Int. J. Green Economics, Vol. 1, Nos. 1/2, 2006 201

Green economics: an introduction and research agenda

Derek Wall Goldsmiths College, University of London New Cross, London SE14 6NW, UK E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: Green economics: An introduction and research agenda, examines the historical evolution of green economics, a discourse which is marked by antipathy to the foundational assumptions of conventional market based economics. Green opposition to growth and the market is identified along with values of ecological sustainability, social justice, decentralisation and peace. To move beyond a critical account, green economics, as a discipline, needs to establish a research agenda based on: 1 examining global political economy 2 developing forms of regulation beyond the market and the state 3 examining the transition to such an alternative economy.

Keywords: green economics; global political economy; regulation; transition; economic growth; anti-capitalism; Marx; open source; usufruct; commons.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Wall, D. (2006) ‘Green economics: an introduction and research agenda’, Int. J. Green Economics, Vol. 1, Nos. 1/2, pp.201–214.

Biographical notes: Derek Wall teaches Political Economy at Goldsmiths College, University of London in the Politics Department. His PhD, ‘The Politics of Earth First! UK’ was completed in 1998. He has published six books on green economics including, most recently, Babylon and Beyond: The Economics of Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Globalist and Radical Green Movements (Pluto 2005). He is a long standing eco-socialist and the founder of the Association of Socialist Greens. He is a member of International Zen Association. His next book, Shopping Without Money, will look at a wide variety of non-monetary forms of economic regulation.

1 Introduction

The Green Movement, which broadly defined, includes grassroots direct action networks such as Reclaim the Streets and Earth First! as well as the more radical elements of NGOs such as Friends of the Earth and Survival International, is globally significant. Green discourse is increasingly influencing personal lifestyles with organic gardening, fair trade and low energy practices spreading through society. Green Parties have become a feature of modern politics with activities in seventy countries and recent governing coalitions in states including Belgium, France, and Germany. While Green Parties and

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green movements have advanced, green ideas have provided a challenge across a number of fields including economics. This paper explores the historical roots of green economics, outlining its defining themes and looks at where it might advance in the future. In short this piece of writing introduces green economics and suggests a research agenda for future work. A starting point has to be the notion of the hegemonic role of orthodox economics in our present society and the opposition of greens to such dominance. Economics is, in many ways, the dominant discourse of modern and even post-modern societies, yet green economics, in contrast to environmental economics, challenges its fundamental logic. Green economists are sceptical of economic growth, the market, notions of ‘rational’ utility maximisation and anthropocentricism. Green economics, far from being new, has deep roots; these are outlined in the first section below. To move forward, green economists would benefit from looking at issues of global political economy, transition and regulation. Global political economy is important to move green economics away from being a discourse, which is primarily moral and critical. Green economists need to understand how, at a particular moment, the worldwide economic system is functioning if they are to theorise how it can be changed. Given the pathological effects of a growth-orientated capitalist economy, green economists must discuss in a practical fashion how change can be introduced. Finally, Greens need to maintain their utopian programme by asking how an economy that rejects continual accumulation can be sustained while removing poverty and providing prosperity without alienation. These orientating questions of where we are (global political economy), of ‘getting there’ (to a green society) and of ‘being there’ (maintaining such a green society) provide the basis of a tentative research programme or in Althusserian language, a set of interlinked ‘problematics’. A ‘problematic’ is a question or a problem worthy of study. The problems identified by students of particular intellectual discipline as worthy of research can be used to distinguish such a discipline from others. Put crudely, economists are concerned with the problem of how scarce resources can be used to meet unlimited human wants. Green economists are, in contrast, concerned with how human happiness can be maintained within ecological restraints. In some ways, such contrasting approaches may seem similar, yet economists assume that ever-increasing production is a goal where green economists wish to increase utility by using less. The green opposition to economic growth is perhaps what makes green economics so interesting.

