Eco-Logo-Nomos - or The Eco-Eco Test

The Eco-Eco Test

Ever since the early 1970's, having just emerged as a philosophy and economics graduate from UCLA, I've been fixated on the idea that in Economics and Ecology, it's the same "Eco".  That's where I get my "greateco" handle, and I've written extensively about the connections  between the two fields and how they are "parts of a common problem-solution nexus".  I didn't patent that, or anything, and it turns out that Ken Boulding, who was teaching there in Boulder, CO when I showed up there, had already written a seminal article on that very topic.  I heard Boulding lecture once, and introduced myself  afterwards, and bought the  book which contained this essay, but  I only read it recently - or at least, I only remember reading it recently. 

But when I was in Boulder, I offered the first course of lectures and discussions I'd ever done.  And it was called that:  "Eco-Logo-Nomos" - how economics and ecology work together. 
There are many schools of "environmental economics," now, and those ideas were in play long before I was born - especially in Thoreau and other Transcendental Romantiks.  It's Darwinism and Spencerism in Britain;  Nietzsche, Humboldt, and Goethe, perhaps, in the German-speaking world, and many Scandinavians, past and present, are part of this tradition. 

With the obviousness and near-universal agreement with these ideas, it continues to amaze me how the whole enlightened community can be bullied into acquiesence by a handful of "resource" corporations.  Didn't anybody see "Avatar"?  This is real.  This is happening, now, in Northern Alberta.  And we've been connected to it ever since my father worked as an "Indian Agent" in that very locale in the 1960's.  I'm supposed to even have some relatives there, among the indigenous Cree. 

Unfortunately, I destroyed a priceless archive of photos and his work there.  He was accused of producing pornography - for photographing Native women without clothes, or whatever - and was rousted by the Mounties and deported from Canada.  As a small boy, my father lived half a block from Charlie Russell, and he distributed a lot of prints of Russell's work to his Indian friends.  Anyone who knew my father knows that he wasn't into anything "for the money" or to exploit people. 

It reminds me of the woman artist who took a roll of film of her naked children playing or posing for some art work she was doing to a Fuji kiosk, and as a consequence, lost custody of her children and had to spend $175,000 on lawyer fees just to stay out of prison.  I hope Fuji reimbursed her, and if not, they should have. 

This is a rather oblique example of the "Eco-eco Test" (EET).  We can subject any law or regulation to the EET.  In many cases, it will be a matter of determining whether or not the law and its consequences are both ethical and practical.  And does it satisfy other basic criteria of social welfare like Pareto's "Optimality"?  Of course we do make interpersonal calculations of utility for any public policy.  Pareto assures us that a minority are not being made actually worse-off for the benefit of some privileged elite.  Not at all in force, so far as the modern "criminal justice system" is concerned.  They violate that principle every day, along with traditional bans on any kind of torture, administrative detention, or commercial exploitation (slavery). 

It is one of the ironies of Montana history that Jeanette Rankin, Montana's (and the nation's) first woman elected to Congress, who was basically a liberal socialist, feminist, probably lesbian, and otherwise far to the "left" of today's Democrats, actually ran and won as a Republican, and her brother, J. Wellington, was one of the most powerful men in Montana, using prison labor to run his vast ranches, which are still largely owned by the Galt family.  One wonders at the veracity of the Jeanette Rankin "re-enactment" video produced a few years ago.  Maybe the Galt family financed it. 

Why is it that no one running for office outside of the Green Party seems to have any awareness of the EET?  Just use simple input-output analysis.  Everything counts.  There aren't any "externalities."  That is why we use a "socialist" model, or other "holistic" thinking.  We have to think of the good (survival, prosperity, health, welfare, etc.) of the WHOLE, not just our particular "team", city, state, nation, or family.  That is why we have DEMOCRACY.  Everything counts, and no information can be excluded.  We're not a small gang or clique trying to control or exploit others.