Resources: Interviews
Dr. Robert Costanza, Director, Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont
Mainstream economic analysis developed during an era when humans were relatively oblivious to their embeddedness within ecosystems. Ecological economics, on the other hand, is an effort to ground economics in social and ecological realities. VSJF recently met with Dr. Robert Costanza, a leading proponent of ecological economics at his home in a hybrid car lined cohousing community to discuss the implications of “The Death of Environmentalism.” “What has to die,” Costanza says, “is the idea of narrow, disciplinary or other narrow interest groups fighting it out with each other. That’s what’s been going on…We’ve got to recognize that we’re all in the same boat and somehow we have to establish common goals if we ever hope to solve these problems.” The "Beyond Environmentalism" seminar series currently unfolding at UVM is one attempt to establish these common goals.
VSJF: Why do you think the “Death of Environmentalism” hit such a nerve?
Dr. Robert Costanza: I think because the confrontational approach, which is the conventional approach to solving these sort of complex problems is just not working. The conventional environmental movement has really been one of a delaying tactic: finding problems and trying to stop those problems from happening. And they have taken a very legalistic, confrontational approach to that, which, for some of those problems, was the right thing to do. But, after a while, once those problems get solved, it doesn’t really motivate people to go beyond that, to create something really sustainable.
So I think that’s the nerve that’s been hit. It’s sort of run into a dead-end, that approach. We need to get beyond that conventional confrontational approach into one that actually has a chance of solving the problems in the long-term. To do that we sort of have to take a step back and rethink, re-conceptualize the whole problem. It’s not us versus them. It’s not the environment versus the economy. And that’s what we’re trying to do at the Gund Institute and with ecological economics in general. I think a lot of other initiatives are taking up that banner as well: how to reconceive the whole relationship between humans and the rest of nature so, it’s not us versus them. We’re a part of the system and if we hope to survive and prosper in that system we have to have a better idea, a more accurate picture of how we actually relate to the rest of nature.
So part of it is also coming on the heels of scientific advances in ecology, in climate science, in earth systems science, and also in the social sciences, about how people actually do behave and what the range of human behaviors are and what actually makes people happy. There’s been a lot of research in psychology lately on the determinants of life satisfaction, showing that more income, more consumption, you know, beyond a certain fairly low level doesn’t actually make people happier. And yet our policy goals, from the economic side, are more, more, more! with the assumption that the more people consume the better off they are. In fact, the research is showing that is not the case. Beyond a certain point consuming more takes time away from things that actually make people happier. We try to integrate across the whole range of natural and social sciences and see what creates a high quality of life. So if you reestablish our goal is a high quality of life for everyone that’s sustainable, then that brings in issues of social equity and distribution, it brings in issues in relation to the ecological life support system because it has to be sustainable. And it brings in issues of how much we spend on built capital and consumption and how we balance that with the other inputs.
VSJF: What is ecological economics?
RC: It’s an attempt to integrate across all the scientific disciplines and all the stakeholders. It’s an attempt to actually solve problems and re-establish the core goals of society and then to do what we need to do to achieve those goals. And I think the next level down is we need to address the four types of capital, as well as our quality of life and its sustainability. It’s not enough just to be sustainable. We don’t want something bad to be sustained.
VSJF: In many respects, ecological economics seems to be about values and assigning the proper valuation to things that have historically not been measured.
RC: I think that’s a big part of it too. If you take these four capitals seriously and you acknowledge that they all contribute to human welfare, well, then the next question is: how much? Because it’s always going to be a balancing act. And what we’ve been doing is just pursuing one of those to the exclusion of all the others. And that’s what has gotten us into trouble. So how do you bring those things onto the table in the most appropriate way? One way, not the only way, is to say, well, all of these things have some value, but not all of that contribution comes through the market. So it’s not going to show up in GNP. How do you state that contribution in terms that people can understand? You can do it in dollar terms, so we’ve done the conversion. We’ve tried to convert those unmarketed inputs into dollar terms just to get some relative magnitudes. Or you state it in other units, like the Ecological Footprint idea, or in energy units. The key point is that there are trade-offs and all four types of capital are important. And the relative contributions of each are huge. I think the traditional economic view was that “yeah, there are externalities, but those are a couple of percentage points on the margin and they’re not really important. The market includes everything that is important.” Well, our findings show that this is not teh case. These externalities, even conservatively estimated, are probably much bigger than what is captured in the market. So if we only look at what’s in the market we’re way off in terms of human welfare.
