EE4ALL Summer Crash Course Program
Welcome!
Ecological Economics for All Open Access Summer Crash Course (originally offered in 2022):
The Shift Needed in Economics to Enable A Just Transition to a Right-Sized Economy
Coordinator, Moderator and Creator of the Course: Rigo Melgar
Collaborators: Jon Erickson, Joshua Farley, Aaron Vansintjan, Nina Smolyar, Tina Beigi and Matt Burke
Sponsors: Leadership for the Ecozoic, the Bittersdorf Professorship in Sustainability Science and Policy, the Gund Institute for Environment and Ecological Economics, Rethinking Economics UVM, the International Society for Ecological Economics, and the Democracy Collaborative.
Goal: To deliver an intensive summer course structured around the foundational principles of ecological economics and other heterodox economic approaches required to promote a socio-ecological paradigm shift in economics, oriented towards sustainability and well-being for all.
Leadership for the Ecozoic (@A2Ecozoic)
The Leadership for the Ecozoic (L4E) is an international program between McGill University and the University of Vermont that aims to foster mutually enhancing relationships among humans and the rest of nature. L4E has 3 main objectives:
(1) Advancing transdisciplinary scholarship in select doctoral programs to educate and empower new leaders for the Ecozoic;
(2) Co-creating a global research-to-action network to heal and restore Earth’s life support systems and to define and foster a new mode of inhabiting the Earth, respectful of life’s myriad ways of knowing and being; and
(3) Mobilizing and focusing higher education resources and communications towards systematically addressing multi-faceted, human-induced, planetary declines in life support capacity for all species, and developing systems of economics, governance, and ethics that promote cooperation, participation and collective well-being.
Ecological Economics For All Initiative (@EE4ALL)
Ecological Economics for All (EE4ALL) is an emerging initiative, inspired by L4E, dedicated to promoting a paradigm shift in economics to enable a just sustainability transition to a right-sized economy. The mission of EE4ALL is to make the theory and knowledge of ecological economics and allied heterodox fields available to everyone who wishes to use it to promote economic transformations that foster genuine and inclusive well-being through ecologically sustainable and equitable societies. EE4ALL aims to achieve its mission by facilitating educational, collaborative, and policy initiatives such as this summer crash course that brings people together to learn from each other to advance well-being for all.
General Description of the EE4ALL 2022 Crash Course
This course aims to foster a paradigm shift in economics based on a worldview dedicated to promoting the well-being of humans and the rest of nature. The current economic paradigm is built on abstract mathematical models and unrealistic assumptions that makes it unable to address the exploitation, oppression, and unsustainability driving our socio-economic systems. Mainstream economics pays little attention to the source of goods and services in nature, the energy and materials required to bring them to markets, or finite waste sinks; and yet it has major influence not only on education, management and policy, but also on norms, values and behavior. Thus, a new paradigm shift in economics needs to be based on a co-evolutionary understanding of economic processes undergoing continual adaptation to rapidly changing ecological and social systems, as well as the application of critical and systems thinking approaches that enable collaboration, pluralism, diversity, and decolonization in economic thought. We believe that this new approach can inform the shift needed in economics to enable a just transition to a right-sized economy to confront the rampant inequalities and ecological crises of the 21st century.
This summer crash course draws from a foundation in ecological economics (EE). Ecology and economics share the same Greek root word, oikos or household, where ecology is the study of the household and economics is the management of the household. EE applies this to study and manage human impacts on the world. EE recognizes that the economy is embedded in and completely dependent on the social realities of human culture and institutions and in the biological and physical (biophysical) realities of low-entropy (available) energy and material resources that enable wellbeing, and the natural sinks that absorb the waste outputs from economic processes.
From this worldview, we understand that the goal of the political economy is to serve society to provide equitable well-being for all, including future generations, in a way that is sustainable, just and efficient. This crash course also draws from allied heterodox (outside of orthodox economics) schools of economics and radical pragmatism to move beyond conventional economics by embracing critical pluralism to solve real world issues of long-term sustainability. In the aftermath of Covid-19, radical pragmatism has been proposed as a new way of responding to crises that goes beyond the state/market dichotomy. It involves trying whatever works, while being guided by an experimental mindset, commitment to empiricism and measuring results. Finally, this course aims to pass the torch to the next generation to ensure that the vision of ecological economics can be sustained and acted on in the next critical decades.
Course Objectives:
To explore the paradigm shift underlying ecological economics and how other heterodox schools of economic thought can contribute to understand our political economy.
To expose participants to systems thinking and the ecological economics toolbox.
To build a network for strengthening and promoting the educational, collaborative and policy advocacy vision of EE4ALL.
Means of interaction among participants and presenters for the course:
Zoom and youtube: We will be using zoom and youtube livestream for the teaching aspect of the course.
Join our Slack for the EE4ALL summer crash course 2022 to network, raise questions and discuss the information that we will be co-learning during and after the crash course.
Follow us on Twitter: It is highly recommended to tweet about the course/presenters before, during, and after to share and amplify our co-learning with our communities.
