot be dismissed as mere amenities with no material significance.
Our discussions makes several appeals to caution; emphasizing the need to take full responsibility for the social and ecological consequences of current economic activities. Up to now, such imperatives to recognize broader responsibilities have almost without exception, been thought unnecessary in the face of impressive benefits from, and universal appeal of almost 300 years of economic expansion. And after such a long time of viewing resources as unlimited and development as most likely to be achieved by the largely absolute private ownership of resources, maintaining or liquidating one's capital is widely considered a matter of individual choice. However, it should now be clear that when ecosystems are at risk, such freedom is not absolute but is constrained by real material and thermodynamic limits, by real connections with, and thus, obligations to others, and by the need to preserve future possibilities in the face of what may turn out to be at best unsustainable, and at worst fatal resource demands and impacts.
Individual freedom--important as it is as an ideal--must be balanced with concerns for the common good--however people come to define such a good within these larger emerging ecological and social realities. If we, as foresters who understand forests best, can see these limitations clearer, our efforts to maintain the productive capacity of forests may be more effective. With such an awareness--perhaps even raised to the level of a universal imperative--individual and collective goals could then encompass not only those forest goods and services directly necessary for human survival, but also the analogous "goods and services" also necessary for forest ecosystems to automatically maintain themselves. Our concerns about the continued productivity and functioning of forest ecosystems might then more realistically encompass their many components, structures, and processes as they all interact to maintain an evolving yet ongoing system--one that continues to support human life in all its possibility. This is really what is meant by sustainable resource management.
This category and the next are probably of greatest interest to
forest economists because they are the areas most familiar. Topics
of interest include: structure and scale of regional or national
economies (InputOutput Analysis); employment, income, and their
distribution; distinctions between income and wealth; natural
and manmade capital; capital depreciation; internal and international
trade; pollution; investment; social accounts; demographics, etc.
Two examples are probably required here. The first concerns macroeconomic attempts to improve the system of national or regional accounts connecting the flows of products, wages, and income in the economy with the stocks supporting those flows, both in the human economy and as natural resources in general. These stocks include traditional items such as forests and minerals as well as the potential for natural services. The primary concern is the structure and scale of economic activity and its dependence and impact on Nature. The aggregate production of income and wealthin both the natural world and in the human economyis the focus. Repetto et al (1989) is preeminent in this area. His "Wasting Assets" describes the recent yet tremendous importance of national accounts in providing an almost universal standard of what economic development ought to be. Yet he points out the serious problems with the accounts as now implemented and more important, that these shortcomings are largely ignored.
For while the concerns which originally motivated their developmentmajor fluctuations in the business cycleare still the central concern of most governments, questions concerning the sustainability of the natural world have assumed major importance. There is he says "...a dangerous asymmetry in the way we measure, and hence, the way we think about, the value of natural resources." While we recognize that if a level of income is only maintained by drawing down the stock of capital on which it is based, one would soon have no income. But natural resourcessocalled natural capitalare not considered in the same fashion. The roots of this oversight are many. And despite the widespread recognition of this asymmetry, although there is movement, very little is being done at the policy level.
In "Wasting Assets" a more accurate but still inadequate measure of Indonesia's Net Domestic Product for the period 1971 to 1984 shows that instead of achieving an apparent annual growth of about 7 percent as the Gross Domestic Product suggests, it rose only 4 percent annually. And these adjustments only consider a few of the commodities produceda full accounting would certainly show a larger gap. Moreover, other indicators are similarly biased. Gross versus Net Investment showed that for a number of years Net Investment was actually negative. This implies that instead of growing, consumption merely used up the principal. Some of the years that net investment grew were due to the fortunate but unrepeatable discovery of exhaustible petroleum reserves.
"Wasting Assets" combines both an examination of the problems of an inadequate system of accounts, as well as a discussion of the policies by which one could correct the situation. It follows with an empirical evaluation of Indonesian resource accounts for timber, petroleum, and soil. Repetto et al conclude that 1) developing these accounts can be accomplished with modest time and money, 2) A significantly different view of Indonesia's economic past, and as a result its future, was obtained, and most important to us as forestry professionals, 3) Such efforts are consistent with, and complementary to our efforts to implement more responsible and more scientifically sound forest practices.
