Meadowlark Economies

Work and Leisure in the Ecosystem

Jim Eggert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315485355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First Published in 2017. The author shares their feelings about enjoying and preserving the natural environment, yet this book also reveals a conflict in values that the most committed ecologist must face. Such conflict pits the powerful American values of individual freedom and rights against the values of community necessary for sustaining the environment. In publishing this collection of essays, the author hopes to contribute to more enlightened economic analysis and more relevant and effective policies that are good for both the economy and the global ecology.

PART I

/ VALUES OF A DIFFERENT ORDER

/ Meadowlark Economics

If I were a CEO or the head of a government agency, I have my doubts whether I would hire a contemporary economist. This may seem like an odd comment coming from someone who has spent the past twenty-two years of his life teaching university Econ classes. Indeed, there have been countless occasions when I’ve defended my discipline’s importance to my students and others.

What is economics’ special contribution? Economists’ stock-in-trade includes: recognizing scarcity; helping to make choices; identifying tradeoffs; and making connections (that may not always be obvious) between the larger economy and one’s own small, individual, economic world.

On the last point, I recall a class in the mid-1980s when a student asked what I meant by “making connections.” It happened on a day that Nature, fortuitously, provided me with an interesting and unusual example. I told the students that I had trouble getting to school that morning because a couple of aspen trees (near a damned-up marshy area) had been cut overnight and had blocked the roadway.

“Now what,” I asked, “did international trade and finance have to do with these downed trees and my morning’s frustration?” Working it through, we concluded that there, indeed, may have been connections:

– Who cut the trees? Probably beaver.

– Why were they felling trees near the road? Overpopulation.

– Why were there too many beaver? No trapping that year.

– What happened to the beaver pelt market? Decreased foreign demand.

– Why? High value of the American dollar in the spring of 1985.

Some of the fun of teaching is thinking through such illustrations, examining, as it were, the connective tissue of the Big Economy, world markets, and then trying to see how they relate to you and me. Indeed, most economists are trained to do this kind of analysis quite well.

So what’s our shortcoming? I believe it is simply this: we economists have simply not gone farenough in broadening our understanding of ecology and ecological values.

ECOLOGY AND ECONOMICS

“Ecology.” Note that the words “economics” and “ecology” have the same prefix “eco,” from the Greek oikos, which literally means “household.” Thus the original definition of economics implied an understanding, a caring for, and the management of human households, whereas ecology implied an understanding and appreciation of the interrelationships within nature’s “household.” I believe these two households are becoming more interdependent and their futures more and more intimately linked. When we fail to calculate ecological values or to see the connections, it paves the way for losses that are both unintended and unwanted. One example (on a small scale to be sure) is now occurring in our area, a dairy farming region of the upper Midwest. We are losing our meadowlarks!

Indeed, the people who walk or jog or bike along our rural roads enjoy the few meadowlarks that are left. Their song is pleasing, their color and swoop-of-flight is enchanting. The complete disappearance of meadowlarks would, plain and simple, be wrong ethically, and also would diminish the quality of our lives.

Why are we losing the meadowlarks? Most likely it is a result of a modern method of haying—“haylage.” Farmers now tend to cut their hay “green” with minimal drying early in the spring, put it into a wagon, then blow it into the silo. Years ago, most farmers let their hay grow longer—perhaps Iwo to three weeks longer—before cutting it. It was then dried and raked into windrows. This method gave the field nesting birds (such as the meadowlarks and bobolinks) time to establish a brood and fledge their young before the mower arrived on the scene.

Haylage in turn is an offshoot of improved farm “efficiency,” of substituting machinery for labor, and of minimizing time and costly rain delays that characterized the old cutting/drying/baling method. These changes took place with the blessings of Ag economists, university researchers, on down the line to the county extension agent. But in the meantime, who was valuing the meadowlarks?

Despite their sweet song, these birds have no voice economically or politically. They represent a zero within our conventional economic accounting system (we don’t even buy birdseed or build birdhouses for meadowlarks). Their disappearance would not create even the tiniest ripple in the Commerce Department’s spreadsheets that are supposed to measure our standard of living.

MEADOWLARK VALUES

In truth, there are “Meadowlark Values” (as opposed to strict economic values) everywhere. They are found in estuaries and sand dunes, in wetlands and woodlands, in native prairies and Panamanian rainforests. It is quite probable that the quality of your life is, to some degree, dependent on these values; they are on every continent, they can be seen upstate and downstate. Just look about and you will find them (like our meadowlarks) on your road, or next door, or even in your own back yard.

Meadowlark Values were underrepresented when Mr. Bush’s economists advised the President to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) for oil and gas exploration. Meadowlark Values were shortchanged when economists pointed out (quite correctly) that Exxon’s oil spill actually increased our Gross Domestic Product (GDP), (by pouring billions of dollars into the cleanup and thereby fattening paychecks as well as state and national income).