2 Green economics: outline and history

Green ideas and movements are often conceptualised as modern. Such modernism is used to suggest that green politics can be sharply distinguished from an old politics of right and left, centrally concerned with issues of economic distribution and class struggle. Numerous New Social Movement theorists have used Inglehart’s (1977) concept of post-materialism to argue that growing prosperity concerns, with ‘bread and butter’ issues of income and wealth distribution, have been replaced with environmental issues. Apparently, the old social movements, concerned with power, have given way to new movements based on identity, dealing with issues of peace, sexuality and the environment. In turn, the global environmental issues that helped trigger the growth of green concern can be seen as rather modern. How could we protest against nuclear power

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before it had been invented? The ‘novelty’ thesis of green movements is strengthened by the fact that Green Parties have only emerged in the 1970s and global environmental pressure groups such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace date only back to the 1960s. Yet, while Green Parties are relatively new, environmental concern is not. In turn, environmental and animal rights organisations were amongst the first pressure groups in existence. Plato drew attention to the effects of soil erosion, and other examples of classical Greek and Ancient Roman environmental concern have been chronicled (Hughes, 1975). The earliest UK anti-pollution laws were put on the statute books in the 13th century. John Evelyn, in the reign of Charles II, wrote a tract against air pollution and a manifesto for tree conservation (Wall, 1993). The Vegetarian Society was established in 1847 and the Open Spaces Society can trace its origins back to the 1850s; the US Sierra Club dedicated to conserving wilderness was also created in the nineteenth century after John Muir went on this famous ‘wilderness’ walks across North America (Wall, 1993). Virtually every element of green economics can be historically situated, although such a history is often forgotten. Opposition to economic growth, a rejection of anthropocentricism, the demand for cooperation rather than competition, an emphasis on localism, and decentralised production and consumption are just some of the features of green economics that can be traced through centuries of evolution. One source of green economics is to be found in the nineteenth century Romantic critique of industrialisation. William Blake criticised the arrival of ‘satanic mills’ in England’s green and pleasant land; Wordsworth and Shelley expressed similar sentiments, which were developed by the Victorian critic John Ruskin who inspired William Morris. Goethe’s romanticism has also been influential. Such concerns were incorporated by urban planners such as Geddes and Mumford in the twentieth century (Gould, 1988). William Morris, the nineteenth century artist and political activist, fused such a romantic concern with Marxism. Indeed it has been argued that despite the dominant productivity strain in 20th century Marxism, Marx was centrally concerned with both environmental problems such as soil erosion and the science of ecology. An eco-socialist economic philosophy was also developed by the psychologist Fromm, most famously, in his book To Have or To Be? (Fromm, 1979). Foster (2000) has outlined Marx’s ecological analysis in some detail. A holistic philosophy that shows how different parts of society and nature are interrelated is taken by greens from the science of ecology, which studies relationships, often invisible without careful study, between different organisms. Holism has spiritual roots drawing upon Eastern philosophies and religions, particularly Buddhism and Taoism. The novelist Aldous Huxley developed such insights as did Schumacher (1978), the green economist, who wrote Small is Beautiful. The Beat poets, especially Synder drew upon Zen and fed into the 1960s hippie counter culture, providing a rich soil for the Green Parties of the 1970s (Snyder, 1974; 1999). Holism remains very important in contemporary green discourse, yet to argue that Asian spirituality gives rise to ecotopia is slightly misleading. China, India and Japan have devastated their environments just as much as the west. Depressingly, the Japanese Buddhist establishment were militarists who rejected the green principle of non-violence (Snyder, 1999, p.98).

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Conservatism runs through some forms of green thought. Such an approach, which broadly argues that laws of nature can be applied to human society, draws upon functionalist and naturalist themes. These themes are most apparent in the work of Goldsmith, who celebrates the stability of tribal societies and the nuclear family. For Goldsmith, human society is part of a holistic and integrated natural order. Goldsmith’s (1988) essay entitled The Ecology of War has even argued that war is beneficial to society, well-localised, small-scale war. Yet contemporary greens have moved to the left. Their values can be quickly summarised by the four ‘pillars’ advocated by the German Greens when they entered parliament in 1983 – ecology, social justice, grassroots democracy and peace (German Green Party, 1983). The German, French and Austrian Greens came out of the social movements against nuclear power and weapons. Feminism is yet another influence on green ideas and, of course, has a long history of its own. Feminist economists argue that unwaged domestic labour, including food production, is ignored by orthodox economics. Real wealth creation is crucially dependent on the productivity of natural ecosystems and the labour of women. Accumulation, as part of a male dominated society, diminishes such natural wealth and is inherently destructive (Bennholdt-Thomsen and Mies, 1999).

