Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Economists are far from unaware of the criticisms of their field as being complicit in helping the market damage the environment- in fact, quite a few of them are actively working to change that. (If you ever find yourself in possession of some incisive criticism of an entire field that you're not apart of, take the chance to see if anyone inside the field has already made it. Chances are someone already did, probably a decade ago or more.) There are, in fact two entire fields of economics devoted primarily to environmental concerns. (There are actually more than that- academic fields love subdividing themselves endlessly. These two are the most important to address, however.)

As ocean temperatures and acidity increase, coral reef bleaching events like this one become more and more common. These highly destructive events can be lethal to huge patches of coral- in fact, half or more of the Great Barrier Reef has been destroyed by bleaching events. Coral bleaching is one of the environmental issues whose costs can be more easily calculated by economists- other environmental damage is often much harder to calculate the cost of. Even so, however, while loss in tourism dollars and other reef related economic activities can be calculated, there are countless intangibles regarding the situation that can't be calculated easily, including the loss of natural beauty and the damage to the oceanic ecosystem. [Image source]

The first, known simply as environmental economics, and can be understood as orthodox or standard economics attempting to come to grasp with environmental issues. It has a number of concerns that vary from standard economics. First off, it worries significantly more about market failure- when a market fails to allocate resources in an efficient manner. Externalities are a classic example of market failure. They also worry significantly more about the commons and tragedy of the commons than most economists. They're also trying to better value parts of the environment and assess the costs of environmental damage- a challenging proposition that we discussed heavily in Part 1 of this series, and which we'll discuss further on in this post.

The second is known as ecological economics, and is in many ways far more ambitious than environmental economics. It's an interdisciplinary attempt to treat economics as merely a subset of the global ecosystem- an incredibly daunting task, to say the least. They share many of the goals of the environmental economists, but go much, much farther in many ways. One of the most distinctive features is their far greater focus on natural capital. Natural capital, the world's stock of naturally occurring resources, has hardly been ignored by economics over the years, but the attention seldom went beyond making the land directly legible as resource- how much timber in a forest, how much coal in a mountain range, how much oil under this land. Now, however, economic accountings of natural capital are beginning to analyze less exploitable resources- things like the value of the protection coastal swamps provide to coastal cities from hurricane storm surges, along with their roles as fish spawning grounds and more.

A Japanese mangrove swamp. Mangroves are trees and shrubs that thrive in shallow saline and brackish conditions, and provide numerous benefits- even compared to other coastal swamps, themselves incredibly biodiverse and ecologically important, mangrove swamps are pretty impressive. Environmental and (especially) ecological economics have begun paying significantly more attention to their contribution to the environment. Unfortunately, more than 35% of the world's mangrove swamps have already been lost. [Image source]

Both movements, however, face significant challenges. First of all, many features of the natural world seem to resist having a monetary value or cost attached to them. How, for instance, do you adequately calculate the cost of a species going extinct? You can calculate the lost dollars from direct human exploitation of the species, perhaps, but that hardly covers the weakening of the ecosystem or the moral price paid. After years and years of debate and squabbling about questions like this, no satisfying answers have been found yet- nor do they seem likely to be found in the near future.

Many critics, in fact, argue that assigning monetary values to environmental losses and destruction is a fundamentally flawed proposition, for quite a reason. First of all, there are serious concerns that insufficient understanding of the ecological complexities of an ecosystem could lead to critical misvaluations of species, biomes, and other natural features. We could entirely miss out on a vital interaction a local species has with other local species, thus undervaluing it severely.