Perhaps it is time we economists begin to rethink our strict adherence to dollar and GDP values. We should not, of course, discard our old and valuable skills: of recognizing scarcity, of making efficient choices, and of pointing out trade-offs. But it’s time to broaden ourselves, to incorporate ecological thinking and ecological values along with market thinking and market values—call it, if you wish, “Meadowlark Economics.”

I’m ashamed to admit that I took my first elementary class in ecology after teaching economics for more than two decades. I still have a ways to go. I am beginning to read (and appreciate) some of the latter day economists who represent this new thinking: Kenneth Boulding, Hazel Henderson, Herman Daly, Lester Brown, Leopold Kohr, and E.F. Schumacher, to name a few.

In addition, I hope that more and more prominent economists, the Friedmans, Solows, McConnells, the Boskins, Bradys and Greenspans of today—and the future—will feel comfortable not only with traditional market/growth economics, but will also know something of ecology as well; to value the integrity of the environment along with the “bottom line:” to promote development, but also protect the standard of living of the other organisms with whom we share the planet.

Along with Environmental Impact Statements (EIS), perhaps future economists can devise what might be called GIS or “Grandchild Impact Statements,” making sure our kids and their kids will have sustainable quantities of biological as well as other resources, helping preserve our soils and waters, fisheries and forests, whales and bluebirds—even the tiny toads and butterflies—that these entities too will have their voices represented.

So all you National Association of Business Economists, government advisers (and we teachers too), let’s dedicate ourselves to a new standard of—what?—Meadowlark Economics if you will, of protecting and sustaining, for the future, a larger and more comprehensive set of durable values.

/ A COMPENSATORY ETHIC

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.²

—Aldo Leopold

Some forty-four years ago, ecologist Aldo Leopold wove various observations together into a memorable idea that he would even tually call “the land ethic.”³ To Leopold’s credit his land ethic concept has, over the years, become a centerpiece vision for ecologists, preser vationists, and outdoors people alike. Indeed, I’ve seen no better “definition” of so-called Meadowlark Values than can be found in his book A Sand County Almanac with special attention to his final “Land Ethic” essay. In this essay, Leopold asserts that we are “members of a community of interdependent parts and that it’s now time to enlarge the boundaries of that community to include not just humans but also plants, animals, soils, lakes, rivers, and oceans, or collectively: the land.”

Recognition of this broader community carries with it a commitment of peaceful coexistence with, and protection of, all these diverse natural entities. Summing up, Leopold asks us all to begin changing the role of homo sapiens from “conqueror of the land community to plain member or citizen of it.”

“Plain member….” I love the word “plain,” a word which implies an uncharacteristic dose of humility and modesty. And as we move away from the role of “conqueror,” we will begin to see the need for honestly sharing resources, both national and global. Sharing in turn would imply an eventual alteration of our industrial-based standard of living. In this vision, Aldo Leopold has perhaps begun to describe an ultimate goal of our species—a true transformation, on a large and permanent scale, of our public and private commitment toward nature. It is a goal that even Professor Leopold realized would take generations to accomplish.

In the meantime, though, what can be done? Are there any intermediate, ethical stances we can use as steppingstones along the way? Let me suggest one: a compensatory ethic.

Compensatory is defined as: “to make up for or to offset; counterbalance; to make equivalent or satisfactory reparation to…” A compensatory ethic would be less revolutionary and in many ways more accepting of the status quo than the land ethic. It would not, for example, insist that we radically curtail our standard of living or necessarily shun many of the pleasures of consumption.

COMPENSATORY INVESTMENTS AND ACTIVITIES

It does, however, imply that if we wish to continue with our resource-using habits, we should somehow compensate or mitigate the damage via investments or activities that will offset the negative consequences of our current level of production and consumption.

An illustration of compensatory ethical action was a decision by a relatively small electrical utility—Applied Energy Services of Arlington, Virginia—to help finance the planting of fifty million trees in Guatemala.⁴ This investment is apparently an attempt to compensate for the utility’s annual carbon dioxide emissions by planting future carbon dioxide absorbers. Along the same line, I wonder why tropical rainforest countries have not yet made the following compensatory proposal to the developed countries: “Okay industrial friends, if you want our forest diversity and also want to continue to enjoy the fruits of fossil fuels—but don’t want the possible greenhouse consequences—you might want to rent our forest of CO₂ absorbers and rich habitats.” One candidate for raising money to pay this rent would be a CO₂ user-tax imposed on processes that burn fossil fuels. In addition, this subsidy could (and should) be used to foster the economic survival of tropical populations who would otherwise be slashing and burning tracts of trees to exploit that elusive and short-lived two or three inches of forest topsoil.

If one accepts this line of argument, and begins to explore compensatory ethical options, a numbe...