A second example in this category concerns a more detailed look at the specific ecological and economic interactions within the Baltic Sea and its surrounding agricultural, fishery, and industrial activities. Folke, Hammer, and Jansson (1991) emphasize the interdependence of past urban/industrial/agricultural development on environmental goods and services, as well as on ecosystem support functions. They relate the increase in industrial production and related environmental problems in the region to several factors, especially fossil fuel usage. In 1900 annual energy consumption in Baltic Europe was 9 tons per square km and 0.25 tons per person. By 1984 this had increased to 284 tons and 5 tons respectively. Industrial production has increaseddepending on the country consideredby 5 to 15 times since World War II, and population has increased 4 times since the mid1900's.
The cumulative effects of this activity on the Baltic Sea's foodweb, in conjunction with an intense increase in fishing pressure, has severely reduced the productivity of the entire system. While the catch has increased 10fold in the last 50 years, the catch per unit effort (kg of fish per horsepower per hour) declined to less than half of what it was in 1955. A striking calculation shows that whereas in 1900 less than 2 percent of the surface of the Baltic was required to produce the 1900 catch, about 85 percent of its area is now required. And also based on these fish declines and other toxicity problems, gray seal numbers have declined from about 40,000 in 1940 to about 1500 now.
Other examples are: Costanza, Farber, Maxwell (1989), Faber, Proops, Ruth, and Michaelis (1990), Hof, Rideout and Binkley (1990), Stigliani (1990), van den Bergh and Nijkamp (1991), Giampietro and Pimentel (1991), Braat and Steetskamp (1991), and Cleveland (1991).
See Howard T. Odum. 1996. Environmental Accounting: EMERGY and environmental decision making. John Wiley and Sons, New York. 370 p.
This book covers a range of topics from physics to policy, thus being difficult to classify. (Quotin extensively from the author's preface) "Starting with studies of energy in ecosystems in the 1950's, ways were found to evaluate the work of systems of many scales. In the 1960's it became apparent that environmental and economic systems could be evaluated on a common basis. Preliminary efforts were published in Environment, Power, and Society in 1971. and Energy basis for Man and Nature in 1976. Then with the definition of transformity and EMERGY, it became easier to make calculations and explain that these concepts measure real wealth. For a decade we have used longer versions of this book as a text for a course in EMERGY analysis and the methods have been widely applied.
This short book introduces EMERGY accounting for evaluation of environmental and economic use. EMERGY, a measure of real wealth, is the work previously required to generate a product or service. For over a century theorists have sought ways of relating resource limitations to economic-environmental systems, often using energy as a common metric. These had limited success because different kinds of available energy are not equivalent. Now commodities, services, and environmental work of different types are put on a common basis as EMERGY. Transformity, the EMERGY per unit energy, identifies the scale of energy phenomena. Tables of transformity facilitate EMERGY evaluations.
Expressing EMERGY in Emdollars (Em$) indicates the part of the gross economic product based on that real wealth. The Emdollar value of something helps people visualize its public policy importance. Calculation the EMERGY of storages and processes provides a new scale for evaluating environment, resources, human services, information, and alternatives for development. This book recommends achieving public and planetary welfare by maximizing Empower, the rate of production and use of EMERGY.
Chapter 1 introduces the window of systems overview and its use to evaluate EMERGY. Chapter 2 contains the scientific basis of the EMERGY value concept in the natural energy hierarchy of the universe. Chapter 3 estimates the EMERGY budget of the earth. Chapter 4 relates EMERGY and money. Chapter 5 summarizes the procedure for making an EMERGY evaluation table. Then several chapters show how to use EMERGY to evaluate environments, minerals, waters, primary energy sources, economic development, nations, and international trade. Chapter 13 on the time dimension considers EMERGY in oscillations according to scales of size and time. Chapter 14 contains comparisons with other approaches and responses to criticism. Although there is not room for many results in this book, the last chapter suggest areas for fruitful applications to policy."
