For environmental economists, these are boom times. Ever since the Brundtland Report, everybody who is anybody seems to be learning their language. Industry and international agencies are announcing that trees need economic growth to survive and vice versa. Think tanks and consultants are busily pricing ecosystems" and doing cost-benefit analyses. Publishers' lists are bulging with titles like The Green Economy and Valuing The Environment. Even some environmentalists, stung by the accusation that they favour trees over jobs, have offered to sit down with the bad guys who run the world and show them how to rehabilitate themselves by redirecting the global economy onto a sustainable path.

Probably none of this should come as a surprise. Those who see modern economies as the social reality and source of livelihood worldwide are bound to assume that if there is a practicable solution to environmental problems, it must lie largely in economics. For them, the only question is, "What sort of economics is necessary?"

The answer increasingly heard among progressive elites in the North is "a pretty radically revised one". The modern economy's tendency to eat away the natural and cultural surroundings which have given it life is finally coming home even to the world's privileged. By prodding the South into economic expansion, the North has stimulated competition for the resources and waste sinks it needs to maintain its own extravagant lifestyles. Modern agriculture is defeating itself by destroying the traditional agriculture it relies on for genetic material. In ripping apart peasant livelihoods to free up labour and resources, economic development has threatened its own foundations by creating a sea of unrest and waste and rendering local care and attention to nature impossible. In the industrialized world, too, as Fred Hirsch points out, the market economy's initial "successes" increasingly appear to be the result of its having stood "on the shoulders of a premarket social ethos" which it is steadily disintegrating.'

The Economy as Parasite

Societies, of course, have evolved many ways of mitigating the economy's corrosive effects. Population growth and the developmentof an investing and regulating state are only two examples. All too often, however, the general result has been a quickened rhythm of destruction. Like a parasite, the modern economy has hollowed out so much of the innards of its debilitated social host that it is threatening its own future.

Enter environmental economics. Its aim, according to one advocate, is to regulate the economic parasite's metabolism by finding

". . . the best estimate we can make of the costs of . . . acid rain, global warming, loss of species orwhatever is associated with economic activity. Once we have estimated these costs, we can bring them back into the economy in the form of environmental taxes . . . that is how I think we can get the world onto an environmentally sustainable path."

If calculating the "costs" of such large-scale phenomena turns out to be too difficult, an alternative is simply to fix in advance the

" . . . resource flows that are within the renewable biospheric capacities of regeneration and waste absorption . . . Imposing sustainable biophysical limits as a boundary on the market economy will lead to changes in market prices that reflect these newly imposed limits . . . These new prices would have 'internalized' the value of sustainability."

Alternatively, "natural capital" can be regulated so that it does not decline through time, while a part of it is set aside as critical, or barred from tradeoffs entirely.

Summarizing Wisdom

At its most ambitious, environmental economics is thus supposed to do for national or global modern societies what culture, conceived more broadly, does for many more traditional local ones: summarize for them the wisdom they need to get through the generations. Instead of the variety of cultural norms and taboos of traditional societies, environmental economics suggests "environmentally correct" market prices. Rather than compelling people to ask permission of local woods and streams for subsistence, it allows the exchange economy free rein until it comes up against its national or global "biophysical limits" or starts dipping too deeply into "natural capital". In place of a conception of livelihood as bound up with social and ritual acts, it proposes instrumental reasoning based on the threat of global holocaust; instead of local-level mutual scrutiny and reciprocity, high-level economic management.

The vital question for this enterprise is: How are these new norms and prices to be determined? Lester R. Brown of the Worldwatch Institute gives the impression that it is no less an authority than Nature Herself who will be contributing such information:

The world's agenda [under the organizing principle of environmental sustainabilityl will be more ecological than ideological, dominated less by relationships among nations and more by the relationship between nations and nature.

Since it is presumably not Nature Herself who will be attending G-7 economic summits and whispering in the ears of presidents, however, it is hard to fight down the suspicion that this mystical union will in the end be mediated by the usual fallible individuals in three-piece suits. The limits supposedly set by "nature" to a national or global economy are thus unlikely to turn out to have any more intrinsic weight than, say, the limits set by a peasant leader in a small village in Asia on woodcutting in a local watershed forest.

Indeed the truth is that they will have a good deal less. Whereas traditional village elders have a pretty good idea of what will offend the spirits in their local areas, no one has much of a notion of what "biophysical limits" to an evolving national or global economy might consist of, or what terrifying "tradeoffs" at the local level the pretence of setting such limits could legitimate. ("Optimizing" the scale of species loss, emissions, or human appropriation of the products of photosynthesis within any region will inevitably put disproportionate pressure on its weakest communities to sacrifice their cultural adaptations to so-called "systemic needs".) As modern resource management failures accumulate, the convenient image of nature as a store of capital from which one may withdraw the interest without touching the principal is crumbling. As historian Donald Worster points out, academic ecologists are becoming less and less willing to talk about "maximum sustained yield" or "optimum yield", even on a local level. Relying on such notions as 8 way of "containing" the global economy looks more and more like a way of authorizing its current destructive course.

