Geography 2412 Lecture Notes
Sept. 23
Last Wednesday we ended class while discussing “Ecological Economics”. Let’s wrap this up with a little more detail. Ecological economics seeks to address some of the environmental gaps in traditional economic thinking and policy. The overarching problem that it attacks is that human and ecological values are not priced by the market and thus not explicitly incorporated into our economic system. But we know that humans do value many non-market things that we could call ecological or social “goods and services.” An ecological good not valued by the market might be a species that is not used in production of consumer items but is appreciated by people (e.g., rare birds for watching); or other benefits like open space, wilderness, views, or natural beauty. An ecological service could be how wetlands provide clean water, act as flood buffers, and even cleanse polluted water, and they do it without us having to build water treatment plants.
Other elements dealt with by ecological economics are:
Resources like the atmosphere, oceans, rivers, etc. are not owned by a private entity and their use is not priced by typical markets. As such they tend to be used by the general population but not protected by, say, trespass or nuisance laws. We tend to overuse common resources as opposed to privately held resources.
Externalities:
Many economic activities create social and ecological benefits and dis-benefits not accounted for by market prices. We focus here on the dis-benefits. The production of a good may create a waste stream that is simply dumped onto the land next to factory. This cheap or even free disposal means that the producer didn’t have to incorporate the cost of disposal into the production price (it is external to the market). BUT, the waste might pollute the soil, air, and water, and thus it really does end up costing someone something, maybe the local municipal water supply that now has to spend more money to find clean ground water. Externality problems are often associated with Commons, as when the atmosphere is used as a free dump. The problem is that the market does not incorporate or “know” all of the costs and values affected by production and consumption: Example: The market seems to demand cheap beef (any rancher who can produce cheaper beef will be rewarded with greater market share). And ranchers find that they can reduce their costs of production if they kill off predators. But, were consumers really saying they wanted predators killed by their apparent demand for cheap beef? If not, they need to find some other way of signaling their multiple desires.
Inter-generational
Problems
Markets only include current consumers, they can’t put a value on leaving a resource for future generations. Yet we know that people do think about future generations, about their children and children’s children (and often plan for those generations in their own financial planning, as when parents reduce their consumption today to save money so that their off-spring can attend university years form now). There’s no market mechanism for allocating resource across generations. But ecological economists argue that we may be making a mistake by depleting resources or giving future generations a world missing some species. The neo-classical response tot his is simply that it is inefficient to save resources for future generations because we cannot know what their demand and desires will be. It can also be argued that foregoing production and consumption today actually reduces the wealth that we can generate to pass on to future generations).
All of these issues will come up as we begin to talk in more detail about actual natural resources.
Sociological Thought (pp. 62-69)
In this section we will only discuss the three types of sociological theories described at the very bototk of p. 65 and thru 69, and we’ll simplify Harper’s presentaiton quite a bit.
There are three main sociological concepts that help us understand how society interacts with environment:
a. as supply depot (nature as resource)
b. as waste repository
c. as living space
Some human uses of environment may be dysfuntional, as when using nature as a waste depot makes part of it unlivable.
2. Conflict theories: these ideas see the interaction of nature and society (and within society) as a series of conflicts for power and wealth. Conflict creates social stratification in which some classes wit power and wealth dominate and others and limiting their access to power and wealth (including their access to natural resources). We’ll return to this when we talk about the environmental movement, but the text here suggests one way that conflict theories predict ecological degradation: the “treadmill of production” that results as corporations fight for market share, which they must do by increasing production and decreasing costs, both of which can and often do result in environmental degradation. The implication is that if corporations could cooperate rather than compete they could provide consumer goods for less impacts to the environment..
3. Social constructivist theories: This is a subtle but important social perspective on nature. The idea is that people and cultures create and re-create the meaning of the environment for various social and political reasons. This was mentioned when we introduced the “cognized environment.” There is a physical world out there, but its meaning is created by society, and it is interpreted in various ways. Some see nature as “in balance” others see it as good or bad. Some people might see a forest as a tree-farm while others see it as a habitat. In the battle over wildfire some groups want fire defined as a destructive force and others want to define it a renewing force in forest ecosystems. A simple hypothesis here (not offered in the book), is that people or societies will tend to construct their idea of nature in a way that maintains the dominant social paradigm. This will come up often as we discuss debates over environmental problems.