May
11, 2020
Today’s
idea – On the class agenda was economics.
The word economy originated from the Greek word “oeconomicus” for
household management, which included consideration for the value of free men’s
work in a household and that of exploited women and slaves. Later these ideas were extended from households to city-states, and later to nation-states.
The shape of its letters resembles a warren, and I added more rooms by contrasting neo-classic economics with eco–economics
and doughnut economics. The word begs the question, what do I consider home?
Where is my Ecos? This existential query should be the Axis of any economics
question; and its answer would be the Mundi. Unless the home is defined or described,
how can we know what we are managing? A clear sense of habitat is rather essential
to shape the perspective and frame the response.
This
afternoon I mulled on this question as I sat on a levee beside the Mississippi
River in a massive wildlife refuge. I had driven upstream for almost an hour. Then
I walked far enough from the road so that the predominant soundscape was an
open sky full of bird song – blackbirds, warblers, swallows, goldfinches, a
great horned owl, and geese with crickets laying down the lower tracks like alpha
waves. In the distance behind the sonic curtain was the low rumble of a
train. Wild
spaces they bring me home. The term, wildlife refuge, bears the qualities
I admire for a domicile. The levee was good place to consider economics
as I pulled out my binoculars for a bit of birding. Circular conveyances came to mind when I looked
about. Before me was a slough with a water level much lower than last month, yet still high enough to flood the
deadfall that had toppled along its edges. The river teams with its own
ecology, facilitating a more rapid composting and decay of the woody debris. Nothing created, nothing
destroyed – just molecules rearranged. All around the deconstruction scenes
rose the alchemy of this greening season.
It had settled deeply here.
Marsh grasses, dandelions, plantains, and blackberries forested the
levee; the deciduous trees were exploding in new foliage, preparing to
reopen their well-honed photosynthesis operations, the real magic on the
planet. The fauna was well occupied, too, turning out their next-generation and
extending the gene pools forward. The debris of one era feeds the dreams of
another.
Somewhere in the last few hundred years, we took the biosphere out of economics and straightened the curves of nature’s reciprocity, railroading resources to waste. Now human society is choking the earth with its growth economics, a management system not based in the real world. Sometimes I feel that pointing this out rings subversive in some households, but damn it, I teach ecology and the economy of the biosphere. I have been charged by the very discipline of this study to invite my students to look for ways to re-vision such a flawed and dangerous economic system that threatens to run us off a cliff in their lifetime. Let them be part of a revival moment, if so inspired,to reunite us with the truly global economy.
Our textbook offered an alternative model to growth economics. Eco-economics studies things inside and outside the market and across other disciplines in an attempt to embed humans in their ecosystems. I happened upon another school of thought called doughnut economics. It is the brainchild of Kate Raworth, an outspoken economist from Cambridge. She has put forward that human societies can thrive if we transition from nation-state economies to a planetary state economy, dwelling in a doughnut space with sensible boundaries above and below. Our economy’s ceiling would be environmentally circumspect within limits that safeguard our precious biosphere. Our economy’s foundations would be held by the social justice principles housed in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals of 2015. It is quite specific.
I like to think either model could be a twenty first century prize to keep our eyes on, creating another Renaissance instead of the Apocalypse. And perhaps it is what we need to generate the steady state of oeconomicus that would facilitate an ascension to the fifth dimension, I hear so much about. But I’ll have to check in with my light
worker friends about that.
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