How much do you love the rainforest?

Photo: National Center for Atmospheric
Research.

It’s been nearly a thousand years since Lady Godiva, the original libertarian libertine, went on her famous naked horseback ride through the streets of Coventry to protest high taxes imposed by her husband.

Since then, the West has been subjected to the Enlightenment, free love, bra burning, Third Wave feminism, and Janet Jackson’s nipple. And yet, it seems, getting naked for a good cause is just as scandalous as it ever was.

There is no shortage of naked activists willing to carry on the legacy of Lady Godiva. Nude and partially nude protesters shocked this year’s Republican National Convention, from ACT UP supporters clad only in painted slogans to Axis of Eve members in “Expose Bush” panties. The California-based ensemble calling itself Baring Witness holds protests in which naked women (and sometimes men) arrange themselves to form words like “PEACE” and “VOTE.” Activist Dona Nieto holds impromptu strip poetry readings for logging crews, in the hopes of distracting them from the task of chopping down old-growth redwoods. And everybody knows the folks at PETA would rather go naked than wear fur.

But the award for Scandalous Naked Activists of the Year, if there were one, would have to go to the Norwegian nonprofit organization Fuck for Forest.

Johansson (left) and Ellingsen.

Photo: Fuck for Forest

Leona Johansson, 21, and Tommy Hol Ellingsen, 28, are a new breed of environmentalists — or perhaps a new breed of porn stars. With their paid-subscription website, they are raising cash to save the rainforest, one money shot at a time. And they’re determined not to let their fellow environmentalists stand in their way.

Since this past winter, when Johansson and Ellingsen started the site (with seed money from the Norwegian government), Fuck for Forest has gained considerable notoriety in the European environmental community. In July, the group won both friends and enemies around the world after making a special appearance at Quart, an outdoor music festival in Kristiansand, Norway.

The couple climbed onstage during the performance of a band called (what else?) the Cumshots. “How far are you willing to go to save the world?” said Ellingsen, who then proceeded to go all the way for about 10 minutes in front of an audience of several thousand.

That stunt got Ellingsen and Johansson arrested and slapped with fines of about $1,400 each. They face a to-be-determined court date, and say they will serve jail time rather than pay the fines.

Why Don’t We Do It in the Roadless?

The link between having public sex and saving the planet may seem tenuous at best. (After all, it’s probably not sending the best message about population control.) But consider this: According to a report by the U.S. National Research Council, the online porn industry could rake in between $5 billion and $7 billion per year by 2005. That’s about as much as all environmental and animal-welfare groups, combined, raised last year in the U.S. Cashing in on the porn money machine could be a windfall for environmental groups — or so Ellingsen believes.

While Fuck for Forest is apparently unique in the green movement, the porn-for-charity model already boasts some successes. For example, a site called ALSScan.com (the ALS stands for “All Ladies Shaved”) claims to have raised $78,346 last year for children’s cancer and muscular dystrophy funds, by donating 10 percent of sales.

Ellingsen reports that Fuck for Forest has raised more than $50,000 in cold, hard U.S. dollars since its launch less than a year ago, even after paying for necessities like server space and internet billing services. “We have a lot of potential,” he said.

The stunt at Quart, despite gaining them considerable notoriety and a little legal trouble, appears to have been a net gain for Fuck for Forest. Since the couple’s highly publicized arrest, the site has attracted more than 1,000 new members — at $15 per member per month. Ellingsen estimates that nearly $40,000 of the money they have raised so far was donated following Quart and the attendant media hype.

Whatever one may think of their morals, that’s pretty savvy fund raising, said Alan Abramson, director of the Nonprofit Sector and Philanthropy Program at the Aspen Institute.

“I think that’s pretty good,” he said. “Nonprofits start in so many different ways. If they had one wealthy donor, they could start with millions. Others operate on a shoestring for decades. It’s hard to say if there’s a norm. But it sounds like a decent amount of money.”

Network It, Network It

Other enviro groups have been reluctant to get in bed (so to speak) with Fuck for Forest, fearing that the group’s brand of activism could tarnish their reputations. Wereld Natuur Fonds, the Dutch branch of the World Wildlife Fund, initially seemed receptive to Fuck for Forest’s offer of about $15,000. But after Quart, the organization backed off.

Doing a good deed.

Photo: Fuck for Forest.

“We do not want to be associated in any way with this type of industry,” said Kees Verhagen, a spokesperson for WNF. “We are one of the biggest NGOs [in Holland], with the support of about 1 million Dutch people. I think they will protest if we support groups like this. We could lose credibility with our members, and also with the stakeholders we have to deal with every day.”

