What is green economics?

• Author: Milani, Brian
• Position: Economics Reconsidered

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 need.

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 labor, or displacing labor rather than resources from production, or extending giant wasteful loops of production and consumption through globalization. These are economic inefficiencies, 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...