2.1 Challenging accumulation

Greens are hostile to economic growth, a feature which clearly demarks green discourse from that of other sets of political ideas (Goldsmith, 1988; Porritt, 1984; Trainer, 1985). In the early 1970s, scientists became concerned that ever increasing economic growth would damage the environment (Meadows, 1974). The idea that human societies should produce more goods and services every year is strongly challenged by green economists. Scarce resources such as oil will eventually be exhausted, although it is difficult to calculate when. In the search for new resources, vital ecosystems are disrupted. To produce more goods, more energy has to be produced which leads to an increase in greenhouse gases or if the nuclear route is taken, to problems of radioactive waste. If we consume more goods, this creates jobs and enhances profits, but leads to ever larger mountains of rubbish that have to be disposed of by dumping or poisonous incineration. (Porritt, 1984, p.47) There are many arguments that can be marshalled to suggest that economic expansion can be ecologically sustainable. Growth can be separated from energy use and rubbish production (Weizsacker et al., 1997). Conservation measures and the application of new technology mean that more goods can be produced per kilowatt. Indeed in recent years, Gross Domestic Product, the most common measure of economic output, has been growing faster than energy use. As societies become wealthier, more services rather than physical goods are consumed, a tendency which also has the potential to reduce pollution. Because of green and environmental movement pressure, more ecologically sustainable practices are being used to maintain growth. In Germany, in particular, the practice of ecological modernism, which uses high technology to try to sustain both the environment and economic expansion, has become important (Mol and Spaarrgaren, 2000). Solar, wind and other low pollution, low impact renewable energy sources have been advancing (Elliot, 2003). Recycling has become a necessity and there is now a strong zero waste movement (Greenpeace, 2001). More people in Western Societies eat organic food or are vegetarian, practices that reduce waste because they need less energy input without

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artificial fertilisers and pesticides. Many of the fears that Greens, linked to economic growth, seem to have been either exaggerated or are non-existent. Oil did not, as some commentators suggest, run out in 1979! Yet environmental problems remain severe and remain linked to growth. The burning of fossil fuels seems to be causing a greenhouse effect, which may already to be causing problems in terms of species loss, the migration of diseases and pests to new areas of the world, desertification and extreme weather patterns (Firor and Jacobsen, 2002). Green economics is hostile to the approach of simply using alternative accounting measures or of internalising externalities as environmental economists have suggested. Goldsmith illustrates the fundamental antipathy to accumulation with the story of two friends who both inherit a 10 000-acre tract of forest. Friend one leaves his 10 000 acres in its pristine state. Friend two sells the trees to McMillan Bloedel Corporation who cuts them all down, sells the mineral rights and the topsoil, fills the resulting dank hole with toxic waste, then constructs a shopping mall and theme park. Friend one is labelled as a waster. Friend two boosts GNP by $1,000,000, runs for office and becomes a senator (Mander and Goldsmith, 1996, p.15). Woodin and Lucas (2004, p.33) point out that globalisation, by accelerating growth, is speeding the greenhouse effect, with parts per million by volume (ppmv) of greenhouse gases now standing at 370 ppmv, a peak which is 30% higher than the previous high over ten thousand years ago in the last interglacial. They state that consumption of fresh water is doubling every twenty years, 12% of all bird species and a quarter of all mammal species are threatened with extinction. Greens in the south of the globe are, despite lower levels of material development, critical of conventionally measured growth. The Iranian Green Party typically notes: “Since economies grow while ecosystems do not, a growing economy is a threat to the long-term health and well-being of a society. In fact, in industrialized countries, large corporations seeking increased revenues are often the main perpetrators of environmental destruction. Although Iranian economic growth is less than the growth in industrialized countries, Iran is still faced with difficult problems because of its fundamentalist regime. In fact, in addition to environmental destruction caused by profit seeking corporations, the ineffectiveness and corruption of the reactionary Islamic regime has caused much of the ecological devastation plaguing Iran today.”1

2.2 Economics as alienation

Greens also argue that economic growth cheapens human existence. Areas of life that are not directly productive in an economic sense come to be valued less and less. Indeed, it is only what can be calculated; bought and sold that truly has worth: “Economics […] suddenly becomes the most important subject of all. Economic policies absorb almost the entire attention of government, and at the same time become ever more impotent. The simplest things, which only fifty years ago one could do without difficulty, cannot get done any more. The richer a society, the more impossible it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate pay-off. [Economics] tends to absorb the whole of ethics and take precedence over all other human considerations. Now, quite clearly, this is a pathological development.” (Schumacher, 1978, p.67)