The Rainforest Foundation Norway has also equivocated on whether to accept money from Fuck for Forest, publicly decrying the group’s activities while indicating in private meetings with Ellingsen and Johansson that it would be willing to accept a hefty donation — so long as it was kept quiet.

“I can not see that this helps the work for the rainforest,” Lars Løvold, head of the Rainforest Foundation Norway, told the Norwegian TV station 2 Nettavisen shortly after the couple’s arrest at Quart. “Generally speaking, we accept donations, but if the money is coming from illegal activity, from someone who abuse[s] the rainforest or wish[es] to abuse our name, we say, ‘No thank you.’ This may be the case here.”

Ellingsen tells the story differently. “[Løvold] said straight to our face, ‘We want your money, but we don’t want to make a big thing of it,’” he said. “I think that’s pretty childish.”

Ellingsen also sees a certain irony in mainstream environmental organizations’ reluctance, for political reasons, to associate themselves with groups like Fuck for Forest: We live in a world where public sex is considered far more controversial than wholesale ecological destruction.

“Society is so upside-down. In Norway, we have this prime minister talking about war and defending it, and at the same time putting sex down as something bad,” he said. “Any kind of action to help nature is good.”

Despite the chilly reception his organization has gotten in some quarters, Ellingsen isn’t worried that the money will go homeless for long.

“There are a lot of environmental organizations out there, and some of them are pretty radical. I think it’s pretty much Norway that is the problem,” he said. “There are some in America and some in Brazil that have contacted us.”

Jamais Cascio, for one, feels that Fuck for Forest is just what the world needs now. Cascio runs the environmental-technology blog WorldChanging.com, and moonlights as a website reviewer for the online sex-toy retailer Blowfish. A self-described “freelance world-builder,” Cascio is delighted with the idea of blending sex and activism.

“The Fuck for Forest kids are just my kind of activists,” Cascio wrote via email. “It’s sad that the Rainforest Foundation Norway (and other Norwegian enviro groups) refused to accept the money. Novel approaches to fund raising and activism should be welcome, and youth (especially in Europe, sheesh) are a lot more comfortable with sexual expression than are the green geezers that run many of the mainstream environmentalist groups.”

Abramson doesn’t see what the fuss is all about, either. “I think that’s what the nonprofit sector is all about, being able to give expression to different ways of working on social issues,” he said.

Children of the Porn

True to its anarcho-hippie roots, Fuck for Forest’s website is more Lola Granola than Jenna Jameson. Caveat emptor: Patchouli fetishists will find Fuck for Forest a $15 well spent, but those who habitually comb the internet in search of Sorority Slumber Parties Gone Wild may find themselves more bemused than aroused.

The front page features a psychedelic Photoshopped tableau of naked girls, giant glowing phalli, and the familiar three-arrow recycling logo constructed from video stills of porn scenes. In one sample video, a beatifically smiling Johansson, her pixie-ish face framed by a halo of white-girl dreadlocks, touts the organization’s good work while performing various sex acts. “The more times I do this, the more money goes to the rainforest,” she says.

If you’ve ponied up the monthly fee, you can access the membership-only content, where you can witness all kinds of debauchery: from plein-air romps involving novel uses for corn on the cob to the uniquely Scandinavian spectacle of a naughty Euro-hippie hiking up her skirt at Ikea.

With its notable absence of teased hair, fake boobs, and bow-chika-bow music, Fuck for Forest is definitely not your typical porn fare. (“I don’t look so much at porn, actually. I’m more into having sex than looking at it,” Ellingsen concedes.)

“The commercial porn industry has made it all about money. They don’t have fun when they make the movies, and you can see that,” he says. “There should be a little spark of self irony and fun in it.”

It must be noted that what Fuck for Forest lacks in glitzy production, it makes up for in sheer joie de vivre.

“The two of them (and the occasional friends from Sweden and Germany and the like) scrump with the energy, enthusiasm, and disregard for social convention that makes being a young twentysomething so much fun,” Cascio wrote. “They are actually relatively attractive, in a will-fuck-for-spare-pot kind of way.”

Fields of grain — GMO barley,
to be precise.

Photo: USDA.

The protocol is the first international convention to regulate trade in living modified organisms (LMOs), a subset of the more widely known (and in some circles widely reviled) category of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It spans 30 pages of definitions, provisions, procedures, agreements, and arrangements, but the most important piece of it is less than a sentence long: an easily overlooked reference, in the preamble, to “Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development” — a.k.a. the Precautionary Principle.