VSJF: Was your education in mainstream economics?
RC: I started in engineering and then got a master’s degree in architecture. And then I got a PhD in systems ecology and I took “Economics as a Foreign Language.” My first job was at LSU working with Herman Daly, who is an unconventional economist. It’s always been more of an interdisciplinary idea than just economics. And I think that gets back to the “Death of Environmentalism.” What has to die is the idea of narrow, disciplinary or other narrow interest groups fighting it out with each other. That’s what’s been going on. The environmentalists versus the economic community. Or anybody versus anybody for that matter. We’ve got to recognize that we’re all in the same boat and somehow we have to establish common goals if we ever hope to solve these problems.
VSJF: It seems that ecological economics is a critique of conventional economics and it’s a critique of our economy.
RC: It’s a critique of conventional ecology too.
VSJF: Right. So you’re tackling some hefty opponents. Were there any particular difficulties in establishing this field?
RC: Yeah, the usual things you might expect. Particularly economists, not so much the natural scientists. Because it is so professionalized, people in economics have a lot invested in their training and they basically market that training and that particular model of how the world works. Any challenge to that is a direct challenge to their livelihood. So they are much more resistant to making any kind of changes in the model. If the model doesn’t fit reality they are much more likely to try to change reality rather than changing the model. Our approach is much more the other way. If the model doesn’t fit reality, let’s change the model and try to come up with one that does fit, because that’s going to be much more useful in the long-term.
VSJF: It seems like the environmental social sciences and natural sciences have established themselves in academia. But comparing, for example, GNP and the Genuine Progress Indicator, I don’t think the idea has been established. Can you talk about confronting the reality of changing the way the economy is measured?
RC: It’s interesting, any economist that knows anything about GNP will admit that it is not a good measure of welfare and we shouldn’t be using it as a national welfare index. There’s no economist that is going to defend that position and say “No, no, it is a good measure of welfare.” They’re going to say “It’s a measure of income. And it only measures marketed income.” It’s a very strange interaction because there really is no disagreement there about the fact that it’s not a good welfare measure. I guess the disagreement is, well, what is a good welfare measure? The people with GPI have come up with an alternative. It certainly has problems too, but it’s arguably a much better approximation to welfare than GNP. I think there’s a lot of interest now in alternative welfare measures from all sides of this, including the economists. Bhutan has decided to use Gross National Happiness as their welfare measure rather than GNP.
It’s really fulfilling human needs with as little consumption as possible that is what we should be doing. Let’s make people as happy as we possibly can with as little consumption as we can. And that would lead to completely different policies than we have now.
VSJF: Who is asking for these different kinds of measurement?
RC: I think a lot of it as at the community level, in the U.S. anyway. Out of all of the estimates of GPI that have been done, none of them have officially been done by countries. It’s always been by NGOs or other groups. And these transitions take time. But I think that it is picking up steam and there are even some mainstream economists that are making the same arguments. There’s a book called Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. The author, an economist, says we should not be pursuing GNP, we should be pursuing happiness as a national policy goal.
So this gets us back to what to do and the Beyond Environmentalism idea. What do we really need to do? I think these are all parts of the message, but it’s also our contention in the seminar series that the missing element is to have a clear, positive vision of what this kind of world would look like. The conventional vision is “Oh well, everybody consumes more and we go on our merry way.” It’s clear now that that’s probably not possible and probably not desirable either. It’s not going to make people happier and it’s not sustainable. So what is? It’s one thing to tell people about all the capitals but that’s very abstract. I think what we need is a much more communicable vision. One that’s much easier to understand. And it could be in the form of a narrative: what does this world look like? How would people live? What would they do and why would they be happier? Why would this be a better place then where we are now or where we seem to be headed?
You can take this community [Costanza's cohousing community] as an example. People actually talk to each other. They actually have good relationships. So there’s a lot of social capital in this community that doesn’t occur in the average tract home development where people don’t even know who their neighbor is, much less talk to them. So we can point to examples. We can say “Look here.”
VSJF: James Kunstler’s book, The Long Emergency, seems to have resonated with a lot of people, especially here in Vermont. It’s a very negative vision of the future and there’s a kind of inevitability to the challenges of climate change and peak oil. How do you counter that?