General modeling concepts used in DUALPLAN were expanded to recognize wood transport decisions in another model DTRAN (Hoganson and Kapple 1991). DTRAN takes advantage of the economic interpretation of the problem realizing that the model never needs to be specified in its equivalent LP form. Typically, the number of possible wood transport decisions in combination with harvest timing decisions is too large for a practical linear programming formulation. Instead, DTRAN utilizes simple maps of the forest to determine wood transport patterns. Procurement zones for specific markets in specific time periods change as shadow prices change throughout the solution process. Using maps and interpretations of intermediate solutions may help address other forest resource issues. DTRAN served as the forest management model for Minnesota's first generic environmental impact statement focusing on timber supply and the market interdependencies. Better understanding of such interactions is important to forest industries considering expansion opportunities for single mills and their forest-wide impacts.
A major shortcoming of all large-scale forestry models currently in use is their general inability to recognize spatial interactions between management units. Much forestry literature addresses spatial issues, but no methods are well suited for typical size problems. Hoganson et al. (1994) proposed a dynamic programming approach to addressing adjacency constraints in large problems. Tests have been very positive on large-scale problems using simplified management units grids. Work in progress will expand the approach to large areas involving irregular stand shapes. Hoganson et al. (1994) claims adjacency constraints can be relaxed to address factors such as the amount and type of forest edge. Characteristics of forest interiors may also be addressed with such an approach, and would also fit well into the broader DUALPLAN modeling approach that addresses forest-wide concerns.
Lewis, B.J. 1995. Value and valuation methodology in forest and natural resource management contexts. Unpublished paper prepared under contract number: 28-C4-843 for the Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station, Forest Service, USDA. Project title: Disturbance-based value determination review. 176 p.
Costanza and Perrings (1990) provide an example of how to combine what we now know about the uncertainties of environmental protection with what we also know about the difficulties of more direct forms of social control such as regulation or outright prohibition. In order to develop more cost effective, less intrusive, and generally more positive stimuli to protect and/or manage environmental use, they evaluated a flexible assurance bonding system. This bond would be required by developers and would be set equal to the largest estimated potential environmental damage that might occur from the proposed action. The bond would be kept in an interest bearing account and would be returned to the developer with some of the interest as soon as the firm proved that the damage would or could not occur. If the catastrophe did occur, the bond would be used to compensate those harmed or help repair the damage. But no further payment would be required from the developer.
Their proposal had several advantages: 1) The firm would know at the outset what the bond would cost and could plan accordingly. Downside risk would be known and limited. But if the developer was diligent, careful, or lucky, all of the bond might be returned with some interest; 2) There would be positive incentives to adopt the most efficient known techniques or even develop new methods; 3) The bond would be proportional to the seriousness of the problem; 4) Costs would be shared among the responsible parties; and 5) Private and social costs would be in accord. But two provisos are suggested: a) Monitoring systems should be provided with the most uptodate information to minimize surprise and b) monitoring costs and the burden of proof should be born by those who stand to profit, not the general public.
Many other policy studies existfrom proposals to swap Thirdworld debt for agreements not to undertake development in certain environmentally sensitive regions (Perrings 1989); to how best to get farmers to use less fertilizer, thereby improving water potability (Andreasson 1990); to whether even admittedly crude estimates of ecosystem carrying capacity can help avoid serious policy errors in developing the Ecuadoran Amazon or the Paraguayan Chaco (Daly 1990).
Some, especially in the natural sciences, hesitate to even speak of a science of society (and this would have to include economics) even considering it an oxymoron. Even many representing the social sciences were not clear about what these two domains have in common, how they differ, nor what implications these differences, if any, have for the entire ESW effort. What is more, because the ESW itself failed to address these questions (which may be perfectly understandable), the authors of this chapter--in our attempts to both explain what EE is all about, as well as to position our discussion in some coherent relation to the remaining science topics--must make at least a small attempt to address these fundamental questions. In our efforts to explain what EE is and what it might offer to the larger task of the ESW, we believe it is necessary to go back and at least review the 'beginnings.'