The Rio Declaration was crafted in the eponymous Brazilian city during the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, better known as the Earth Summit. In Principle 15, the international community addresses the perennial problem of how to regulate to protect the environment in the face of massive scientific uncertainty about the causes and consequences of ecological problems. “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation,” the document proclaims. In other words, better safe than sorry.

Whether or not GMOs pose “threats of serious or irreversible damage” is a question that has polarized the global community. Nations that are net importers of GMOs are increasingly trying to regulate the flood of imports destined for their farmers’ fields and their supermarkets’ shelves; net exporters of GMOs are crying foul. The debate has reached the chambers of the World Trade Organization, where the U.S. — which is not a signatory to the Cartagena Protocol — has brought a suit against the European Union for imposing labeling requirements on genetically altered foods and a moratorium on new genetically modified crops, calling the E.U.’s regulations protectionism in disguise.

Bigwigs met in Montreal in 2000 to
finalize the Cartagena Protocol.

Photo: IISD.

The Cartagena Protocol bolsters the E.U.’s position, because its invocation of the Precautionary Principle affirms the right of nations to regulate biotech imports — such as GMOs — whose environmental and human health risks remain unknown. “This [protocol] is a fundamental step towards better global governance in the GMO field, which is badly needed to maximize the benefits deriving from biotechnology and minimize the risks for the environment and human health,” says Nicola Notaro, an official in the Development and Global Biodiversity Unit of the European Commission.

But at the WTO, the rules are different. Under the Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Regulations that govern trade in food, imports are considered innocent until proven guilty. “Members shall ensure that any sanitary or phytosanitary measure is applied only to the extent necessary to protect human, animal, or plant life or health, is based on scientific principles and is not maintained without sufficient scientific evidence,” the SPS rules state.

In other words, under the WTO rules, “the burden of proof [is] on the country that wants to have higher standards,” says Kristin Dawkins, vice president for international programs at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minnesota. “Under the Cartagena Protocol, the Precautionary Principle basically reverses those things.”

It remains to be seen whether the newly inaugurated Cartagena Protocol will come into open conflict with the WTO’s existing regulations. But one thing seems certain: Proponents of genetically modified food, led by the U.S. and Canada, will not give up the golden age of unregulated biotech trade without a fight.

Chew on This

How intense of a fight? Well, consider the negotiations that led up to the adoption of the Cartagena Protocol in 2000, which were themselves long and contentious. Since the U.S. did not ratify the Convention on Biological Diversity (the treaty that underlies the Cartagena Protocol), it was not an official party to the development of the protocol. As a trading partner of many countries that did sign on to the protocol, however, the U.S. maintained a keen interest in the proceedings.

Trade to order.

Photo: NOAA.

“If you were to encapsulate this from a U.S. government point of view, we hope that the debate and discussion are based on scientific evidence, rather than hearsay and emotion,” says a senior official with the Bureau of Oceans, Environment, and Science in the U.S. State Department. “Our interests have focused around trying to ensure that when the protocol goes into force, it will not unnecessarily disrupt trade.”

Beth Burrows, founder and director of the Edmonds Institute, a small environment and technology think tank that works to promote more scientific study of the health risks of GMOs, has a different view. “I don’t know that the U.S. has a cogent policy, except to export its own products,” she says. “The U.S. brought quite a large delegation and played quite the bully … throughout the negotiations. It’s like the old joke — what does a 900-pound gorilla eat? Anything it wants.”

At the Cartagena negotiations, the U.S. and the other major GMO exporters (Canada, Argentina, Australia, Chile, and Uruguay) were known as the “Miami Group,” after the location of their first meeting to develop a unified position. Led by the U.S., the group attempted to exclude as many GMOs as possible from regulation, says Dawkins of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. “There was a while when people referred to this as the ‘Animal Vaccine Protocol,’ because every other type of GMO or LMO was up for exclusion in the U.S. proposal,” she says.

Bananarama: Charles Arntzen
with his vaccine-bearing fruit.

Photo: Cornell University.

In a coup for processed-food exporters, the scope of the treaty was eventually narrowed from all GMOs to only LMOs — bioengineered organisms with viable DNA. The shift in wording excludes most processed foods from the treaty, treating a shipment of corn as an LMO subject to regulation, but exempting cereal made from the same kernels. In another notable exclusion, the protocol does not apply to pharmaceuticals, on the theory that drugs for human consumption are already regulated by other international treaties. However, in the few years since the protocol was finalized, another seemingly science fiction-esque development has edged nearer to becoming fact: crops bioengineered to produce drugs, such as the bananas developed by Cornell scientist Charles Arntzen that contain an edible vaccine for Hepatitis B.