Economic Culture

If "nature" can't be said to be capable of setting prices which will ensure a future for the economy, what can? Many environmental economists are looking at currently unmarketed "environmental benefits" as well as people's values and beliefs about the environment and trying to measure them on a monetary scale. Incorporating this procedure into economic planning, they hope, will make the economy "sustainable". This practice, however, exposes an even more fundamental difficulty for environmental economics, one connected with the very idea of translating diverse beliefs and values into prices.

The problem is similar to one described by Orwell in 1984. Suppose someone tried to translate the American Declaration of Independence into Newspeak. Inevitably it would become either a mass of criminal thoughts ("crimethink") or a panegyric on a "solute government". Neither translation, needless to say, would have struck the Declaration's framers as particularly satisfactory.

Economics, happily, has no totalitarian intent. But, like Newspeak or any other language, it has evolved in particular historical circumstances (mainly the last two or three centuries) around a particular set of purposes (providing a rational framework for a capitalist type of social organization). Thus it is hardly surprising that problems arise when economists try to "translate" ideas which have evolved in other historical contexts into the language of prices. Many ecologists, for example, bridle at the translation of their concerns about pollution into demands that polluters pay, since in their terms no payment can be said to be "equivalent" to a change in the course of evolution. Many laypeople, similarly, refuse to say how much compensation they would be willing to accept for hydroelectric dams or polluted air in their region, pointing out that for them the issue is one for rolitical debate, not for market bargaining. The only way of "translating" this refusal into economic language is to say that for these people, conservation has "infinite" monetary value&emdash;an interpretation which is satisfactory neither to them nor to the Economists.

Environmental economists often seem baffled by this state of affairs. Many of them view all humans as speaking essentially the same language and as constantly comparing alternatives along a single scale. What could be wrong with regarding this scale as one of price? Surely the problem, they insist, is just that sconomic illiterates fail to understand how well economists have translated their views. One author, for instance, suggests that to refuse to give wilderness a monetary value and yet to recommend that it be preserved rather than developed:

" . . . is to exhibit confusion and inconsistency. For to recommend preservation is simply to say that it has been in some way compared with development and found to be preferable. Cost-benefit analysis is a way of making the comparison explicit."

The confusion, however, is all on the part of the economist. First, unless there are well-established practices for exchanging or ranking two alternatives, it is difficult to see how even implicit comparisons between them could be made along a single yardstick. Second, even where such a yardstick has evolved, people may not always want it to be used to make decisions. To demand preservation may merely be to value social relations and obey moral imperatives that have developed in historical circumstances distinct from those which have resulted in the modern market. It may even be to reject the notion that a choice between scarce alternatives should be involved. It does not follow from the fact that people choose wilderness over development that they have implicitly or explicitly compared the two along a single yard stick any more than it follows from the fact that courts make judgments that they have followed a set formula for doing so. In sum, it seems unlikely that environmental economics will be able to assimilate into prices the rich variety of views it would need to make the economy "sustainable".

Many observers would shrug off this conclusion. After all, whatever its limitations, hasn't environmental economics at least offered a rationale for more environmental taxes and better costbenefit analysis? As prominent English green Jonathon Porritt suggests, isn't it good to learn to "measure the value of the natural resource base in the same way as "we measure the value of the financial capital base"? After all, " . . . when you are talking to the people who are really in the business of destroying the environment, you have to use concepts that will allow them to begin to understand what we're saying."

It's difficult to be sure who this "we" refers to. One thing is certain, though: if people who are trying to protect their rivers against pulp mills in Sumatra or their children's health against toxic waste in California want economic policy-makers to understand what they are saying, the first prerequisite is that their words not be replaced by the language of "financial capital". As Mark Sagoff observes, it is only by protesting against such translations that these people can begin to make their views known to those in power." In the real world, a great many more rivers and forests are saved by those who force economic leaders to learn their language than by those who allow their views to be phrased in consultants' cost-benefit terms.

Economic policy-makers are perfectly capable, in any event, of understanding what they are told by chanting demonstrators and irate lobbyists and of making their own translations of what they hear. And if they use the results to formulate just and effective environmental taxes and cost-benefit analyses capable of halting mega-projects, by all means let them get on with it. Those whose interests cannot be fully defended by such measures, however, will have to be pardoned forwanting to keep a foothold in the rough ground which still remains outside the grasp of the industrial economy.

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