To begin to address these difficulties, we consider three important systemic characteristics of the natural and social worlds which might positively affect EM research or our operational EM strategies. These characteristics include: (1) The evolutionary, indeterminant, and emergent nature of biophysical and social processes, (2) The unique effect of human consciousness on the evolutionary trajectory of these processes, and (3) The essentially social nature of human consciousness and existence. These characteristics form the basis of two important principles: (a) While we may now more hopefully attempt to integrate our understanding of various biophysical, ecological, and social processes--over which we obviously exercise some influence--we must learn to take a more open view of the outcomes of these processes, with respect to which our influence, much less control, is largely uncertain; and (b) When identifying and choosing alternatives for implementing EM, this inherent and often irreducible uncertainty of ecosystem and social system outcomes necessitates that normative judgments exercised within appropriate institutions must play as important a role as science and technology.
We do not want to repeat--although in a different perhaps more justifiable ecological form--the mistakes of an existing economic reductionism to a narrow individualism and its field of market actions. What we are after is a more engaging and even playful consideration of a dialectical moving from part to whole and back again. If current problems with how economists have envisioned the material and social worlds, have lead to our current difficulties of implementing sustainable ecosystems, economies and societies, then all these areas must be re-addressed to have any chance of reversing these errors.
A real system--as opposed to a conceptual system--is defined as a material and thermodynamic arrangement of things so organized and related or connected so as to form a unity or organic whole. And by organic, such linkages or connections can be thought of as functioning or facilitating the self-reproducing capacities and as a result, the continued survival and development of this organic whole over time. The term 'organic' is not meant to refer only to living systems in a strict sense but that the nature of the interconnections between the system--any system--and its environment, as well as the internal relations between the system's component structures and processes are such so as to lead to the systems persistence over time. A systems worldview entails a belief in the common origins and trajectory of all real systems, the importance of the sequence in which they probably arose, and especially in their dramatically different features, properties, and dynamics that lead to their emergence in coevolutionary interplay between part and whole.
Key aspects of system origin and development are: (1) stratification--that systems exist in various strata, each of which rests on and has developed out of (or emerged from) precursor systems. The entire cosmos or universe is the sole exception; and (2) 'emergent properties'--that new systems (consisting of component structures and processes that may or may not be systems themselves) or new components arise from, yet may differ profoundly from, their precursors (Bunge 1979). The sequence of system emergence and the objects they consist of are considered by two different metaphysical areas: Ontology: What is the world made of and how does it work? And Epistemology: What can we know about the world? Both are especially relevant to EE for it is upon earlier errors in both areas that the problems addressed by the ESW can truly be said to rest. Indeed, such errors occurring at the very foundation of current worldviews and their negative ramifications provide the soundest justifications for calling EE, EM and closely related insights in other fields, truly new paradigms.
This suggests that physical indeterminacy underlies the complex process of evolution and an important basis of the diversity of life forms that comprise natural systems. A concurrent feature of such evolutionary processes is that of a world that is not merely differentiated but stratified as well, and that different strata or levels of systems exhibit emergent properties not found among their lower-level constituents. In the purely physical world, for example, the properties of water, including its ability to extinguish fire, cannot be explained solely in terms of the properties of its constituent elements (hydrogen and oxygen), for both are highly flammable. Water exists at a higher stratum or level than does either of its elements--oxygen or hydrogen.
These same phenomena of stratification and emergence are evident in the biophysical world as well. Ecosystems, as one of many kinds of systems, are complex entities comprised of a wide variety of constantly changing structures and processes. As above, such complexity cannot be understood as arising simply from adding together the influence of each ecosystem component, either historically or at a given point in time. Rather, complex ecosystem functions operating through various structures and processes, as well as species themselves, are emergent properties resulting from an historical interplay of 'part' and 'whole.' Again, entities at any 'higher' system level may have a profoundly different character than their 'lower' level components.
Emergent properties, therefore, are not merely the unfolding of features that were already immanent in existing structures yet somehow hidden. These result from ongoing creative processes and may be entirely novel. Indeed, every evolutionary process we observe--whether chemical, genetic, or social--may all be considered as manifestations of emergence. This in turn suggests that many novel features of an evolving ecosystem, as well as their significance and/or consequences for humans, will likely evade prediction by any scientific model, no matter how sophisticated. As Poincare noted, the real world is its own fastest simulator (Soddy 1933). More generally, no science can precisely anticipate the future states of natural systems in the face of ongoing physical and social processes through which the creative course of evolution and emergence are played out. Such a worldview stands in stark contrast to those rooted in mechanical metaphors where attaining various stages of 'progress' seemed straightforward. Yet if our prospects for predicting the future in light of the indeterminacy inherent in natural and social processes is so limited, what does this suggest for our continued motivation? How shall we 'construct' a better future?