Whether such biopharmaceuticals will be regulated under the protocol remains to be seen, says Dawkins: “That was still far enough into the future that it wasn’t addressed directly. It’s another one of those gray areas that the lawyers can have fun with.”

May the Enforcement Be With You

Although Cartagena becomes international law as of today, many questions remain about its enactment and enforcement.

“On Sept. 11, there are two clocks that start ticking, very important ones,” says Dawkins. “In two years, they’re supposed to come up with detailed regulations on labeling of shipments, which is going to be very hot. And in four years, they’re going to start dealing with the liability issue on an international level.”

The “liability issue” — who pays when biotech experiments go awry — is perhaps the thorniest legal problem in the emerging debate over the regulation of GMOs. Over the next four years, the protocol’s signers will work to decide how to hold GMO manufacturers accountable if their products cause negative environmental, socioeconomic, or human health impacts. This may prove no small feat, particularly as most GMO manufacturers are based in countries that have not signed the protocol. (Cartagena applies to trade between signers and non-signers, but enforcement will likely prove difficult.)

A hard grain is gonna fall.

Photo: USDA.

In the early days of genetically modified crops, biotech companies assured the public that buffer zones around crop fields would prevent GMO crops from escaping into the environment. But for the major GMO crops — corn, soybeans, canola, and cotton — it is proving increasingly difficult to segregate bioengineered varieties from ordinary crops. Genetically engineered genes have shown up in cornfields in remote mountain regions of Mexico, where GM corn has been banned since 1998. In 2000, bioengineered Starlink corn, banned for human consumption because it contained a suspected allergen, found its way into the food stream and prompted a massive recall of supermarket tortilla shells. Canada has already given up on all efforts to grow GMO-free canola because of widespread contamination. Faced with evidence that GMO crops are essentially uncontainable, biotech producers now claim that the escape of bioengineered genes is nothing to worry about.

Tell that to Percy Schmeiser, the Saskatchewan canola farmer who has become something of an international celebrity for standing up to biotech giant Monsanto. Schmeiser’s troubles began when a few bioengineered Monsanto plants showed up in his canola field — according to Schmeiser, the result of GMO pollen drifting from a nearby field. In 1998, acting on a tip from a toll-free, anonymous “snitch line,” Monsanto discovered the plants and sued Schmeiser for patent infringement. Schmeiser promptly slapped Monsanto with a $7.3 million countersuit, claiming that the company had genetically polluted his crops.

Monsanto won the first round. In 2002, a Canadian federal judge ordered Schmeiser to pay $125,000, ruling that he had violated Monsanto’s patent even if the company’s plants had spread into his fields accidentally. Schmeiser has appealed the case all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court, where it will be heard early next year.

Cases like Schmeiser’s reveal the limitations of conventional law when it comes to dealing with patented life forms. On both national and international scales, the question of who pays the price for unwanted gene flow remains unresolved. But in the absence of legislation placing the burden of liability on the shoulders of GMO manufacturers, the costs are likely to be borne by farmers and consumers. And given the difficulty of keeping genes in their proper places, by the time the Cartagena Protocol and all of its liability and labeling laws take full effect, the proverbial genie may be long since out of the bottle.

But regardless of how much environmental impact it will have, says Dawkins, Cartagena is a politically important treaty. “My hope is that it will give more strength of conviction to countries and nations to insist on their sovereign right to regulate these products,” she says.

“The whole point of this thing is … to have some assurances that these GM products are safe,” says Peter Jenkins, an attorney and policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety in Washington, D.C. “I don’t know why anyone would want to argue with that.”

And if economics is a religion, Herman Daly is its arch-heretic, a member of the high priesthood turned renegade. From 1988 to 1994, Daly was the World Bank’s senior environmental economist, a lonely voice of dissent in an organization that frowns on unbelievers. During his six-year tenure, Daly, the economist-turned-ecovisionary whose works established ecological economics as a discipline, succeeded in getting the World Bank to take notice of the environment in its policies and programs. But he made little headway persuading his colleagues to adopt his more radical views on economic cosmology, which, in his vision, placed the economy squarely inside the global ecosystem, instead of the other way around.