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The pressure to be competitive individually or collectively driven by globalisation is particularly damaging. Workers are expected to put in ever longer hours. Universities must concentrate on promoting skills that lead to further economic growth. Status is measured by wealth that drives even the ‘haves’ to spend longer hours working and consuming. Economic rationality based on quantitative measure treats anything that cannot easily be measured and sold with contempt. An Australian Green noted: “Like George Orwell’s term ‘Newspeak’, Neo-Liberal speak usually denotes the opposite of the truth. The long line of such economic rationalist coinages includes: ‘the level playing field’ that is always on a slope, ‘industry parks’ that never see a flower, ‘world’s best practice’ unprovable, empty rhetoric but, rather like the Freemason’s handshake, indicates they are in the Economic Rationalists’ club.”2 All needs in a capitalist society are transformed into the need for commodities. To be a good parent, one should work long hours to afford more ‘things’ for the babies. To be fulfilled sexually requires a huge and diverse industry. The body, created by unhealthy food and a sedentary car based lifestyle, has become a new focus of capitalist growth with billions spent on new diets (Fromm, 1979). Ted Trainer notes in Abandon Affluence!, “Acquiring things is important to many of us today because there is not much else that yields interest and a sense of progress and satisfaction in life” (quoted in Dobson, 1991, p.85). Economic growth does not even remove poverty, the richest generally see the biggest gains and the poorest are usually separated from resources that they previously had access to. In the nineteenth century, surveying the chaos created by the Industrial Revolution, Sismondi echoed the green critique of growth and wider economics. In 1819, Sismondi identified England as the home of economics, a nation obsessed with global competition where wealth paradoxically breeds poverty, dissatisfaction and crisis: “England has given birth to the most celebrated Political Economists: the science is cultivated even at this time with increased ardour […] […] In this astonishing country, which seems to be subject to a great experiment for the instruction of the rest of the world, I have seen production increasing, whilst enjoyments were diminishing. The mass of the nation here, no less than philosophers, seems to forget that the increase of wealth is not the end in political economy, but its instrument in procuring the happiness of all. I sought for this happiness in every class and I could nowhere find it. […] Has not England, by forgetting men for things, sacrificed the end to the means?” (quoted in Luxemburg, 1971, pp.175–177) Capitalist industrialism, as Sismondi suggests, may increase material wealth but at the cost of making humanity (and nature), which are ‘ends’, merely into ‘means’ for an alien economic system. Greens argue that such concept as GNP, competitiveness and production are in the saddle and ride of humanity. The Victorian social critic John Ruskin, in a statement that rings true a century after he penned it, noted: “The real science of political economy, which has yet to be distinguished from the bastard science, as medicine from witchcraft, and astronomy from astrology, is that which teaches nations to desire and labour for the things that lead to life: and which teaches them to scorn and destroy the things that lead to destruction.” (quoted in Boyle, 2002, p.13)

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Like Sismondi and Ruskin, Schumacher (1978, p.54) in his green economics primer Small is Beautiful stressed that economics should be a means of making human beings happier and serving ethical needs: “This is standing the truth on its head by considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity. It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the sub-human, a surrender to the forces of evil.”

