Businesses are now entering the Green Economy...

Levasana Douglas Dept. of Management, Eastern University.

Green economics is the economics of the real world-the world of work, human needs, the Earth’s materials, and how they mesh together most harmoniously.

It is primarily about “use value”, not “exchange value” or money. It is about quality, not quantity, for the sake of it. It is about regeneration of individuals, communities, and ecosystems not about accumulation of either money or material.

The industrial or capitalist definition of wealth has always been about the accumulation of money and matter. Any use values generated (i.e. social needs met) have been secondary a side-effect, by-product, spin-off, or trickle-down to the primary goal of monetary accumulation.

For two centuries, the quest to accumulate money or capital drove a powerful industrialization process that actually did spin off many human benefits, however unfairly distributed. But blind material and monetary growth has reached a threshold where it is generating more destruction than real wealth.

A post-industrial world requires an economics of quality, where both money and matter are returned to a status of means to an end. Green economics means a direct focus on meeting human and environmental needs.

Tinkering with money, interest rates, or even state regulation is insufficient in creating sensible economies. One can scarcely imagine a more inefficient, irrational and wasteful way to organize any sector of the economy than what we actually have right now.

Both the form and the content of sustainable agriculture, of green manufacturing of soft energy, etc., are diametrically opposed to their current industrial counterparts, which are intrinsically wasteful.

There is no justifiable rationale to be producing vast quantities of toxic materials, or generating more deskilled than skilled labour, or displacing labour rather than resources from production, or extending giant wasteful loops of production and consumption through globalization.

These are economic inefficiencies and economic irrationalities that can only be righted by starting from scratch to look at the most elegant and efficient ways of doing everything. As green economist Paul Hawken writes, our social and environmental crises are not problems of management, but of design. We need a system overhaul.

Green economics is not just about the environment. Certainly we must move to harmonize with natural systems, to make our economies flow benignly like sailboats in the wind of ecosystem processes. But doing this requires great human creativity, tremendous knowledge, and the widespread participation of everyone.

Human beings and human workers can no longer serve as cogs in the machine of accumulation, be it capitalistic or socialistic. Ecological development requires an unleashing of human development and an extension of democracy. Social and ecological transformation goes hand in hand.

Green economics and green politics both emphasize the creation of positive alternatives in all areas of life and every sector of the economy.

Green economics does not prioritize support for either the “public” or the “private” sector. It argues that both sectors must be transformed so that markets express social and ecological values, and the state becomes merged with grass roots networks of community innovation.

For this to happen, new economic processes must be designed and new rules of the game written, so that incentives for ecological conduct are built into everyday economic life.

The state can then function less as a policeman and more as a coordinator.

This is a very different kind of “self-regulation” than current profit- and power-driven market forces.

The basis for self-regulation in a green economy would be community and intelligent design, which provides incentives for the right things.

Ten principles of a Green Economy:

*The Primacy of Use Value, Intrinsic Value, and Quality:

This is the fundamental principle of the green economy as a service economy, focused on end-use, or human and environmental needs. Matter is a means to the end of satisfying real need, and can be radically conserved.

Money similarly must be returned to a status as a means to facilitate regenerative exchanges, rather than an end in itself. When this is done in even a significant portion of the economy, it can undercut the totalitarian power of money in the entire economy.

*Following Natural Flows:

The economy moves like a proverbial sailboat in the wind of natural processes by flowing not only with solar, renewable, and “negawatt” energy, but also with natural hydrological cycles, with regional vegetation and food webs, and with local materials.

As society becomes more ecological, political and economic boundaries tend to coincide with ecosystem boundaries. That is, it becomes bioregional.

*Waste Equals Food:

In nature there is no waste, as every process output is an input for some other process.

This principle implies not only a high degree of organizational complementarities, but also that outputs and by-products are nutritious and non-toxic enough to be food for something.

*Elegance and Multifunctionality:

Complex food webs are implied by the previous principle integrated relationships which are antithetical to industrial society’s segmentation and fragmentation.

What Roberts and Brandum (1995) call “economics with peripheral vision,” this elegance features “problem-solving strategies that develop multiple wins and positive side-effects from any one set of actions.”

*Appropriate Scale/Linked Scale:

This does not simply mean “small is beautiful,” but that every regenerative activity has its most appropriate scale of operation. Even the smallest activities have larger impacts, however, and truly ecological activity “integrates design across multiple scales,” reflecting influence of larger on smaller and smaller on larger.

To be continued