At last, frustrated with the institution’s unwieldy bureaucracy and antiquated policies, he resigned. In his farewell speech to his World Bank colleagues, Daly advised that they take “a few antacids and laxatives to cure the combination of managerial flatulence and organizational constipation,” and prescribed for good measure, “new glasses and a hearing aid” to aid the World Bank in dealing with the outside world.

Herman Daly.

It was Daly’s parting shot not only at the World Bank, but at the entire edifice of neoclassical economics. First a believer, then a reformer, he is now content to remain outside the fold as a professor at the University of Maryland, working not in its economics department but in its school of public policy. “That’s not accidental,” he says. “They [the economists] would not have me, and I would not go.”

Speaking with me on the telephone from his home in Hyattsville, Md., Daly seems an unlikely rebel. He is affable and soft-spoken — but unswerving in his conviction that it is high time for a new world order. “Rather than redemption of the World Bank, I think it’s probably time to have a model of death and resurrection,” he says. “Kill them off and start over again with something new.”

Don’t Bank on It

Daly’s is not the only voice crying out for change. In 1999, when anti-globalization protesters staged the legendary “Battle in Seattle,” the World Bank (along with its sister organization, the International Monetary Fund) gained newfound notoriety in U.S. civil society. The World Bank’s aid programs, designed to open up markets in poor countries to foreign investment, have been increasingly accused of leaving a trail of environmental destruction and poverty in their wake. The bitter legacies of “structural adjustment” programs — under which the World Bank loans money to developing countries on the condition that they slash social spending, eliminate tariffs and subsidies, and shift their agricultural production from feeding their own populace to growing cash crops for export — have sparked a firestorm of protest, both in the developing and the developed world.

Protesting the World Bank
in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Indymedia.org

But despite the global havoc it is wreaking, the institution means well, Daly says. “There are many good people at the bank. Most of them really, sincerely believe the basic model. That’s what they learned in their Ph.D. programs, so they have some reason to believe that what they do is well-founded and will ultimately work out. It takes a bit of a conversion experience to see otherwise.”

At the root of the World Bank’s woes, says Daly, is the fundamentally flawed conception of how economics relates to the physical world — what he calls “the pre-analytic vision” — that every economist learns along with the formulas and equations of the trade. “Most of the people they hire are academic economists who have gotten their degrees at Harvard, Stanford, MIT — standard economics departments. It doesn’t matter whether they came from India or Africa. They all went to the same schools. Their basic way of seeing the world is the neoclassical economic view. They’re basically good-hearted folks out trying to do good in the world, like the church, like the missionaries. But they have a bad theology. They went to the wrong seminary.”

Growthed Out

For Daly, the first real challenge to that pre-analytic vision came in 1967, when he was a Ford Foundation visiting professor at the University of Ceara in Brazil. Daly, who had recently received his Ph.D., had gone to Ceara to help train students for graduate work in economics programs overseas. However, a political dispute shut down the university for several months, leaving him with little to do but read and contemplate his new surroundings.

It was then that Daly began to make connections between his economic knowledge, the experience of life in northeastern Brazil (an economically struggling region whose ballooning population had all but exhausted its natural resources), and the works of environmentalists such as Rachel Carson and Paul Ehrlich. It suddenly occurred to him: Like a human population, when the economy grows, it does so at the expense of the ecosystems that sustain it.

“Once you sit down and draw a little picture of the economy as a subset of the larger ecosystem, then you’re halfway home as far as ecological economics is concerned. That’s why people resist doing that,” he says. “That means you would have to say well, there are limits, we’re not going to be able to grow forever. That means the economy must have some optimal scale relative to the larger system. That means you don’t grow beyond the optimum. How do we stop growing? What do we do? These are very threatening questions.”

It is because these questions strike so deeply at shared hopes and ambitions, says Daly, that most economists do not ask them. “The source of economists’ influence in the world of power, at least in recent times, has been through growth. The solution to all economic problems has been growth. If you’re poor, the solution is growth. If you have unemployment, the solution is you have to increase investment, that means growth. The population explosion — well, there’s a demographic transition, if we just grow enough then people will stop having so many children. And what’s the problem with unjust distribution of income? Well, it’s just that we don’t have enough, so if we grew more it would be easier to divide a big pie than a little pie. It’s just so inconvenient if growth is limited that it’s been hard to contemplate.”

Daly sees conversion experiences like his own as rare events for economists raised in the old ways. Until a new generation arises, armed with a pre-analytic vision that places the economy within physical and ecological limitations, he believes that mainstream economics is unlikely to change. “There’s a buildup of anomalies and vexing questions that don’t make sense under the existing paradigm. And eventually, there’s a tipping phenomenon; it eventually changes. But it doesn’t change because the new rationally makes arguments and convinces the old. It’s that the old eventually dies and the new takes its place.”