2.3 Bad trade

Greens have increasingly turned their attention to trade. Economists have argued that trade is beneficial because of gains from comparative advantage, competitive pressure, economics of scale and technology transfer. Competitive pressure means that by opening a country up to trade, domestic producers lose any monopoly status they had and are forced to become more cost efficient. Comparative advantage, a notion developed by Adam Smith and refined by Ricardo, occurs when countries specialise in the goods or services they are best at producing and exchange them for others. Economies of scale occur when increased production by a firm leads to lower average costs. A firm with a national market typically might sell to 30 million consumers. With a continental market, the firm gains access to 300 million, with a global market, perhaps more than a billion. Increased production allows expensive machinery to be used more efficiently, bulk buying of parts and raw materials can be enhanced and specialised staff recruited. These and a host of other savings lower costs. Trade also should create development via technology transfer from richer skilled nations to the rest of the planet. Greens such as the UK Green Member of the European Parliament, Lucas and the late Woodin, also of the UK Greens, are strongly critical of such assumptions: “Trade is rarely conducted between equal partners. […] Throughout the history of international trade, ‘comparative advantages’ have been created artificially and protected fiercely. Whether through gunboat ‘diplomacy’, colonisation, slavery, land enclosures, or protective subsidies, dominant trading nations have, for centuries, expropriated and jealously guarded the factors of production and market access they need to establish ‘comparative advantages’ over would-be competitors.” (Woodin and Lucas, 2004, p.7) Competition usually leads to a race to the bottom with companies forced to cut wages, working conditions and environmental protection to minimise costs. Korten (2001, pp.206–207) has noted how competition may lead to monopoly, rather than free competition, as giant corporations emerge and destroy domestic firms. They can then raise prices, punish consumers but are less interested in using their margins to benefit workers or the environment. WTO rules on patents are aimed at preventing poorer countries from copying products from Europe and North America, so they actually prevent technology transfer. Most notoriously, patent controls, relaxed only after huge international protest, were used to prevent South Africa developing cheap versions of the anti-AIDS/HIV drugs it needed. Technological transfers can, on the other hand, spread toxic or socially disabling practices from one part of the globe to another. Economies of scale may be significant but diseconomies can also occur. Schumacher (1978, pp.62–63) noted:

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“I was brought up on the theory of ‘economies of scale’ – that with industries and firms, just as with nations, there is an irresistible trend, dictated by modern technology, for units to become ever bigger [...] [Yet] Small scale organisation allows for greater flexibility and human communication, in short decentralised economic activity allows for ‘the convenience, humanity, and manageability of smallness.’” Trade, when successful in conventional terms, accelerates economic activity that damages the environment: “By now, it should be clear that our environment is becoming ever less capable of sustaining the growing impact of our economic activities. Everywhere, our forests are over logged, our agricultural lands over cropped, our grasslands overgrazed, our wetlands over drained, our groundwater’s overtapped, our seas over fished, and nearly all our terrestrial and marine environment is over polluted with chemical and radioactive poisons […] In such conditions, there can only be one way of maintaining the habitability of our planet, and that is to set out to reduce the impact. Unfortunately, the overriding goal of just about every government in the world is to maximise this impact through economic globalization.” (Mander and Goldsmith, 1996, p.79)

3 Global political economy

Marxism, the more sophisticated variance of neo-Austrianism and most recently post-Autistic economics have challenged aspects of the discipline but as we have seen Greens go further in criticising foundational assumptions. The previous sections provide a brief sketch of the main principles of green economics, yet they do little to explain how green economics would be implemented. Green economics does not particularly focus on traditional notions of left and right or on unravelling capitalism, which eco-socialists would regard as essential. The green polemic is instructive but, at present, incomplete. Green economics provides a penetrating critique of conventional varieties of the discourse, attacking the very quantitification that economists value together with a host of foundational assumptions from utility maximisation through to the desirability of growth and international trade. Green economics is normative in its slant. However, although it provides a critique, which is devastating, eco-sociolists would seek more in the way of analysis. Green economists need to examine why the global economy works in the way it does to ‘under labour’ attempts to move towards a more ecologically sustainable, democratic, peaceful and just economy. A number of theorists have attempted to conceptualise the workings of a global economy. Marxists have long sought to understand the workings of the economy as it moves and changes, often seeing economic crises as functional to a system, which is always in flux. While Marxist approaches are varied in the extreme, perhaps the most sophisticated come from the Japanese Uno school, which seeks to explain how a nested set of systems interact and change. Green economist Lipietz (1987), in a previous life stage, developed the insights of the Regulation School to seek to understand how particular forms of economic organisation articulated to precise state forms. Thus, the post-Second World economic order was based on Fordist mass production, tentative cooperation between workers and capital along with an interventionist Keynesian welfare system.