RC: Well, I think the counter to that is yes, if we don’t do anything that’s what’s going to happen. That’s the Mad Max vision. If we continue with our current set of policies and don’t change anything and the assumptions underlying the Star Trek vision don’t turn out to be true, then that’s where we’re going to end up, with a certain inevitability. But we do have choice. We can, if we choose to, change our policies and increase the likelihood that we end up in Ecotopia or something like that, in a positive, sustainable, and desirable future.
VSJF: I think that is the tension. On the one hand you have this dark vision of the future and you have Amory Lovins and the techno-optimists on the other side…
RC: Saying don’t worry. We’ll figure it out and we can continue on our merry way. People will just drive Prius’s, rather than something else. The Amory Lovins approach is that we don’t have to change our lifestyles. All we have to do is change the technology. And I don’t think that’s true either. We have to change our whole vision of who we are and what we’re doing. And we do have to change our lifestyles, but that won’t be a sacrifice. The environmental movement presents that we have to change our lifestyles and it’s going to be a big sacrifice. That’s not the case. It will be an improvement in the quality of life.
VSJF: What is the Gund Institute? How/why was it created?
RC: It’s located in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources but we try to build bridges across all the different schools and departments on campus. We have people appointed as Fellows in the Institute and they have faculty appointments across campus. We pursue integrative, transdisciplinary research. We also do problem-based courses that pick a problem, either locally or nationally, and then assemble a team of faculty, students, and stakeholders to address that problem. We try to eliminate the distinction between teaching and research. The research becomes a form of teaching and vice versa. Everyone’s learning at the same time. And that, I think, is really the only way to operationalize this interdisciplinary approach…We’re trying to develop more team oriented learning, teaching and research. We allow our PhD students, for example, to work on group projects rather than the conventional approach. You really need bigger teams, you need to teach people how to work in those teams…Part of it is how do you encourage group collaboration, transcending disciplinary boundaries but also utilize the tools and knowledge that are out there? But the problem comes first and then the tools.
VSJF: A challenge that the Governor and others have been talking about lately is brain-drain. Do you have any sense of Gund students staying in Vermont and tackling Vermont problems?
RC: I do. And also attracting students from outside Vermont because we have a unique perspective and a unique training experience. We have something to offer that wasn’t there before. And I think that’s also spreading through the rest of the University. President Fogel is certainly behind the problem-based service learning approach.
VSJF: Is anyone in Vermont preparing for climate change? Is anyone in Vermont preparing for peak oil?
RC: I would say not enough. I’m not sure they really are preparing for these things yet. Although the Governor did sign the climate convention thing. One paper we could link is one that one of my PhD students and I wrote for Nature. If you add up all the states and cities in the U.S. that are doing something like Kyoto, that it’s about half the U.S. economy. It’s not that the United States isn’t doing anything, it’s just not doing anything at the federal level. States like Vermont could be real models for other states and the whole country if we ever get a federal administration that gets it.
VSJF: You and your colleagues report that the estimated GPI for Vermont and Burlington had gone up from 1950 to 2000. What do you attribute that to?
RC: I think Vermont is different from other parts of the country. I think it’s the appreciation of the Vermont’s natural capital. You know, this idea that nature is not just a luxury good and it’s not just a stockpile of raw materials. I think it’s the real, ingrained appreciation in the culture of Vermont that doesn’t occur, necessarily, all over the country. It does occur in places like the Pacific Northwest and the northern tier states. And the social capital aspects in Vermont. I think those are very different and they’ve been shown to contribute a lot to people’s quality of life.
VSJF: Given that, there also a big disconnect between attitudes and behaviors or values and behaviors. Have you experienced that in Vermont?
RC: Yes, of course. There are lots of institutional barriers to doing the things that everyone seems to want to do. And so that requires a little more digging and a little more pressure in the right places, from the top or the bottom or both. Which I think is another reason for pursuing this envisioning kind of work because if you can clearly say “Here are the goals. Here’s where we’d like to be. And here’s where we are. Then how do we narrow that gap between where we are and where we’d like to be?” It’s hard to know how big that gap is unless you clearly articulate where you want to be. It’s helpful in motivating people to solve those institutional problems and disincentives. Just an example, pursuing interdisciplinary work at the University, the disincentives for that are still around…we have to change the reward structure. And I think we’re trying to do that but it does take time.
VSJF: What do you hope to achieve with the Beyond Environmentalism seminar?
