Economics and the environment
This is the text, including slides, from a talk given on October 28 2020 during an online event organised by University College Cork’s Economics and Environmental Societies. (I didn’t follow the text word for word during the talk, but it covered the same ground)
Thank you very much, I’m delighted to be able to participate in this discussion.
My name is Caroline Whyte, I have a background in ecological economics and I do research and help with communications for a think tank called Feasta: the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability.
Feasta, as some of you may know, is the Irish word for ‘in the future’. We have our administrative headquarters in at the ecovillage in Cloughjordan, and we’re in the Environmental Pillar of Irish environmental NGOs and in Stop Climate Chaos Ireland, but our focus is actually quite global and we have international membership. I’ll be explaining a bit more about Feasta later.
If I’m asked about the role economics plays in the environment and sustainability, my answer would be ‘what kind of economics are you talking about’ because there are a lot of different schools of thought within economics. You could be forgiven for not knowing that though, because there’s one particular school of thought that’s become quite dominant in university courses and in think tanks, political advisory groups, the media and so on – you could call it Neoclassical economics.
I find this approach to economies – particularly standard macroeconomic theory – quite problematic in many ways for the environment and for society and I’ll explain why in a minute. I’d argue that there needs to be a much broader range of economic thinking in universities, in the media, in advisory groups, all over really, if the economy is going to be able to adapt itself properly to our environment…
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