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Contemporary theorists argue that the global economy is both more globalised than in previous eras and increasingly dependent on symbolic rather than physical production. Huge and untidy debates as to the extent of such a post-Fordist global economy rage across academia, with critics such as Hirst and Thompson (1999) arguing that globalisation, has been exaggerated. If green economists have generally been guilty of failure to engage with such important debates, alternative forms of political economy, while criticising and politicising conventional economic analysis in their study of global economics, have ignored the ecological dimension. Not only is it vital to understand where the global economy is going but it is also essential that the precise ecological implications are mapped. A rare approach that links economic change to ecological concern is that of O’Connor (1995) who has developed the concept of the ‘second contradiction’ of capitalism. O’Connor sees the traditional Marxist explanation of why capitalism is crisis prone as being captured by the term ‘first contradiction’. There is, of course, much debate as to why Marx argued that capitalism was likely to be troubled by depression. O’Connor argues that capitalist economic growth, by creating environmental damage, leads to increased costs that make it more difficult for capitalism to survive. The damage done to insurance companies, facing larger pay outs to clients because of storms and floods created by climate change, is one possible example of such a contradiction. The massive costs of decommissioning nuclear power are another example. However, while Marxism remains us, that crisis can at least in the medium term be functional to capitalism by clearing out inefficient companies. The second contradiction thesis should not be seen as leading to mechanical collapse. Ecological costs may lead to problems for the economy but cleaning them may lead to another source of accumulation. Neither are assumptions of paper free, post-manufacturing economy likely to lead to post-modern ecological salvation. The move to a high technology information economy has also been seen a way of increasing economic value without increasing the output of pollution. The information-based economy may seem virtual, but as Klein (2001) exhaustively demonstrates, branded goods still have to be produced, and computers made by exploited workers. Computer manufacture and disposal are sources of pollution and resource use. Some services have little physical impact, but the huge global growth in tourism is accelerating air travel, which has become the fastest growing source of greenhouse gases. The danger with green economic approaches is that in cataloguing such ecological problems of growth, even in a post-industrial post-Fordist economy, contemporary capitalism is simply attacked. Greens need to analyse with care the trajectory of contemporary capitalism. Such an approach must build on the insights of other theorists of political economy without losing an ecological dimension. A green economics research agenda needs to develop an understanding of where contemporary capitalism is going together with its contradictions and tendencies. Such an approach must link economic issues with social and political understanding to provide models that are saturated and holistic.

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3.1 Regulation

Regulation is another broad and vitally important area, which has been under research by green economists. In a rough and ready way, the central question that defines economics is one of regulation. Economics, according to Hayek (1996), far from depending on perfect information, is necessary because flows of information in a modern society are so uncertain and complex. The mediation between economic agents has been provided apparently by either the state or the market to overcome such information problems and to provide an incentive for the production of vital goods and services. Regulation, in an ecologically sustainable and socially just society, will not only have to deal with the traditional economic issue of what to produce, for whom to produce, etc., but will also have to deal with ways of regulating the interaction between human beings and the rest of nature. Marx, according to Foster (2000), spent some time theorising the ‘metabolism’ governing the interaction between humanity and nature. Economists generally assume that there are two broad categories of regulation, the state and the market. The state provides anti-pollution and other laws to prevent environmental damage. By extending such regulation, environmental threats can be removed. Some greens have attacked such a statist approach to regulation as innately problematic, arguing that increased state power can be a source of environmental damage. This approach is developed most fully by Carter (1999). Economists have argued that state regulation is inflexible, stifles innovation and is not sensitive enough to solve practical environmental problems without a huge cost in lost production. The environmental economics paradigm is based on the need to adapt market mechanisms to solve environmental problems in a more efficient way. The state may introduce taxes on CO2 production, or bring in congestion charges or subsidies, environmental friendly farming methods or better public transport. However, green economists argue that this approach to regulation fails to understand that the very market principle drives the accumulation, which is so ecologically damaging. While market based instruments such as pollution charges are advance, they simply moderate environmental problems rather than deal with their cause. The problem for green economists seeking to model a green economy is that despite their radical intentions, they tend to rely on either market or state based forms of regulation. Both approaches have undesirable side effects and tend to ignore the expansion inherent in market based economics or state development that is so ecologically destructive. Thus, green economists need to think rigorously about alternative forms of regulation if they were to even tentatively create models of a green economy. Recently, mainstream economists have been forced to admit that there are alternative forms of regulation to those of the state and the market. The introduction of ‘open source software’, which is produced free, is one example of such form of social sharing. Market liberals embrace open sources because it challenges monopolies. Marxists should embrace it as a form of socialism that provides for need not greed. Green economists, although they do not seem to have noticed it, should recognise it as a potential means of bypassing wasteful accumulation while increasing prosperity. It is easy to see the problem of regulation as being about how individuals are discouraged from damaging the environment through greed and thoughtlessness, it is important to look at why individuals are forced into participating in an ecological destructive economy instead. Individuals have to work to