A systems view also entails understanding the temporal 'order' in which various system aspects emerged. While such an order of emergence is not completely clear-cut, nor does it imply dominance, there are at least some aspects of hierarchy. As a result, a systems view implies that at least a sort of priority exists based on the nature of the forces that characterize the 'earlier' system and that might still hold sway. Such a view entails understanding the 'relative force' or 'priority' of the various factors that influence, if not determine absolutely, subsequent developments. And these include the possibility of further events of emergence. For example, ecosystems, their component species, and various processes and structures that link them in a 'system' emerged from an inanimate physical and chemical world, not the other way around. And while profoundly different from such a 'prior' world, ecosystems are both enabled and constrained by various properties of the physical and chemical world from which they arose. At minimum, living systems must 'obey' the laws of thermodynamics, gravity, etc. Further, they have no choice but to somehow garner specific kinds of chemical matter and energy to grow and develop. And in turn, ecological structures and processes constrained by physical and chemical laws, have significant--if not absolutely controlling--influence on various activities of individual humans and social system. In short, while not completely determining, such a hierarchy implies that as we consider each higher level or strata of system from the Cosmological to the Social, ever higher levels may be 'subject' to various features and 'forces' determined to be characteristic of the lower level strata from which it emerged.
Freedom is an ideal with its origins in human consciousness--the locus of our unique ability to understand at least some of the conditions that both constrain and enable our actions, and to use that knowledge to construct and pursue future possibilities. Such freedom is embodied in our ability to choose from among alternative ends, and the means to these ends. Moreover, this freedom is exercised not only by individuals acting alone, but by groups in which individuals participate. Indeed, as we shall presently consider, the very existence of such a freedom and its meaning depends on the interplay of individual and collective social processes and actions. For collective processes, grounded in language and culture, are themselves objectively necessary to create the very individuals who might one day be competent to recognize and exercise whatever freedom they may attain.
The emergence of human freedom is a significant outcome of the evolutionary process characterizing life on this planet, providing an important justification for retaining the recognition of humans and human societies as distinct, in certain ways, from the rest of nature (but in a radically different way than that posited by the mechanical worldview--i.e., humans as 'outside of' nature, manipulating it, as it were, from the control booth of human society). At the same time the notion that humans, while distinct, remain part of nature (or equivalently, the Ecosystem) suggests that a standard for ecosystem health must succeed in integrating the distinctive (i.e., emergent) characteristics of humans with the biophysical requirements of 'natural' systems. Three key points relative to the emergent character of human freedom will in turn have important implications for our search for a larger health. First, the nature of necessity--i.e., the linkage of cause to effect-- regarding the actions of individuals or societies--is not as straightforward as it is for the rest of Nature. As a simple example, although a punch in the nose or an insult may at times trigger a similar reply, no response is physically necessary or even automatically produced. Whatever the reply, it often involves not a calculus but a complex judgment the capacity for which, in contrast to a largely uncomprehending nature, we possess in varying degrees. We can choose from familiar responses or create new ones altogether. Second, while we are free as the rest of Nature is not, we are paradoxically compelled to envision our own future and to work toward it. And while all must avoid attempting the materially impossible, in attempting to identify goals, we cannot avoid considering what we ought to do to achieve them. Thus, we are compelled to envision and choose both ends and means. In many cases this may involve the distinctly human activity of moral reflection. Finally, as a consequence of the above, our actions--despite intentions to the contrary--contain the seeds of failure, although this word has no meaning in the nonhuman domain of the rest of nature.. We may fail to envision a worthy goal or fail to achieve a worthy goal once envisioned.