While most economists may not be listening, others are. Daly’s work has already inspired one generation of economists and environmentalists, and it forms a large part of the intellectual inheritance of the one that is emerging. Daly’s self-imposed excommunication from the Church of Perpetual Growth has not slowed him down. Rather than being discouraged by the myopia of his erstwhile colleagues, he seems to be following the advice of Mahatma Gandhi: Be the change you wish to see in the world.

“When I graduated, there were virtually no jobs in ecological economics. I applied to the only job I saw. Three years later, I saw three jobs in ecological economics, one of which was the one I already had,” he grins. “Now, if you look under ecological economics, there are a lot of jobs — mostly at liberal arts colleges, but also at the top research universities.”

Farley’s long battle to do the work he is passionate about is a telling story — and one he loves to tell. When I spoke with him recently at the institute’s new home on the University of Vermont campus, he waxed eloquent on the subject. Farley, who is 40, came to ecological economics the hard way: through an old-guard economics department that thought this young doctoral student’s ideas about the interrelations between natural and economic systems were bunk. He began a PhD program in economics hoping to find ways to connect his previous work in ecology and international development to economic problems. Instead, he felt that he had stumbled into a strange new world, where infinite growth was hailed as a perfectly reasonable goal (isn’t that against the laws of thermodynamics?), all goods were fungible (you mean, when we run out of clean water, we’ll just find something else to drink?), and nobody was interested in the questions he was asking.

Josh Farley in his Gund Institute office.

Sick of constantly battling his advisory committee over everything from the courses he took to the equations that were the centerpiece of his dissertation, he was ready to quit — until he discovered the writings of Herman Daly, the founding father of ecological economics.

“I got very excited again about economics, and was told, ‘No, that’s garbage, you shouldn’t be studying those things.’ I wrote to Herman and told him I wanted to quit, and he said, ‘No, finish it up, we need people who are trained in mainstream economics and know its problems.’ Basically, if you want to convince people that something is wrong, you have to understand what it is you’re talking about.”

On Daly’s advice, Farley finished what he’d started, earning a PhD from Cornell University. Now, he’s working to ensure that things will be different for the next generation of ecological economists. With Daly, his former mentor, Farley is writing a textbook on ecological economics that will be the first of its kind — one he hopes will encourage more universities to offer training in the ideas and techniques of the new economic science. The book is slated for publication in August 2003.

And Farley has also learned to dole out his own advice to anyone interested in economics: Study something else as well. “It’s a vaccine against accepting mainstream economics,” he says. “If you’ve been inoculated with biology, or ecology, or even physics, and you start looking at mainstream economics, you say, ‘Wait a minute, this just can’t be, this doesn’t make sense, these things aren’t true.’”

The Trouble with Econ 101

Among the assumptions of traditional economic theory are a few that are nothing short of baffling: that people are perfectly rational, that they have free access to all information, that they seek to consume as much as possible. (In a famous essay, Thorstein Veblen called the economist’s improbable individual a “homogenous globule of desire.”) Although economists concede that human behavior doesn’t always match their assumptions, the models they use tend to assume that deviations from the ideal are just so much random noise.

More troubling still is the assumption free-market economics makes about nature: that we don’t need it. Because everything is theoretically substitutable for everything else, when we run out of nature, we’ll just substitute technology. That, says Farley, is a religious belief, not a scientific one.

“That’s essentially a faith-based position, that we will always develop substitutes,” he says. “It also ignores this idea that ecological economists are concerned with, that ecosystem services don’t fit into the market mold. They don’t have a price — price is a feedback signal — so there is no signal, as they grow scarcer, to tell us we need to develop substitutes.”

In the market, the price of a good is related to its scarcity. That’s the reason why diamonds, which are fairly useless, are more expensive than water, which is, to put it mildly, fairly useful. In theory, the scarcer a good becomes, the more expensive it becomes, until people will substitute something else for it rather than continuing to pay steeper and steeper prices. The trouble is, this system, which works very well for things like diamonds, doesn’t work well at all for things like ozone layers.

“Free-market economics works great, for a certain narrow class of goods and services,” says Farley. “But there’s a huge, broad class of goods and services that are incredibly important to our well-being where it doesn’t work at all.”