Certificate of Participation
You will receive a certificate of participation after having provided feedback at the end of the course, having participated/watched all of the presentations, and completed the En-ROADS weekend reflection/application of ecological economics. The certificate for this version of the course is no longer available but they will be when we resume our new course offerings.
The main learning sources for the educational materials and videos for the 4 days:
EE4All website, google folders (including the zoom chats for each day), and our EE4ALL YouTube Channel.
We highly recommend going through the Econ 101 page to learn the basics about Ecological Economics.
You can also find these and other reading materials on Libgen and Sci-Hub.
The Original Schedule for the 4 Days was 12-3 p.m Eastern Time (US and Canada):
Click on each presenter’s name to learn more about their bios:
Curriculum for Each Day
Day 1 (July 7th) - Why do we Need a Socio-Ecological Paradigm Shift in Economics?
Shifting Away From the Unsustainable Growth Paradigm
Recording available here: https://youtu.be/v7F65TxGDGY
Humanity is confronting unprecedented inequality and climate crises that cannot be addressed by the growth paradigm that helped to create them. In particular, we need to rethink the hegemonic paradigm of neoclassical and neoliberal economics to include other ways of understanding and explaining how the economy works based on the real world, critical thinking, pluralism, and systems thinking. Ecological economics (EE) offers a transdisciplinary explanation of the economy where the economic system is embedded within the social system that is also embedded in the biological and physical (biophysical) system. It focuses on social dilemmas and collective action problems rather than on private property, individual choice and the profit motive. It can help inform a new socio-ecological paradigm that can reground economic education to achieve real as opposed to greenwashed sustainability. The vision of EE is more relevant than ever as scientists have repeatedly sounded the alarm that we are rapidly crossing planetary boundaries such as climate change, facing limits to economic growth, and depleting our finite stocks of fossil fuels. This requires a just sustainability transition to a right-sized economy that is informed by natural and social sciences to transform our economies and foster genuine well-being for all through ecologically sustainable and equitable societies.
Suggested readings/videos:
Erickson, Jon D., 2022. Chapter 1 The education of an economist. In The progress illusion: Reclaiming our future from the fairytale of economics. Island Press, Washington, DC.
Video: Jon Erickson provides an intro to why do we need a shift in economics?
Video: Donella Meadows Envisioning A Sustainable Future
Supplemental readings/videos:
Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., Cornell, S.E., Fetzer, I., Bennett, E.M., Biggs, R., Carpenter, S.R., De Vries, W., De Wit, C.A. and Folke, C., 2015. Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. science, 347(6223), p.1259855.
Vargas Roncancio, I., Temper, L., Sterlin, J., Smolyar, N.L., Sellers, S., Moore, M., Melgar-Melgar, R., Larson, J., Horner, C., Erickson, J.D. and Egler, M., 2019. From the Anthropocene to mutual thriving: an agenda for higher education in the Ecozoic. Sustainability, 11(12), p.3312.
Video: Johan Rockström on 10 years to transform the future of humanity or destabilize the planet
Day 2 (July 8th) - The Biophysical and Social Foundations for a New Economic Story:
How a Socio-Ecological Paradigm Changes our Goals?
Recording available here: https://youtu.be/VOHcQtLOvBU
To understand what a socio-ecological paradigm shift in economics could be, we begin by grounding the economic system in a social and biophysical foundation. From a biophysical perspective, economic systems are embedded in the biophysical world of low-entropy (available) energy which is required to transform matter in economic processes to provide human beings with material well-being. Meanwhile, the social foundation of the economy informs the institutions and behavioral patterns in which human societies operate. This understanding of the biophysical and social foundations of economic systems is reflected in the three goals of EE: sustainable scale, just distribution and efficient allocation. Conventional economics is often defined in Econ 101 textbooks as the study of the efficient allocation of scarce resources among people with unlimited wants, where efficiency boils down to the maximization of monetary value. However, in EE we understand that our economy is sustained by the ecological functions of our finite planet. It therefore prioritizes the goal of desirable scale: how much of nature’s finite resources can be transformed into economic production, and how much must be conserved to generate life sustaining ecosystem functions for all species? A second goal is the just distribution of our shared inheritance from nature, within and between generations, as well as the just distribution of wealth produced collectively by society as a whole. A third goal is efficiency: given finite resources, how can we attain sufficient well-being for all at a minimum ecological cost? Thus, understanding the biophysical and social foundation of the economy is essential to inform what the sustainable scale of our economies can be to justly distribute and then efficiently allocate resources to sufficiently meet human needs within planetary boundaries.
Suggested readings/videos:
Farley, J., 2016. The foundations for an ecological economy: an overview. Beyond Uneconomic Growth.
Melgar-Melgar, R.E. and Hall, C.A., 2020. Why ecological economics needs to return to its roots: The biophysical foundation of socio-economic systems. Ecological Economics, 169, p.106567.
Krall, L., 2018. The economic legacy of the Holocene. The Ecological Citizen, 2(1), pp.67-76.