This notion that by virtue of our freedom we as humans are compelled to decide, and that in deciding we may fail to properly identify either ends or the means to achieve them (or both), has important implications for our efforts to better understand our relationship both to each other and to the rest of nature. First and foremost, it suggests that the very nature of human freedom entails a self-imposed responsibility to ensure that, in striving for individual freedom, we do not in the process endanger the foundational biophysical and social processes upon which our individual and collective freedom depends. Over the past several decades, however, it appears that it is precisely because of attempts to realize our individual freedom, while consistently underestimating the collective responsibilities and risks it dialectically entailed for the group, that our transformations of Nature have so often resulted in unexpected, irreversible, and undesirable changes to both the natural and social worlds. At the same time, even though our continued survival as a species has never been ensured (e.g., even in the mechanical worldview, we may press the wrong button), we will continue to "find" a purpose, for that is our nature. And after all, success cannot be ruled out. Yet by failing to provide ourselves and our societies with a more adequate notion of the obligations and responsibilities this pursuit of freedom entails, we increase the possibility that our actions will unnecessarily threaten ecological and social reproduction, in the process short-circuiting our real hopes.
An important consequence of the above is that society or the 'social' represents an emergent level of system that cannot be understood by simply aggregating characteristics of individual societal members. Social actions, including those focusing on ecosystems and/or the social world, cannot be explained exclusively in terms of the characteristics or actions of individuals alone. For example, the significance of forests and other ecosystems is shaped by the way we and our societies have come to know and use forests or other landscapes over a very long time. Such knowledge has also shaped the relations between societal members and/or groups. These relations are emergent properties of the group or society and are grounded in a reservoir of culture--patterns of beliefs and values that have come to be shared by all members of a society, and transmitted from generation to generation. As the locus of shared meaning in any society, culture itself is an emergent aspect of the social, supplying the shared social meanings which parents and educators attempt to pass on to adolescents who may then adopt these in the process of forming their own identities. One consequence of this is that when considering shared values as a key constituent of culture, while we recognize that only individuals are capable of 'valuing,' we cannot view questions of value--whether related to ecosystems, economies, or societies--as simply matters of individual preferences and their summation. Such preferences are also strongly influenced (albeit, not determined) by the cultural fabric and social relations in which our personalities are formed, and in which any individual participates as a unique member of a group or society.
This interdependence of individual and society has its parallels in the discussion to follow. Just as our attention shifted between part and whole--or equivalently, across two levels of system--so too must our focus shift up and down various systemic levels as we consider the notion of health applied to ourselves, the societies to which we owe our formation, and the ecosystems on which our individual and collective future development--material and immaterial--rests. In a real sense, and despite the importance of health to our individual lives, this notion also concerns the nature of inherently collective or social relationships and processes without which individual health would be both meaningless and impossible. And here too, normative visions--including the moral and ethical--are unavoidably implicated.
These important conclusions concern relatively new philosophical--specifically realist ontological--insights about what distinguishes the natural and social worlds, what kinds of objects each is made of, and how each works both in their separate parts and as a whole (Sayers, 1992). That is, in our efforts to understand and manage ecosystems (in which we, as actors, also live), we must distinguish between the fundamentally different kinds of objects of study. And this in turn requires that we be aware of the specific system level under study, for different levels may have different ontological properties which determine in large part what we can know about the objects it contains, what methods for coming to understand them would be efficacious, and what goals would be appropriate--that is, what we can realistically accomplish. Such system levels include in order of their emergence: Cosmological, Physical, Chemical, Biological / Ecological, and Social / Cultural (economic actions fall within the latter system). What we are getting at is the need from the outset to encompass a systems view of how all are related and interdependent--whether for the area of EE we hope to clarify, for conventional ERE, or for any of the other science topics to be considered in the final ESW report.
We can probably all agree on a few notions: A Natural science seeks to understand the natural or material world (and this understanding surely underpins current and impressive economic actions) and using it we seek to understand what kinds of a human life style are either necessary and/or possible from a material viewpoint. We then choose from realistic material alternatives to construct a desirable material world. In a parallel fashion, at least in part, a Social science seeks to better understand a social world made up of individuals and the societies from which such individuals can only arise. And as above, we seek to understand ourselves as individuals and as members of a society in order to know what kinds of individual and collective life styles are socially either necessary and/or possible. Beyond this point, however, the use of this social science knowledge is quite different--perhaps even profoundly so.