While wolves can cause immense losses to farmers by killing livestock, they also hold down populations of deer, rabbits, and other grazing animals, as well as forcing them to spend more time grazing in cover, rather than out in the open. This radically alters local ecosystems. In ecosystems without wolves, grazer populations often get large enough that they consume most young trees, preventing forest growth and renewal. They also tend to destroy groundcover, to the point where it can no longer adequately prevent erosion, leading to increased flooding, more rapid changing of river courses, and more severe topsoil erosion. This duality makes them incredibly hard to accurately determine their economic value. [Image source]

Next, there are concerns that simply putting a flat number value on a natural feature could also be a severe mistake. Wolves, for instance, can cause severe economic losses to ranchers by eating livestock- but they also tend to be critical in the maintenance and preservation of forest ecosystems, without which flooding and topsoil erosion become much more urgent threat, as discussed above. Just subtracting one value from the other to get a net value for wolves is arguably a nonsensical path that leads to poor economic decisions- rather, we need to take both into account.

There are also many, many situations where the economic benefits of destroying an ecosystem will massively outweigh the economic losses- even if the environmental losses are still immense- based merely off of something like, say, the high price of oil or uranium. The introduction of the Nile Perch to Lake Victoria is another good example of that- their introduction completely decimated local ecosystems, to the immense economic benefit of many local communities.

The Nile Perch was introduced to Africa's Lake Victoria, the world's largest freshwater tropical lake, in the 1950s. This large predator can grow to 2 meters and 200 kilograms, making it a fearsome predator. It's done incalcuable damage to local ecosystems, wiping out literally hundreds of native species. It's also severely reduced populations of algae eating fish, which is resulting in a potential algae overgrowth catastrophe in the lake. The depths of the lake are already having their oxygen depleted by the algae as it sinks and decomposes, degrading the ecosystem even more. And while some local communities have been able to switch over to fishing for Nile perch, resulting in immense economic and food security benefits for them, many others have been unable to do so, given the expensive equipment and larger boats needed to catch the huge predators. [Image source]

Possibly the most important criticism of assigning monetary values to natural features is that, simply speaking, it might just be morally wrong to do so. That doing so will make us callous to them, and more willing to part with nature if it's not valuable enough. That it lessens our connection to value outside of utility. Less simply put, these criticisms touch upon the ideas of several major thinkers- most notably, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger discussed a concept known as standing reserve- "Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering." Essentially, it's the treatment of the entire world as merely a mute collection of resources to be shaped to mankind's will, and it's something Heidegger was exceptionally critical of. Descendants of this idea lie behind many of the moral criticisms of attempts to assign monetary value to aspects of nature. Ultimately, I think it's still worthwhile to at least spend a lot more time attempting to understand nature's interactions with our economy- but these criticisms do make me very uneasy.

[Image source]

One key battlefield of both major forms of environmental economics is the historical. Having an economic understanding of how the economy and nature intersected in the past is absolutely invaluable towards moving environmental economics forward. Thankfully, economic historians are making leaps and bounds in doing so. In fact, one of the first posts I wrote on Steemit was an in depth review of The Great Transition, an environmental & environmental history of the 13th century, with a special focus on the Black Death and the Great Famine. Similar research is taking off all over, and is more than proving its worth.

Ultimately, we need to understand economics as one leg of a tripod of intellectual battles we need to be fighting over the environment. The other two are knowledge of the environment and knowledge of social dynamics related to the other two, and all three overlap heavily- to the point where separating them can get really silly. Environmental crises can cause economic and social crises- often in the shared form of refugee crises. Third world nations often have much more difficult times transitioning to greener systems than wealthier developed nations, who already (and, as is often claimed by poorer nations, unfairly) got to bootstrap themselves upwards by exploiting nature to an extreme degree. Economic shifts can have huge environmental and social consequences. There is really no part of the human experience that really stand separate from the immense environmental crises we've brought upon ourselves.

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Bibliography:

• An Environmental History of the World, by J. Donald Hughes
• • Environmental Problems of the Greeks and Romans, by J Donald Hughes
• Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C. Scott
• The Climate Casino- Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World, by William Nordhaus
• The Question Concerning Technology, by Martin Heidegger
• The Great Trasition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World, by Bruce M. S. Campbell
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_economics
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_ethics
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_capital
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_bleaching
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_wolf
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangrove
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Victoria