Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
project may or may not be a rational choice for individual consumers, depending on
perceived marginal benefits and costs to each person. However, one could wonder if
the question itself is rational. Borrowing from Daly's nautical plimsoll line analogy
(Daly and Farley 2004), if your ship's weight is such that your ship is sinking below the
plimsoll line, the collectively rational question to ask is: How can we rearrange and
get rid of some of the cargo now? It is not: Will marginal benefits from one more load
exceed marginal costs? Ecological economics is a paradigm shift from neoclassical
economics because its first action is to ask: What are the rational and prudent ques-
tions to ask when in pursuit of sustainability? For example, if ecosystem conditions
and processes have been damaged to a critical point, the rational choice beyond mar-
ginalism is to promote the “recovery of damaged ecosystems.” The Millennium Eco-
system Assessment (2005) concluded that approximately 60 percent of the world's
ecosystem services are in decline and are being used unsustainably, which, in turn,
causes significant harm to human well-being. The imminent problem is known. The
question to ask is: How can we effectively go about solving it?
Ecological Economics for Ecological Restoration
The ecological path that advocates of restoration nearly everywhere are trying to cor-
rect was set by past management and development paradigms. For instance, in the
United States ideas and practices were driven by the utilitarian philosophy of the Pro-
gressive Era. To the Progressive Era conservationists, like Gifford Pinchot, Theodore
Roosevelt, and Stephen Mather, resources are for use. Thus, their primary concern
was to set policies and build public institutions to reduce waste and inefficiency in the
use of natural resources (Hays 1959; Cortner and Moote 1999). Under the “gospel of
efficiency,” the scientific management of forest fires translated into the effective pro-
tection of resources against fire, later characterized as the policy to wage war on the
forces of nature (Nelson 2000). Neoclassical economics, along with other reduction-
ist disciplines, provided the theoretical and political base for the scientific manage-
ment of efficiency, where management decisions are based on “objective science”
that can transparently evaluate trade-offs among multiple uses of ecosystems. But, as
Einstein duly noted, “We cannot solve the problems we have created with the same
thinking that created them.” Our current problem of degraded ecosystems cannot be
solved by simply adding more ecosystem state variables to the same old framework of
sustained yields and economic efficiency.
Indeed, Norgaard (2004), among others, argued that modern science, compart-
mentalized within various epistemic communities, is “neither fit nor organized to ad-
dress the whole and inform collective action.” In an earlier paper, Norgaard (1989) il-
lustrated that methodological diversity and cultural adaptation need to be consciously
maintained for ecological economics to effectively work within a range of answers.
Others went a step further and argued that the mode of scientific inquiry itself has to
be different if we are to offer effective solutions to the most urgent problems in the
face of inherent uncertainties and the value-laden nature of science and policy mak-
ing (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993, 1994). “Post-normal science,” a phrase coined by