The real world almost never lives up to the assumptions of free-market economic theory. But economists have persisted in believing in those assumptions, says Farley, because they haven’t behaved like scientists: Instead of counting market failures as evidence against their theories, economists have criticized markets for not measuring up. “In ecology, if your theory is not supported by real life, you change your theory. In economics, if your theory is not supported by real life, you try to come up with policy measures that change real life to make it a closer fit to your theory.”

The Birth of a New Paradigm

Ecological economics has all the flavor of a Thomas Kuhn-style scientific revolution — wherein a new paradigm radically alters and replaces an older one — and therefore, the road to acceptance has been rocky. “Herman Daly has very rarely been published in a mainstream economics journal. Bob Costanza [the director of the Gund Institute] has probably never been published in a mainstream economics journal,” says Farley. “I’ve been invited to give lots of presentations, by former students of mine and by other people, where they have tried to get the economists to come. The economists simply boycott it. They don’t want to hear it.”

But, like any good paradigm, this one finally seems to be gaining traction. In the few years since Farley was a graduate student, there has been a veritable explosion in the field. Ecological economics, once obscure, now makes international headlines. And, as the failure of free markets to ensure global well-being becomes increasingly apparent, more and more people — from black-masked anti-globalization protestors to Nobel laureates — seem to be taking a hammer to the ivory tower of mainstream economic theory.

The Post-Autistic Economics movement, which began a few years ago in the brains of a few frustrated French graduate students, is now an international phenomenon. Both traditional economists and sufferers of autism share a few characteristics, they say: abnormal subjectivity, living in a world of fantasy, and difficulty communicating with others. PAE supporters at European universities have circulated petitions and scrawled slogans like this one, emblazoned on a wall on a Madrid campus: “La economia es de gente, no de curvas!” (“Economics is about people, not curves.”)

The last two Nobel prizes in economics have been awarded to heretics. In 2001, the prize went to Joseph Stiglitz, George Akerlof, and Michael Spence for their work on how markets fail when the “perfect information” assumption isn’t met. (Ironically, Stiglitz had recently been dismissed from his advisory role at the World Bank for spreading his heresy.) Last year, it was awarded to Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith, who used tools from psychology to demonstrate that traditional economics makes bad predictions because humans behave in systematically irrational ways.

Economics in Action

While these critics are not ecological economists, they share with them the sensibility that economics ought to be treated as empirical science, not dogma. The best way to study how human beings behave in the agora, they say, is not to theorize, but to roll up your sleeves, go out into the world, and find out.

Josh Farley, speaking to participants
in the Gund Institute’s 2003 workshop
near Palawan, Philippines.

And that’s exactly what Farley and his colleagues do. Since last year, the Gund Institute has been hosting a series of “ateliers,” or field workshops, in which an interdisciplinary team of students and faculty works with government officials, nonprofit organizations, and local stakeholders to address problems from diverse angles. The workshops serve a threefold purpose: studying ecological economics in action, training students in research techniques, and solving real-world problems in conjunction with local communities.

The most recent atelier, which focused on the illegal destruction of mangrove forests in the Philippines to make way for shrimp aquaculture, had a dramatic outcome. When the local participants realized how much the offending shrimp farm was costing the community by displacing ecosystem services, they tore it down with pickaxes. La economia es de gente, indeed.

At the epicenter of this maelstrom is Robert Costanza, director and founder of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont, and cofounder of the International Society for Ecological Economics. In 1997, Costanza and his colleagues made news headlines around the world with a paper, published in the British journal Nature, that estimated the annual net worth of the biosphere: $33 trillion, a figure greater than the annual gross national products (GNP) of all the world’s economies combined.

Over a mug of tea in his office at the Gund Institute, Costanza tells me that despite the big splash the figure made, $33 trillion is probably on the conservative side: “We always felt that was an underestimate, even from the beginning.” Last August, he and his coauthors came out with an even more startling number: In a paper published in Science, they proclaimed that investing in the preservation of intact ecosystems yields returns of 100 to 1.

Robert Costanza and his sustainable
office furniture.

Putting a price tag on the ecosystems of the world is a big job. But Costanza has smaller things on his mind as well — office furniture, for instance. Last summer, the Gund Institute moved to Vermont from its former home at the Center for Environmental Science, a research campus of the University of Maryland. When faced with the need to equip the institute’s new digs, Costanza opted not to reach for the nearest office-supply catalogue. Instead, he forged a partnership with local sustainable-timber producers and furniture-makers to make custom office furniture for the institute.

