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Herman Daly: Supporting leaders in ecological economics
By MAGGIE I. JARUZEL
Herman E. Daly shakes his head in dismay when businessmen and politicians point to ongoing economic growth — whether local, national or global — as the panacea for poverty and unemployment. And when world leaders and economists recite only positives about the global marketplace, he cannot keep silent.
“There is almost an idolatry of this concept of growth. You can’t say anything bad about growth — because it is seen as the solution to everything,” Daly said.
“This is a delusion. There comes a point where growth can become uneconomic, just too costly, and we are getting to that point. It’s when growth really does cost more in terms of sacrificing our ecosystems than the extra products are worth.”
Speaking frankly and challenging the status quo are two of Daly’s trademark characteristics, whether as a professor in a university classroom or as a senior economist in the Environment Department at the World Bank.
For nearly five decades, Daly has lived and breathed economics, focusing the bulk of his career on the interplay between human economies and natural ecosystems.
 Herman E. Daly |
During his tenure at the World Bank from 1988 to 1994, he joined colleagues in developing policy guidelines that support sustainable development internationally. These policies aim to balance economic growth, environmental protection, and human well-being for large infrastructure projects such as roads, dams, and oil and gas pipeline projects.
The policies sparked changes at other international financial lending institutions, and it is now standard practice to require environmental impact studies before funding is approved for multimillion-dollar projects in developing countries.
As a result of both his depth and breadth of expertise on the subject, Daly is recognized as an international leader in the field, and many refer to him as the father of ecological economics. Still others credit him with giving a warm heart to what sometimes is called a cold discipline.
Ever the teacher, Daly succinctly reduces the complex study of ecological economics to three key elements: allocation of resources, distribution of income and scale of the economy as it relates to nature.
He has given national and international lectures on the topic; served as co-founder and associate editor of the trade journal, Ecological Economics; written dozens of articles for an array of publications; and authored several books, including Steady-State Economics, Valuing the Earth and Beyond Growth.
The father of two and grandfather of three is known as a humble man. If there is anything he boasts of, it is his 42-year marriage to Marcia. While trips to South America aren’t as frequent as they once were, the couple still travel to her native Brazil to visit the people and places they love.
These days, the professor with a quick smile — and even quicker wit — can be found mentoring graduate and doctoral students in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. Recognized as the top ecological economics institution in the country, the university has been the recipient of $200,000 in Mott Foundation grants since 1999 for its “Supporting Tomorrow’s Leaders in Ecological Economics” program.
The program enables Daly to serve as a mentor to promising leaders in the field. It is something he has done formally and informally since his days as a professor at Louisiana State University in the 1970s and 1980s.
One of Daly’s LSU students, David Batker, is known internationally for his own work in ecological economics, specifically in relation to natural disasters. He says damage could have been lessened from the Asian tsunami in 2004 and the U.S.’s hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 if ecological economics principles had been incorporated into major coastal development projects in those areas, such as ensuring that mangroves and wetlands remained intact to absorb some of the storms’ impact before hitting land.
Batker is grateful for Daly’s mentoring and cites him as a pioneer in the field.
“Herman is a supreme teacher and a person of tremendous integrity. His ideas form the most important advancement in modern economics,” said Batker, executive director of Earth Economics (formerly the Asia Pacific Environmental Exchange’s Center for Applied Ecological Economics) in Seattle, Washington.
“On many occasions, I saw Herman speak up in the face of tremendous institutional opposition within the World Bank. He did so with convincing clarity, and without malevolence or a personal agenda, to successfully transform the policies of the World Bank for the better.”
Daly’s views on economics caused controversy at the World Bank and other international financial institutions because they went against the grain of traditional economics. Simplified, the foundation of traditional economics is that Earth’s natural resources — and its ability to absorb pollution of those resources — are virtually limitless. For ecological economists, Earth’s natural systems are limited and should be treated as such.
Consequently, traditional economists discuss the ever-increasing exchange of goods and services as necessary for economic growth, while Daly and others point to the “negative impacts” and “disservices” that are characteristic of unlimited growth.
For example, he asks, “What is the true cost of a product?”
If a mahogany tree is cut down, there are costs for chopping it, transporting it to a sawmill and paying someone to make it into products that can be marketed, distributed and sold.
But Daly wonders, “What is the cost of growing another 200-year-old tree?” The market doesn’t measure those costs, yet they are real, he says. So are the costs to people of polluting land, water and air in the name of economic growth and development.
Often when he states other troubling truths for ecological economists, such as the disconnect between the Earth’s static biosphere and the ever-increasing number of humans and their possessions (cars, cattle, houses, etc.), he can predict people’s responses.
“They ask me, ‘So what are we going to do if we are not going to grow?’ I tell them, ‘It means we are going to have to share’ — and that is not the news some people want to hear.”
His conversations are peppered with provocative questions and vivid illustrations in an effort to make the complex subject matter easier to understand.
For example, when Daly discusses globalization, he mentions strong concerns about governments becoming integrated instead of interdependent. For Daly, the difference between interdependence and integration is like “the difference between being friends and being married.”
At age 68, Daly has garnered more national and international honors than a single wall can hold. Among them, he has been given the Honorary Right Livelihood Award, which is Sweden’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize; the Heineken Prize for Environmental Science awarded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic for his work in steady-state economics; and the U.S. Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, which he shared with theologian John Cobb for the book they co-authored, For the Common Good.
His life’s work has not been done to gain awards or esteem, Daly says. Instead, it has been to leave the planet a wee bit better than he found it — and to instill that desire in others.
These days, he is slowing down somewhat, evidenced by his move from full- to part-time status at the university.
But the fire in his belly is still fueled. He insists that Planet Earth has room for qualitative development without quantitative growth.
“As long as we respect the physical limits of the system, we can keep the path of progress