Video: Lisi Krall on The Origin of the Economic Superorganism
Video: Josh Farley on Ecological Economics a Paradigm for People & Planet: The Social & Biophysical Foundations of the Economy
Supplemental readings/videos:
Faber, M., 2008. How to be an ecological economist. Ecological Economics, 66(1), pp.1-7.
Gowdy, J. and Krall, L., 2013. The ultrasocial origin of the Anthropocene. Ecological Economics, 95, pp.137-147
Video: Charles Hall, Josh Farley, Nate Hagens and Marta Ceroni on the Limits to Growth 50 Years Later Ukraine, Inflation, Depletion, & the Urgent Need for Systems Change
Day 3 (July 11th) - Systems Thinking and The Role of Other Heterodox Schools of Economics for a New Economic Story:
How Can Systematically Rethinking Institutions With a Diversity of Ideas and Vision Help us Achieve Our Sustainability Goals?
Recording available here: https://youtu.be/JGJkR0IITxM
A new economic story based on the socio-ecological paradigm of EE needs to be based on systems thinking and informed by other heterodox economic schools to be real world based, critical, plural, and decolonized. EE is grounded in the recognition of planetary biophysical limits and systems thinking. This recognition can help us to explain how the many parts of complex socio-economic systems operate within the biophysical world of energy and materials, and the social realities of human systems that transform the environment to provide us with well-being. Heterodox schools of economics can help explain how we change our society to improve wellbeing for humans and the rest of nature, for example: how human behavior can be adjusted or nudged to minimize waste and cultivate a mindset of real sustainability (behavioral economics); how working less can improve well-being, and how taking into consideration gender disparities help us address inequities (feminist economics); how institutions and norms guide the economy and can be catalysts for transforming its goals (institutionalist economics); how we can understand the role of finance and money in the economy and the need for an ecological macroeconomics (post-Keynesian economics); how we can explain the co-evolution of our economy to learn from history and implement a precautionary principle for future generations (evolutionary economics); how we can make sense of the complexity of the nexus between the biophysical and social realities driving our economies (complexity economics), etc. By studying the economy with a systems thinking lens we can connect the different aspects of heterodox schools of economics to inform and promote institutions for a just transition to a right-sized economy.
Suggested readings:
Eisler, R., 2021. Whole Systems Change: A Framework and First Steps for Social/Economic Transformation. In Speth, J.G. and Courrier, K. eds., The New Systems Reader: Alternatives to a Failed Economy. Routledge.
Speth, G., 2021. A Joyful Economy: A Next System Possibility. In Speth, J.G. and Courrier, K. eds., The New Systems Reader: Alternatives to a Failed Economy. Routledge.
Røpke, I., 2020. Econ 101—In need of a sustainability transition. Ecological Economics, 169, p.106515.
Video: Donella Meadows on Systems Thinking and Sustainable Systems
Supplemental readings/videos:
An article by Amna Silim, What is New Economic Thinking, that compares neoclassical, complexity, evolutionary, and behavioral theories of economics. https://evonomics.com/new-economic-thinking/
David Sloan Wilson’s article series by heterodox thinkers specifically for those who are thinking about studying economics/becoming economists, who are troubled by what they're being taught, and who are asking all the right questions.
https://thisviewoflife.com/advice-to-an-aspiring-economist-introduction/
Meadows, D.H., 2008. Thinking in systems: A primer. Chelsea Green Publishing.
Day 4 (July 12th) - A New Way of Economic Teaching, Practice, and Policy Making
Recording available here:https://youtu.be/4gk6hez8j8o
By grounding economic teaching, practice and policy making on a socio-ecological paradigm that respects our biophysical reality and understands our social context, thus generating new goals and recognizing the need for new institutions, we can begin to build movements within and outside of academia to promote justice and sustainability. To create a new economic story that works for people and the planet, we need to explore alternative economies that exist around the world to learn from them how we can genuinely thrive with the rest of nature. We have to rethink development patterns in the Global North and Global South to break free from exploitative and unsustainable patterns of wealth creation, and shift from quantitative to qualitative development that is centered on improving genuine well-being within planetary boundaries.
Suggested readings/videos:
Kothari, Ashish. 2021. These alternative economies are inspirations for a sustainable world. Scientific American: Sustainability.
Raworth, K., 2017. A Doughnut for the Anthropocene: humanity's compass in the 21st century. The Lancet planetary health, 1(2), pp.e48-e49. Plus supplemental material.
Video: Ashish Kothari: Radical Democracy: Towards a Sustainable, Equitable World
Video: Kate Raworth: A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow
Supplemental readings:
Jackson, T., Victor, P., 2021. Towards a new, green economy: Sustainable and just at community scale. In Speth, J.G. and Courrier, K. eds., The New Systems Reader: Alternatives to a Failed Economy. Routledge.
Schmelzer, M., Vansintjan, A., Vetter, A., 2022. Chap. 6. Making degrowth real. In The future is degrowth: A guide to a world beyond capitalism.
Kothari, A., Salleh, A., Escobar, A., Demaria, F., and Acosta, A., 2019. Pluriverse: a post-development dictionary. Tullika Books: New Delhi, India.