Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
ethical analysis forces an examination of all potential costs. That tree in the
yard has value. Cutting it down to construct a chair offers many benefits, among
them money in the pockets of the carpenter and comfort for the individual
purchasing it. Yet, letting it stand offers other benefits to humanity and nature,
though not readily measurable monetarily or definable economically.
For Economists like David Pearce, putting a price tag on the environment could
help. For many years he has argued that without placing a monetary value on
environmental gains and losses, we will continue to treat natural resources as if they
were free. Quantifying how much people will pay to preserve or improve their
environment will enable decision-makers to see how much people value it. The more
they are willing to pay, the more they appreciate the resource or amenity, enabling
economists, using a form of cost-benefit analysis, to calculate the net worth of various
options. As David Pearce
et al
. (1989: 81) write, 'by trying to value environmental
services we are forced into a rational decision-making frame of mind'. Writing from
a Marxist perspective, geographer David Harvey (1996) is extremely wary of a
number of positions promoted by ecological economists and others who continually
emphasize eco-scarcity and what amounts to an arbitrary financial valuation of nature
independent of market prices. Harvey notes that what exists in nature is and always
has been in a constant state of transformation and to declare that a state of eco-
scarcity exists is tantamount to suggesting that human societies lack the capacity,
knowledge and capability to modify either our material practices, our social goals,
our economic arrangements, our technologies or nature itself. He writes:
To say that scarcity resides in nature and that natural limits exist is to ignore
how scarcity is socially produced and how 'limits' are a social relation within
nature (including human society) rather than some externally imposed necessity.
(1996: 147)
On sustainable development and degrowth
The ambiguity of the concept of sustainable development has long been a subject of
criticism and although the concept has many defenders and many advocates most of
the global indicators have not been favourable. The Copenhagen Climate Conference
in 2009 and the Rio+20 conference in 2012 have increased academic and policy
interest in an idea that goes beyond sustainable development, natural capitalism and
the steady state economy. In the early 1970s the economist and mathematician Nicholas
Georgescu-Roegan produced a paper titled 'The Entropy Law and the Economic
Problem' (Georgescu-Roegan, 1994) which explored the laws of entropy in the context
of economics. For Georgescu-Roegan, the economic process is an immaterial flux
referring to the enjoyment of life rather than a never-ending material flow of production,
consumption and waste. Indeed, the economic process depends on using material and
energy resources that, however much we recycle or freecycle, cannot ensure industrial
abundance in the long term. Economic growth, even zero growth, cannot exist forever
in a finite environment, although population control and new technology may enable
the steady state economy to exist for quite some time albeit subject to fluctuations,
challenges and stresses. Thus the truly desirable state is not a steady one but a declining
one. These rather bleak but logical ideas were taken up by others in the 1980s,