Costanza doesn’t say how much more the institute paid for the handcrafted, solid hardwood desks and shelves than they would have spent at Staples. But, he remarks, “it was probably cheaper, from a full-cost point of view.” In other words, although it may have cost the institute more, the custom-made furniture was the better bargain because it took into account the costs known in economic parlance as “negative externalities”: costs that society hasn’t yet learned to calculate.

Global Accounting, Enron-Style

Returns of $100 for every $1 invested. Even in the heady pre-Sept. 11 days of the dot-com craze, numbers like this would have made any day trader giddy. So why aren’t investors lining up by the thousands to buy old-growth tropical rainforests and mangrove swamps?

The answer is simply a matter of how the costs and benefits are distributed. When costs and benefits flow to the same place, Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” works like a charm to maximize general economic well-being. When they part ways, you get externalities. The owner of an old-growth forest makes more money cutting trees down than letting them stand, because she is able to pass on the massive external cost of their loss to 6 billion other people.

Everything has its price.

Costanza and his colleagues believe that putting a price on the services ecosystems provide (such as stabilizing the climate, providing biodiversity, and pollinating crops) alerts us to the true costs of the destruction of the biosphere. If these costs were accounted for in standard measures of economic well-being, like GNP, policymakers would be less inclined to allow corporations to exploit natural resources with impunity.

“Enron’s been doing a bad job of accounting, but we’ve been doing an even worse job on a larger scale,” he says. “The depletion of the natural capital base has often been counted as profits, because these external costs are miscounted as profits. Are we making bad management decisions because we’re not considering all of our capital base? If you were the CEO of Earth, you would have been fired long ago, and replaced with someone who can take that stuff into account.”

(Costanza & Co. are currently working on a glossy, book-length “shareholders’ report” for the Earth, slated for publication early this summer. Its effects on upper-level planetary management remain to be seen.)

There are economic alternatives to treating ecosystem destruction as profit. As early as the 1920s, British economist Nicolas Pigou advocated for taxes on activities that caused pollution and sickness, in much the same way that state governments tax tobacco to discourage smoking. Costanza would like to see governments adopt more of such taxes, along with eliminating what he calls “perverse subsidies” from which society derives no benefit. “Tax bads, not goods,” he says. “You could reduce taxes on labor and income, things you want to support, and increase taxes on things you want to discourage.”

Ma Nature and Primordial Blasphemy

Costanza’s work has drawn plenty of fire from critics on several fronts. University of Maryland scholar Mark Sagoff objects to Costanza’s calculations, saying that because nature has a stranglehold on the ecosystem-services market, the numbers are meaningless. “If nature sought to operate as a monopoly, the government would rightfully either set the price of an ecosystem service at a small percentage above costs (as it does with utilities) or break up Ma Nature into competing units (as it did Ma Bell),” he writes.

Others are morally outraged at the very idea of pricing ecosystems. “Exchanging, selling, calculating tradeoffs, or otherwise commoditizing biodiversity in the global sanctuary of creation simply to maximize immediate human gain represents the primordial blasphemy of confusing sacred space with the market place,” fumes Timothy Weiskel, an environmental ethicist at Harvard Divinity School, in an essay comparing the Costanza team to the money-changers Jesus threw out of the temple.

The trouble with such ringing indictments is that, true or not, they simply don’t convince enough people. Most people would think it a terrible shame to destroy a work of art, but only a handful of tweed-jacketed aesthetics professors would consider that a planet devoid of all human life would be any worse off without Michaelangelo’s David on it. Likewise, deep-ecology arguments for the inherent sanctity of untouched ecosystems may appeal to the fond hearts of a few preservationists, but such sentiments don’t hold much water with land managers.

Costanza sees his work as a way for hard-core environmentalists and hard-nosed policy makers to speak the same language, regardless of their moral commitments. “You can say how important you think water supply is as a service until you’re blue in the face, but until you say ‘It’s worth this much in dollars,’ it’s hard to get people to pay attention,” he notes. “Once you’ve got their attention, you can then go back and say, ‘Now, this is why it’s so valuable.’”

As for the kinds of tradeoffs Weiskel criticizes, Costanza says we make them all the time: “We are converting forests to agricultural land. We are reducing the amount of ecosystem services of various kinds, and we are paying for that as a society. So it’s incumbent on us to know how much we’re paying, how big are those tradeoffs, how do we expect them to change in the future, and can we make better decisions.”

Implicit in the process of making decisions about the environment and resource-use are judgments about what we consider valuable, Costanza says — and numbers are just a way to make those value judgments explicit.