Description
A transdisciplinary exploration, by one of the founders of ecological economics, of how our economic beliefs have led to social and environmental disaster. Richard B. Norgaard shows how understanding the economic system is essential for understanding modern people’s relation to nature and to morality. Economies need to be guided by moral reason and scientific knowledge. Instead, economists look to the economy for guidance, and in so doing economists have abused the assumptions and logic of markets.From this position economists have since misguided the public through policy and legal recommendations concerning ecological and ethical issues. The abuse stems from the systemic complexities of social and natural systems that defy the atomistic and individualistic assumptions of market logic .This abuse has helped sustain the economy that has been driving modernity along a road to destructive climate chaos and the sixth extinction along with ever greater income inequality. Drawing on decades of experience, Norgaard documents the illogic of economic analyses of resource scarcity, climate economics, thinking of nature as capital providing ecosystem services, and the divisibility of nature into private property. Ultimately the book argues for planned equitable, technologically selective degrowth, based on intercultural learning, to limit our degradation of the environment.