I Return This Respect

Ecological economics is not just a specific branch of the field (or the economics of a specific type of goods), it's a completely new set of priorities, a massive overhaul of the goals and mechanisms of the financial system. It was one of the most in-depth fields of research I pursued for this album. This was partly because I never took a class in economics, so I had to learn something about the traditional models before I could understand how ecological economics changed them.

The most fundamental premise of ecological economics is that we have not correctly valued ecosystem services under the current system. Farmers, for example, know the value of having micro-organisms in the soil break down waste and re-fertilize the ground, but pay nothing for the privilege, and wouldn't be compensated if something kills these organisms. Nestlé can make millions bottling water that they only pay a tiny administration fee for. Ecosystem resources have various barriers to being valued properly in our current monetary system. Some resemble traditional commodities, as the pollination industry does: beekeepers are paid to tour their bees around North American farms to help the plants reproduce. But other resources, like air, are consumed whether we like it or not and people in a region don't have a choice of what quality they get.

Ecological economics classifies and recommends how to incorporate ecosystem products and services into the current system, but there is an even more fundamental problem: economics is currently predicated on growth to drive it forward. This is against biological and physical science that suggests that the Earth can only support so many people. Technology may continue to increase the efficiency with which we use resources, and thus the planet's carrying capacity may continue to grow incrementally, but there are limits on the amount of several key resources on Earth. Metal may continue to be recycled, but there is only so much available on the planet and 100% recycling is physically impossible. So, practically, the world economy will have to shift from one that expects everything to grow perpetually to one that expects things will merely sustain themselves.

Proponents of ecological economics express this like a police investigator might: we can do this the easy way, or the hard way. The hard way involves doing nothing to change until we run straight into the carrying capacity, and entails at the very least extreme hardship and privation for most, and more likely war and cultural regression in the struggle for limited resources. The easy way involves preemptive measures to enact the change to a sustainable economy ahead of time, incentivizing positive change with government money and by adapting existing financial institutions.

This is one of the places I had to do some learning about how "our" (I imagine Canada is similar, but the book focused on the U.S.) current system works. One of the major financial changes ecological economics recommends is giving the government back the power to issue currency. I didn't understand that the current U.S. system gives that power to private financial institutions, who can then sometimes lend ten times the money they create because of the fractional reserve system, where banks are only required to have something like 10% of the cash they lend to their clients on hand at any given time. So, for every dollar created, they can lend it to tend different people at once and collect interest from all of them. Ecological economics advocates changing this system so that governments control the issue of currency, as a means of paying for the transition to a sustainable economy: offering financial incentives to conduct research and change environmental practices.

The problem is a lot of people benefit from the current system, and are wilfully ignorant or cynically selfish about their role in perpetuating an unsustainable growth-based economy. They either don't believe we'll ever need to control growth, or think that when the crash comes the wealth that they've accrued will put them in a better position to survive it comfortably. And the people that will be hit hardest by unsustainability and environmental degradation aren't just determined by wealth, but by geography as well. It's apparently a fact that both 80% of the world's population and its biodiversity are located in the tropics, but global wealth is massively concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere, in Europe and North America. In studies that try to estimate the effects of global warming in economies and productivity, most admit that it will either have little impact or a moderately positive effect above the 49^th parallel. The growing waves of immigration into northern countries from those feeling the most detrimental effects seems like the only logical step for those people to take, and considering much of the environmental degradation in the tropics is driven by the need for raw materials and cheap labour from northern countries, immigration quotas and restrictions seem massively unfair.

This is all really big picture stuff I'm not sure I've fully understood, but my readings in ecological economics were very eye opening. Seeing such scary data presented so matter-of-factually, realizing how decentralized power is in our system and how little influence governments have to change things compared to private companies that are benefiting from the status quo; now I began to understand why one of the biologists I had read earlier on blamed environmental degradation on “a lack of democracy in the economic sphere.” The situation seemed dispiriting, but not completely hopeless, since people's individual behaviours and spending habits still have tremendous power to affect everything, including the massive private companies.

I knew I wanted my songs to contain some of the things I'd learned about biodiversity over the course of my research and inspire people to care more about it. But I didn't want to scare people needlessly or recommend specific courses of action since new research often changes what we think the best thing is to do. So I read some books on teaching environmental education as my last field of research before starting to pull some song ideas out. I read some lesson plans and course outlines from teachers, and several took pride in “creating a narrative arc” that would inspire student engagement. It seemed more like emotional manipulation to me. They talked about purposely depressing their students in the beginning of the course, only to inspire them at the end with hopeful reading, trying to create students with an appreciation for the seriousness of environmental problems and the belief that they can personally go out and change things.

It seemed like my instincts matched up more with the educational theorists than with these narrative-creating environmental teachers. The theorists I read emphasized critical discussion which retained student agency, the right to choose what behaviour individual students thought was best. The goal of environmental education, according to them, was to create students that are able to solve environmental problems, that have the capacities to think critically, discuss with others, and act politically and collectively to find an implement solutions.

So environmental education shouldn't be about telling you to recycle, or else. It should be about explaining the problem recycling attempts to solve, the potential consequences of not acting, the ways we've though about solving the problem. As the student, you should understand why recycling is a good thing to do, and then you will choose to do it. But what did this mean for writing songs? Maybe I could write songs that demonstrated the challenges of considering environmental issues, and focus on building a capacity for critical thought in my listeners through example? After such extensive research, I sure was acutely feeling the challenges of thinking about solutions to environmental issues, so I decided to try that.