Here is one common scenario of how the natural and social sciences are thought to differ: The Natural World is apprpriately thought to be subject to the force of various kinds of physical laws that embody certain kinds of regular and predictable necessity embodied in the notion of causality (And to the extent that all humans are physical beings, we are apart of this world and thus, also subject these forces and laws.). Yet because various notions of Freedom--sometimes seen as the antithesis of Necessity--seem so essentially characteristic of humans and their social actions, and especially arising from our unique ability to comprehend ourselves and the rest of the world, many have the impression that a parallel kind of social necessity and based on forces embodied in a parallel set of Social Laws not only does not apply to individuals or their societies, but simply does not exist. Nothing could be further from the truth, although certainly the nature of social 'forces' is quite different from their physical analog. Sociology and other social sciences seeks to understand those necessary aspects of collective or social reality that in fact, underpin the very possibility of free individuals: persons who may--if all goes well in their unavoidable socialization within the groups of family, school, community, and nation--one day develop the capacity to understand those collective aspects of their lives that are as necessary to their humanity and development as food and shelter. Armed with such knowledge of both physical and/or social necessity, we might then go on to construct a more realistic as well as desirable future. So how do these domains differ, what do such differences imply for their respective sciences? The following questions suggest the nature of the ground we must re-cover and in the process, hint at the more realistic worldviews that we might reconstruct.
In what 'common' senses can we speak of the natural and social sciences? First, in what ways, if any, do the objects of study (Ontology--what is the world made of and how does it work?) in the natural and social worlds differ? Second, if the objects differ, how might the knowledge (Epistemology--What can we know about these different objects?) that we acquire about these objects also differ? Third, if such knowledge differs, what effect would this have on the methods we use? And fourth, if the knowledge differs, what effect if any, might such differences have on the purposes to which such different knowledge would be put? (These last two issues--methods and purposes--because it requires action, raises questions of ethics and morals: What should we do in both acquiring such knowledge and in using it toward some end?) It is in the process of posing such questions and perhaps answering them (at least in part), that we may better understand the size of the task we at the ESW set ourselves, as well as suggest more realistic approaches, for such questions lie at the root of our difficulties with understanding ecosystems and using and/or protecting them to meet human needs over the long term.
Beyond central matters of material and social necessity and possibility, a key reason we study the social world is certainly to get a more realistic picture of the conditions under which we--as individual persons as well as members of various groups, and even as members of a society--are both created and develop. As conscious and self-interpreting human beings who are able to imagine, aspire, and plan for our own individual and our collective futures--somewhat more realistically as compared to other living creatures--we are also interested not only in if a certain life style is possible, but most important, why we would want to live in such a way. In other words, as stated earlier, humans are not only driven by biophysical requirements, but are also and essentially driven by meaning and significance. Such meanings are the crucial difference between humans and almost all other living things. But most important for our purposes here, such meanings have force in the sense that they may stimulate and even compel us to act.
In this short summary are embedded several key points: (1) Based at least on the emergence of conscious humans from a largely unconscious and--even more distinctive--an un-reflective world, the objects of study in these two domains differ fundamentally; (2) Because of such differences, one set of scientific methods will not suffice--that is, the notion of one scientific method for all kinds of inquiry doesn't hold water. While we as physical beings are subject to various physical forces and imperatives and thus, methods appropriate to the natural sciences are certainly relevant, we are also thinking self-interpreting beings to whom things are significant. It is in our coming to understand the nature of this significance and especially in reflecting on its force in motivating our own feelings, attitudes, but most important our own actions, that the need for other methods arise. Such methodological differences will be briefly discussed later. Finally (3), Because the knowledge that might result from such self-reflection is by definition self-knowledge, the very reasons or purposes to which this self-knowledge would be put, must also differ from the purposes of a material science where 'control' is the chief objective. Suffice it to say now that while prediction and control may be sufficient reasons for studying the physical world, studying ourselves requires something quite different: Understanding and even more, Emancipation are the ends we have in mind. And from what would we emancipate ourselves? On the one hand, a more complete material knowledge may emancipate us at least to some extent, from a stultifying physical scarcity. But surely while survival is important, humans have always strived for more. Thus, on the other hand, such an improved if not absolute material freedom might also be enhanced with a more enhanced social freedom--one based on a mature embrace of those social realities that necessarily bind us together and those aspects of our lives that permit individual realization and fulfillment (Sayer 1992).