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survive economically, without increased consumption based on more wasteful production, or the economy would cease to function. Social sharing would allow more needs to be met without such accumulation and would thus reduce ecological pressures. The open source principle can be used to meet many social needs. Kovel (2002) has argued that an ecological economy would be based on the principle of ‘usfruct’, which involves using goods but not owning them. Marx is on source of such a non-market, non-state mode of ecological regulation, noting that we should take what we want but nurture what we use for the benefit of the next generation: “From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuries, and like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.” (Marx quoted in Kovel, 2002, p.238) Research into open source could be used to extend this third form of regulation that rejects the constraints on liberty of state action and the innate wastefulness and injustice of the market. An alternative where resources remain scarce and ecologically fragile is the concept of a commons regime. Rather more research has been carried out in this area, which provides an account of how communities negotiate shared access to common land or other ecological fragile resources to prevent unsustainable use. Commons regimes are very common yet, like social sharing, are not acknowledged by conventional economists (Ostrom, 1991). Open source and commons regimes need further investigation if they are to provide a model for maintaining human prosperity without ever increasing economic growth. The question of how to live better on less may prove not to be about sacrifice but instead sufficiency. Certainly, green economics must concern itself with ‘being there’, examining the alternative microeconomics of a post-capitalist society.

3.2 Transition

Such questions of where we are (global political economy) and of where we wish to be (regulation) help prepare for a third area of study that of ‘getting there’. Theorising transition is almost impossibly difficult because it demands consideration of not just economics but that of political sociology and culture. These areas must be examined in detail if a world that is ecologically sustainable and just is to be achieved. The danger is that ameliorative action, including ecotaxes, will simply conserve a sustainable society rather than move us towards a different world. If continuous economic growth is essential to the survival of contemporary capitalism, capitalism will ultimately have to be replaced by a different economy with, as we have noted, a different dominant mode of regulation. In the absence of a strong debate over transition, Green Parties for all the practical good they have done, have in government sought to manage the present economy rather than look for alternatives. Economic transition is a huge area but one fruitful way of modelling policy measures may be via cybernetic principles of negative and positive feedback. Negative feedback tends to conserve a system by compensating for change. Congestion charges, for example, reduce traffic problems and make it easier to maintain a car-based economy.

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While congestion charges are clearly environmentally beneficial, more radical measures such as income tax cuts for those who reject car ownership may lead to a chain of changes that lead to a radically different pattern of traffic use. Another example is agriculture. At present, demands for organic food are met in Britain largely by conventional supermarkets that fly produce in from farms, which are thousands of miles away. Corporations who can exploit economies of scale squeeze organic small holders in the UK out. Policies that create a localised economy, which have been developed by the late Woodin and Green MEP, Lucas (2004) are far reaching and radical. Transition needs to be theorised in terms of measures that shift the economy to one where non-state and non-market means of regulation are dominant. Questions of transition must also model specific policy areas such as agriculture and transport. Finally, cultural and sociological questions of how to catalyse and democratise green choices are of vital importance.

4 Conclusion

Green economics must renew its normative critique of both the principles and resulting consequences of conventional economics. We live in a world dominated and increasingly being destroyed by economic rationality, thus green economics provides a powerful critique of what drives ecological destruction and fuels injustice. Continued examination of the history of green economic ideas can help maintain such a necessary and deep-rooted critique. However, green economics, in the view of this author, needs to move beyond criticism. While Hegel reminds us that it is impossible to over leap our age, the very ecological problems generated by capitalism demand that a jump be made. To cross the abyss between the present unsustainable world order and a new green world demands detailed consideration of where we are at present (global political economy) and where we wish to be (regulation). Finally, a more detailed examination of questions of transition is vital if green economics was to mature as a discipline and provide a path to the future.

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Notes 1 www.iran-e-sabz.org/program/program 2 Clare McCarty July 2003, Australian Green Party election candidate, www.sa.greens.org.au/ speeches/cm_030712.