Common, M. S., & Stagl, S. (2005). Ecological economics: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. It must meet the needs of people for income, healthcare, employment and chances to increase their capabilities and provide opportunities for the next generation. While improved technologies can certainly reduce waste and facilitate recycling, agents of transformation (capital and labor) cannot serve as direct substitutes for the material and energy being transformed (natural resources). Can we produce a ten-pound cake with only one pound of ingredients, simply by using more cooks and ovens? And further, how could we make more capital (or labor) without also using more natural resources? While a capital investment in sonar may help locate those remaining fish, it is hardly a good substitute for more fish in the sea. And what happens to the capital value of fishing boats, including their sonar, as the fish disappear? Kallis, G. (2017). Radical Dematerialization and Degrowth. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, A, 375, 20160383. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2016.0383. Those who deny the conflict between growth and environment often claim that since GDP is measured in value units, it has no necessary physical impact on the environment. But one must remember that a dollar’s worth of gasoline is a physical quantity—recently about one fourth of a gallon in the United States. GDP is an aggregate of all such “dollar’s worth” quantities bought for final use, and is consequently a value-weighted index of physical quantities. GDP is certainly not perfectly correlated with resource throughput. Nevertheless, prospects for absolute “decoupling” of resource throughput from GDP are quite limited, even though much discussed and wished for. 3

Newig, J., Derwort, P., & Jager, N. W. (2019). Sustainability Through Institutional Failure and Decline? Archetypes of Productive Pathways. Ecology and Society, 24(1), 18. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10700-240118. Also consider: Communication Skills for Conservation Professionalsby Susan Jacobson, Communicating Natureby Julia Corbett

Saddler, National Energy Emissions Audit: Electricity update (TAI, May 2019), see especially Fig.4. E.g. Ehrlich PR, Holdren JP & Ehrlich AH, Ecoscience: Population, resources, environment (W.H. Freeman, 1978). Martinez-Alier, J., Pascual, U., Vivien, F.-D., & Zaccai, E. (2010). Sustainable De-growth: Mapping the Context, Criticisms and Future Prospects of an Emergent Paradigm. Ecological Economics, 69(9), 1741–1747. Hamilton, ‘Foundations of ecological economics’ in M Diesendorf & C Hamilton (eds), Human Ecology Human Economy: Ideas for an ecologically sustainable future (Sydney: Allen & Unwin,1997) 35-63 Hamilton, ‘Foundations of ecological economics’ in M Diesendorf & C Hamilton (eds), Human Ecology Human Economy: Ideas for an ecologically sustainable future (Sydney: Allen & Unwin,1997) 35-63.

Gilmore, B. (2013). The World Is Yours: “Degrowth”, Racial Inequality and Sustainability. Sustainability, 5, 1282–1303.Barnett, H. J., & Morse, C. (1963). Scarcity and Growth. The Economy of Natural Resource Availability. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. McCay, B. J., & Acheson, J. M. (Eds.). (1987). The Question of the Commons: The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Need an antidote to the doom and gloom? Stressed-out environmental advocates will appreciate Prospects for Resilience: Insights from New York City's Jamaica Bay. It’s a deep dive into one of the most important questions of our time: how can we create cities where people and nature thrive together? Prospects for Resilience showcases successful efforts to restore New York’s much abused Jamaica Bay, but its lessons apply to any communities seeking to become more resilient in a turbulent world. Economic logic would tell us to invest in the limiting factor. The old economic policy of building more fishing boats is now uneconomic, so we need to invest in natural capital, the new limiting factor. How do we do that? For one, we can do so by reducing the catch to allow fish populations to increase to their previous levels, and by other measures such as fallowing agricultural land to refresh its fertility. More generally, we can do so through restoration ecology, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable use practices.

Blow the mind of the advocate in your life with a copy of Ecological Economics by the godfather of ecological economics, Herman Daly, and Josh Farley. In plain, and sometimes humorous English, they’ll come to understand how our current economic system does not play by the same laws that govern nearly every other system known to humankind—that is, the laws of thermodynamics. Given recent financial and political events, there’s a message of hope within the book as it lays out specific policy and social change frameworks. O’Connor, J. (1998). Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism. New York and London: Guilford Press.Klitgaard, K. (2013). Heterodox Political Economy and the Degrowth Perspective. Sustainability, 5, 276–297. In the 1970s, when some economists were developing environmental economics, another economist, Herman Daly, was developing a far more radical field of knowledge that he called ‘steady-state economics’, or SSE. [6] It subsequently evolved into the nominally interdisciplinary field of ‘ecological economics’ - the economics of sustainability. Hamilton has neat diagrams illustrating the difference between environmental and ecological economics. [7] Daly’s original definition of an SSE is: The Economy as Subsystem of the Ecosphere | From Empty World to Full World: The Limiting Factor Has Changed | Limits to Growth and the Optimal Scale of the Economy in a Full World | Policies for a Steady-State Economy | Larger Ethical and Ecological Context of Economics | Endnotes The Economy as Subsystem of the Ecosphere Sen, A. (1992). Inequality Reexamined. New York and Oxford: Russell Sage Foundation and Clarendon Press.

Cato, M. S. (2009). Green economics: An introduction to theory, policy and practice. London: Earthscan, Dustan House. He is also a recipient of an Honorary Right Livelihood Award, the Heineken Prize for Environmental Science from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Sophie Prize (Norway), the Leontief Prize from the Global Development and Environment Institute and was chosen as Man of the Year 2008 by Adbusters magazine. Daly, H. (1994). Steady State Economics. In C. Merchant (Ed.), Key Concepts in Critical Theory: Ecology. Amherst and New York: Humanity Books.According to ecological economists, conventional economics does not reflect adequately the value of essential factors like clean air and water, species diversity, and social and generational equity. By excluding biophysical and social systems from their analyses, many conventional economists have overlooked problems of the increasing scale of human impacts and the inequitable distribution of resources. Mayumi, K. (2001). The Origins of Ecological Economics: The Bioeconomics of Georgescu-Roegen. New York and London: Routledge. Although environmental economics made some people, especially economists, more aware of the importance of the environment, it retains the limitation inherent to neoclassical economics: it is tied to using markets to handle ‘externalities’ such as environmental pollution (Jacobs 1991). [3] Discuss in a group the following vision by Klitgaard ( 2013: 294) and the arguments for it critically. If you do not accept certain arguments, try to find other or further ones, but do not reduce the vison to a selective picture— try to think about all necessary changes to achieve global sustainability. Economic imperialism is essentially the neoclassical approach. Subjective individual preferences, however whimsical or uninstructed, are taken as the ultimate source of value. This is a perverse value judgment, not the absence of value judgments, as economists normally treat it. Since subjective wants are thought to be infinite in the aggregate, as well as sovereign, the scale of activities devoted to satisfying them tends to expand. The expansion is considered legitimate as long as “all costs are internalized into prices.”