Our purposes may then encompass coming to consider and reflecting on the use of such knowledge for the emancipation, certainly of others, but most important of ourselves: For this is the purpose of freedom--To understand all the conditions--material and social, and the latter may also include moral and aesthetic considerations--which both influence our lives as well as have significance, and to take as many of them as possible into account. Again such an emancipatory focus is not only to find out which life styles are possible, but more in line with of our search for meaning, why we would choose to live a certain way. To summarize, the following schema suggests the hierarchical differences between various emergent objects, the consequences of such differences on the methods we may bring to bear on their explication, and finally on the purposes to which we might put such knowledge:
On such a view of a world of many emergent system strata, the questions we just posed concerning any distinction between Natural and Social science makes some sense and offers at least some hope for their integration. Without such a systems view what would integration mean? From the common practice of placing these two domains in opposition, many have the impression that the two domains were unrelated, which is certainly false--humans arose within a lower or prior ecological strata. Nor is the picture of the social world as 'unnatural' a desirable one. Nor is it a difference of rigor--with the natural sciences somehow having the possibility for objective rigor and the social sciences as impossibly subjective (yet here too, there is an element of truth because of our need to consider ourselves as observers who are looking at ourselves, and so on... Especially in the social sciences, there is no way or place for us to stand 'outside' the system, which is supposed to be the essence of objectivity).
Returning to the possible integrating potential of an EE, we can say that without careful attention to these important distinctions between the so-called natural and social sciences--especially its different objects and as a result, their potentially different purposes, and methods, EE (or any other of the 30 topics for that matter) such an integration--however we come to define this term --will likely be impossible. Which brings us to another aspect of the systems world view which was not addressed by the ESW--synthesis. Science as a systematic strategy to understand various wholes--material, biological, or social--is based on two different ends of the same continuum: Reduction and synthesis. So far, reduction has been our strongpoint, yet surely, when it comes to understand either ecosystems or social systems and individuals, we still have far to go. Nevertheless, and for a variety of reasons--not least the unprecedented pace and scale of current human impacts on ecosystems--and ready or not, synthesis or integration is the next order of business.
As our discussions have hopefully emphasized, science has advanced largely through the reduction and subsequent study of various systems to their component parts. And as mentioned above, while our knowledge of many domains is at best--indeed, by definition--'partial,' actual achievements seem nothing short of miraculous. But if such scientific successes can justifiably be said to rest on our abstraction of a more complex whole--and so far we seem to have largely gotten away with it--the real question is, can such a strategy focused on parts continue to deliver? And indeed, many recent reexaminations of these 'successes'--the so-called 'green revolution' comes to mind--suggests the opposite. Our efforts in regard to the ESW might be seen as an attempt to advance to the next stage of a really mature science--that of putting the parts together into a more robust understanding of integrated wholes. Curiously, economics, in its heroic attempts to connect the material world of scarce resources to potentially insatiable human desires and aspirations once claimed to be just such a synthesizer. EE hopes to further economic's efforts in this direction: it is still a worthy goal.
In summary, whether EE or any other perspective will be able to
satisfactorily translate all these concerns into a coherent view
of the problems you face as managers across an almost unbelievably
wide range of ecological and social conditions, is certainly unrealistic.
For we ourselves lack such a view --indeed such a view is precisely
what we seek in common effort with you. Certainly this is not
possible in one step. The most significant reason why we cannot
is because many of the concerns which must eventually be brought
to bear on these problems are simultaneously being addressed by
other participants in the ESW. And this again brings up the importance
of a systems view: We do not have had access to their state-of-the-art
thoughts and output while buzy preparing our own summary. And
even if we were, we probably wouldn't understand all their ramifications
for, like most of you, we are specialists too. From our focus
on EE, we refer particularly to the work of the ecologists and
sociologists. But in the end, our success will be a measure of
the extent to which our conception of EE and its importance to
EM encompass a deeper understanding of all these other disciplines.
And so must these others similarly come to understand the problems
of economics seen in a broader sense.
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I have been promised by Faye Duchin ISEE education chairperson to be sent materials collected under the auspices of the ISEE and to be demonstrated at their next meeting in Boston.