Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development.

• Author: Roodman, David Malin

The Faith of an Ecological Economist

The first time I encountered Herman Daly's work was part of a serendipitous chain of events of the sort that gives you pause years later with the thought of how different your life would be now if it had gone a tad differently then. Just out of college, I was spending year at Cambridge University in England, supposedly studying mathematics. Instead, I found myself searching for distractions.

One short January day, I came across Small Is Beautiful, a 1973 work by the British economist E.F. Schumacher, on a friend's bookshelf. It fused ecology and economics in a way I had never seen, and thrilled me with the results. A conversation with another friend led to Soft Energy Paths, written around the same time by Amory Lovins, a young American physicist turned Oxford don. When that appeared, it upended the conventional wisdom that the only antidote to energy shortages was ever-more-aggressive efforts to expand supply. (Instead, it argued, countries could and should use existing supplies much more efficiently.)

On the first page of his book, Lovins yielded the lectern to an economist at Louisiana State University. This economist backed Lovins in criticizing mainstream energy analysts for viewing energy demand purely and unthinkingly as something to be accommodated, not controlled - in effect, as an end rather than a means. "This approach is unworthy of any organism with a central nervous system, much less a cerebral cortex," Herman Daly wrote. "To those of us who also have souls it is almost incomprehensible in its inversion of ends and means."

It was a compelling quote. Daly spoke from both his mind and his heart - and thus, like Schumacher and Lovins, appealed to both my mind and my heart. His analysis was cutting, both intellectually and morally. Indeed, as I eventually came to appreciate, Daly's strength as a thinker is that his heart is in his work. Unlike the emphatically secular methods of most economists, Daly's pursuit of descriptive analytic truth does not turn him into a moral agnostic. On the contrary, it allows him to found his economics quite solidly on his faith as a Christian.

Soon, I had tracked down Daly's classic Steady-State Economics. A few pages into it, I felt I had found a new home. Where my chalk-dusted professors offered a mathematical language to describe how stars bend the space they occupy, like bowling balls on a trampoline, Daly offered an elegant framework for understanding how the human economy was distorting the natural world in which it operates. The difference was that...