Second, ecological economists view state intermediation as crucial for bringing about a balance between the demand of individual appropriators of natural stocks and the ecological system’s requirements for self-maintenance. To clarify this observation, economists Robert Costanza and Herman Daly, for example, differentiate between micro and macro allocations of ecological resources. Micro allocations are made by individual producers and consumers competing for goods and energy. Here, as individual producers and consumers compete to maximize their private benefits, there will be an overexpansion of the economy. Since natural resource stocks are vital resources held in trust by the collectivity for the benefit of present and future generations, macro or collective social decisions take precedence over private market decisions under the stewardship of the state. This is the reason why the state should have greater interest in the future of the ecological system than individuals because the integrity of the ecology and the stability of social existence of the collectivity are public goods, which only the state could provide.61
Third, ecological economists rightly contend that resolution of structural poverty is requisite for maintaining the integrity of the ecological system. This reasoning inheres in the contention that poor people have no stake in ecological conservation since their survival is based in the here and now. Given their wretched circumstances, the poor are likely to discount the present to the future. Therefore, it is in society’s long-term interest to ameliorate the living conditions of the poor. Just distribution and sustainability are the criteria by which both social justice and sustainable scale of the economy are measured. In a nutshell, societal demand for and nature’s ability to supply low-entropy throughput and sinks would not be in steady state unless a brake is put on limitless growth of resource extraction and sink utilization and unless there is just distribution of goods and services.62
Finally, the contribution of ecological economists to unmasking the fetishism of gross domestic product (GDP) is difficult to exaggerate. By conveniently focusing on aggregate growth of the economy, measured in terms of GDP, neoclassical economists have long masked the costs of unfettered capitalist accumulation underlying GDP growth. For neoclassical economists, anything that does not produce exchange value has no value at all. Ecosystem services are typically taken by capital free of charge, and thus have no market value because dollars are not exchanged. They confine their measurement to the natural resources that produce goods such as timber and wood pulp for which there are markets, while ignoring the non-market services provided by trees before being cut down, such as pollination services, carbon sequestration, climate regulation, water purification, storm protection, and shoreline stabilization.
In an apparent effort to demystify the position taken by orthodox economists, ecological economists have struggled for a quarter-century to put a price tag on ecosystem services in ways that are understandable to the average person, even though putting a price tag on ecosystem functions is controversial. This is because commodification and privatization of these services are associated with the valuation exercise, since some market fundamentalists have already proposed payment for ecosystem services as a solution to resource overuse. After thoroughgoing examination of seventeen ecosystem service types from sixteen biomes, Robert Costanza and his colleagues put a price tag of $145 trillion on the services that humans derive annually from the ecosystem in terms of carbon sequestration, climate regulation, water production and purification, storm protection, erosion control, shoreline stabilization, pollination, waste absorption, and provision of suitable habitats to an array of terrestrial, marine and aquatic species. If the destruction and degradation of marine and terrestrial ecosystems that took place between 1997 and 2011 had been avoided, the valuation of global ecosystem services could have been $167 trillion per annum. In other words, we have lost $22 trillion worth of crucial ecosystem services between 1997 and 2011; the destruction of coral reefs alone may have cost the global economy $11.9 trillion during that period. For reference, the gross world product of the global economy in 2011 was $75 trillion.63
There are also unavoidable abiotic consequences of industrial globalization, costs that are not captured by GDP. The dogged determination of capital to create a borderless world has indeed placed the fate of the biosphere on a precariously dangerous trajectory. The flows of global trade soared from $3 trillion in the early 1980s to $30 trillion in 2012, with no consideration of the environmental costs of the circulation of these goods. Almost all globally traded goods are transported by gigantic containerized cargo vessels crisscrossing the world’s oceans and seas, dumping all manner of refuse and toxic fuels along the way, without anyone monitoring what they do to vital parts of the biosphere. The global circulation of goods by sea increased from 228.3 million traffic equivalent units (TEUs) in 1994 to 627.5 million TEUs in 2013; this is equivalent to 150 million trailer-size containers carrying goods across the globe.64
Can criticisms be made of modern ecological economics? Ecological economists are unreproachable in terms of their description of the connections between allocative efficiency, sustainable scale, and just distribution. Empirically, the market is ill-equipped to reveal the real non-market values of natural goods and services, much less to justly distribute them. Nor can the market tell us how much of the animal species, forests, and wetlands should be left intact to maintain ecosystem integrity. Additionally, since distributive equity and sustainable scale, by definition, are antithetical to the logic of capitalist accumulation, the market cannot address issues of equity and scale short of socially determined imposition of limitations and regulations on market operations. In keeping with the law of conservation of matter/energy, ecological economists are also right when they propose the paramount importance of prior determination of scale in resource extraction, since outflow of high-entropy wastes into the environment is proportional to the inflow of low-entropy throughput from the environment into the economy.
However, when it comes to prescriptions, contemporary ecological economics falters. In the first place, the supposition that stocks of material wealth and levels of populations can be maintained at some desired levels within the prevailing capitalist mode of production betrays objective understanding of how the logic of accumulation operates. The notion that steady-state conditions can be attained if people somehow temper their wants for the nearly infinite flow of goods and services smacks of religion, not of a materialist understanding of history. Because ecological economists hinge their prescriptions on ethics to tame the appetites of capital accumulators and consumers, the propositions forwarded to address issues of resource conservation, poverty eradication, and climate mitigation takes on quasi-religious overtones.
Their own class limitations have, perhaps subconsciously, made ecological economists steer clear of both the reactionary stagnation of the bourgeois order and the needed revolutionary transformation of it. Ecological economists forget that infinite expansion of accumulation is the heart and soul of capitalism. The prescriptive weakness of ecological economists stems from the general orientation they share with all bourgeois economists on the recognition of capitalism as a system without alternative and thus incapable of qualitative change. It can only be subjected to judicious modifications. This requires making bourgeois ethics guide the call for reform, meaning persuading corporations, states, and consumers to recognize the singular fact that there are limits to growth, that they should be willing to trade the prevailing productionist growth ideology for an earnest commitment to sustainable development, and that consumers of all classes ought to learn how to live within their means, combating conspicuous consumption and respecting nature. But if there is anything anathema to capitalist accumulation,