RC: It’s open to the public. We’re having good attendance. We’re videotaping all of the talks and putting them up on the web. So people who didn’t attend can take advantage of it. We probably will publish something out of it. I’m working on a book along those lines. We’re putting together online courses and so this can feed into that as well. We can use lectures as part of those online courses.
VSJF: In the description of the seminar it says that until we create and widely share a vision of the future, we have no hope of achieving it. So there’s nine or ten people talking and I’m wondering about the unity of the vision?
RC: (Laughs) And how is that a shared vision? Yeah, well, it’s not the best way to do it. I’m not sure the best way to do it. It requires some ongoing dialogue and discussion. We had a workshop a couple of years ago at Oberlin College, Envisioning a Sustainable and Desirable America, where we had 40 people from mixed backgrounds and we met together for a week with this goal. What is the shared vision? I think that was a successful exercise. It would be scaling that up and doing that with as large a community as possible. We’re actively pursuing funding to do that kind of process. To me that is what democracy should really be all about: having that dialogue and getting people to govern ourselves. A very important part of that is coming up with shared goals. And we spend almost no time in our current system doing that. So just voting is not democracy. This other element is a much more critical component of it. How we operationalize and achieve those goals is the technical part of it.
VSJF: What role should academics play in communicating that vision? What is the connection between the academic world, politics, and the business community here in Vermont?
RC: Well, I think it’s better here then it is in a lot of places. But there’s still a lot of room for improvement. That’s one of the things we want to do over time is improve that connection. Re-engage the university with society and make it a real driving force for making a better life. I think the university, over time, has kind of disengaged from that. All of these problem-based service learning courses are one way to get students and faculty on the ground.
VSJF: Thinking about going Beyond Environmentalism, you’ve spoken a lot about breaking dichotomies…
RC: There’s a good book by Deborah Tannen called The Argument Culture and her thesis is we’ve gone way too far down this road of dichotomizing everything, making everything a debate. Right or wrong. Yes or no. Black or white. For some questions that’s appropriate but for most complex issues that really gets in the way, in a big way. But, the law, the media, academia, they’re sort of stuck in this argument culture and unless we can get out of it we’re never really going to solve these problems. We’re just going to perpetrate them. That I think is on one of key goals: How do you get past the argument culture? To do that you have to discuss things in different ways. We have to cast them as shared goals that we have and how do we achieve the shared goals?
VSJF: Following something like wind power in Vermont, it’s about values. How would you address that issue differently?
RC: Well part of it is doing research to see what the projections are with wind power. Although we haven’t gotten the funding that we’d like to, we have looked at the effects of wind turbines on property values. The evidence is that there is very little effect. In fact, there might be a positive effect. The impacts of wind power on tourism, for example, seems to be a positive stimulus because Vermont has a certain image in the minds of the tourists that come here, and part of that image is protection of the environment. The fact that that there’s a wind turbine on the top of a ridge, in a lot of tourists minds, seems like a positive thing rather than a negative thing. So, stuff like that. But I would really like to have the discussion a little more broadly conceived, about the future. We need to get beyond the narrow, interest group, locked in positions. We need to talk about what are the potential futures? And what are the trade-offs? What would it look like under different scenarios? And put that back in front of the public so they have something better to choose from then wind or not-wind.
VSJF: A standard criticism of academics is that they don’t speak English. So how do you communicate to the general public?
RC: (Laughs) Well, we try to write some stuff in English. We have attempted to make that link- to bring stakeholders into the process. I think that’s much more effective in the end, rather than simply doing the stuff and then trying to communicate it. We’ve tried to make stakeholders part of the research in the first place. Then they’re going to understand it much more deeply and it’s not so much of an issue of what words you use. I think sometimes we put too much emphasis on that: if we just said it right they’d get it. Well, that may not be the case. They have to participate in it to get it. That’s one of our strategies.
VSJF: Thinking ahead, do you feel confident about making these kinds of values part of the mainstream?
RC: I certainly hope so. That’s our goal. It has to be mainstream if we want to avoid the Mad Max kind of future. There is a lot of activity under the surface. There are a lot of people thinking about this. And there are potential triggers all the time, like the peak oil thing might be a trigger that would cause everyone to all of the sudden stop thinking about things in the old way and start thinking about things in the new way. Our goal is simply to keep adding more to the bucket and be ready for when it flips. But it’s extremely hard or impossible to predict when exactly that is going to occur or what the trigger is going to be.
Photo credit: Wayne Fawbush
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