Deep in recession and with scary ecological scenarios looming, now may be the ripest moment we’ll ever have to power-shift global capitalism onto a new sustainable path. We invite economics students around the world – especially PhD students – to join the fight to revamp Econ 101 curriculums and challenge the endemic myopia of their tenured neoclassical profs. Read some of the introductory articles, check out the latest dispatches on our blog, then download the Kick it Over Manifesto (and other posters) and keep pinning them up in the corridors of your department. Get a small group together and start jamming! Put your university at the forefront of the monumental mindshift now underway in the "science" of economics.
Sustainability is a profoundly ambiguous term. Depending on the context in which it is used, it is a word that can mean an almost incalculable variety of things, running the gamut of interpretation. At best the idea of sustainability should suggest that we live on a planet composed of finite resources, where there are thermodynamic constraints on the growth of any material or energetic system. Proponents of sustainability should acknowledge that in the past 150 years we have seen the most exaggerated expansion of human economic systems that the world has ever seen, resulting in a mass of challenges that threaten not only humanity, but the entire living envelope of the planet itself. That this expansion is synonymous with the sixth greatest mass extinction event – the first with a biotic (human induced) cause – should be of immense concern to the modern human moment. Yet despite this knowledge, the brand of sustainability that is most often promoted in industry and in the media remains tethered to development and growth. Such “sustainable” values are the very same ones that promote an accelerated rate of consumption in fossil fuels, food, energy, water use, and polluting emissions, only now cloaked in the neutralizing guise of a recyclable, or 'green' package.
In the worldview of industrialized societies, the planet has been reduced to a resource bin whose primary existence is to provide materials that can be converted into commodities. As such, we construct a world informed by a particular brand of fragmented knowledge that tends to normalize ecologically disastrous behavior. Economics, stemming from this worldview, acts as if its laws exist in a vacuum, seeing environmental degradation as being easily repaired through market incentives, material substitution, and new technology. This is why an ecological approach to the economy is so tremendously important. Ecological economics (although not without its flaws) recognizes its interdependent and co-evolutionary relationship to natural ecosystems, knowing that the economy is merely a sub-system of a much greater and more complex web of significance. A true sustainability will involve a re-imagining of the economic system away from a growth-obsessed model that demands excessive throughput of material and energy, towards a more steady-state, egalitarian economy that recognizes itself as a subset of the planet that supports it.
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