THREE ECONOMIC PARADIGMS
by
Chris Maser

Analysis must always serve synthesis in order to serve life; what is taken apart must be put back together again. — Robert Johnson

According to the reductionist mechanical worldview—which is today overlain with the notion of continual economic expansion—the economic process of producing and consuming material goods and services has no deleterious effects on the ecosystem because the assumptions are that natural resources are limitless and the unintended, deleterious effects of the economic process are inconsequential. In contrast to the dominant worldview, however, the paradigm of sustainability is neither mechanical nor reversible. It is entropic, which means that the Earth's resources and its ability to absorb and cleanse the waste produced by humanity's economic activities are both finite.¹

By tying the economic process to the entropy of the physical world, as mentioned earlier, economist Georgescu-Roegen pointed out that for Western industrialized society to survive with any semblance of dignity, there must be a shift from the old reductionist mechanical world view to a paradigm built around sustainability. In making that point, however, he posed the unspoken question of how one measures sustainability in terms of human welfare. For the sake of discussion, three potential measures will be considered:



GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT

The Gross Domestic Product, which is nothing more than a measure of total output (the dollar value of finished goods and services), tells very little in and of itself because it assumes that everything produced is by definition "goods," including people.¹ William Bennett, who was President Reagan's Secretary of Education, observed that "socialism treats people as a cog in a machine of the state; capitalism tends to treat people as commodities." As such, the Gross Domestic Product is an intellectual measure of the size of the U.S. economy, the amount of money that exchanges hands in a strictly additive sense—like an adding machine that cannot subtract. Thus, Gross Domestic Product makes no distinction between benefits and costs (credits and debits), productive and destructive activities, or sustainable and nonsustainable activities. In addition to which, there is no allowance for the declining quality of human life in the face of environmental degradation.

The reason for this disregard of human welfare is simply that the Gross Domestic Product treats everything that happens in the marketplace as a positive gain for humanity and thereby de facto ignores everything that cannot be converted into money as being unimportant to social well-being, such as the logging practices that destroy habitat for salmon. In this case, both logging and commercial salmon fishing cause money to exchange hands and count as a plus in the valuation of the Gross Domestic Product, even though the degradation of the salmon's habitat caused by logging in the mountains will eventually put the commercial salmon fishers in the ocean out of business. Politicians, however, generally see this decaying quality of human life through a well-worn ideological lens that accepts economic growth as good even as it cannibalizes the family, community, and environment that nurtures and sustains us.

On a more personal note, consider a man dying slowly of cancer who needs three major operations while in the middle of a messy divorce that forces him to sell his home. This man is an asset to the economy from the Gross Domestic Product point of view because he is the cause of so much money exchanging hands.

In the first case, commercial salmon fishers are faced with a declining way of life because the logging they never see is slowly destroying their livelihood. In the second case, the quality of life of the dying man could hardly get much worse.

In both cases, the valuation of the Gross Domestic Product goes up at the unmeasured expense of the commercial salmon fishers who are losing a way of life and the dying man who is losing everything he held dear to forces other than his impending death. This scenario is somewhat analogous to adding (crediting) the amount of each check one writes against one's bank account instead of subtracting (debiting) it.

The significance of this illogical calculation of economic activity revolves around the Gross Domestic Product as the primary indicator of economic growth (the economic score card) from one year to the next in the U.S. As such, when growth in the Gross Domestic Product exceeds three percent, it is usually favorable for incumbent politicians. The danger hidden within the calculation of the Gross Domestic Product, as a real measure of economic growth, however, is that it creates a false sense of prosperity and security, especially when growth is rapid because it ignores costs (adding only the benefits) and thus ignores the major problems confronting American society.

This kind of valuation is like adding up all of the inflowing cash from a shopping mall while ignoring both short-term costs (such as physical wear on buildings and equipment and the human labor involved in maintaining the buildings) and long-term costs (such as replacement of computer systems, resurfacing parking lots, replacing roofs, and so on).

Money itself as a measure of success is another example of a serious flaw in thinking and valuation where sustainability is concerned because the bottom line in business is always pleaded as the truly important figure. The bottom line, which shows how much profit has been made, is used as a measure of how well a company performs. Too little profit, and a company is deemed inefficient, its management is slack, the full potential of its workforce is not harnessed, its products are out of date, or most damning of all, the company is not competitive in the global economy.² Are such damnations true? Is money the only valid measure?

Perhaps a family-owned furniture company is making products that are robust and lasting and/or selling its products to people with only a moderate income or those who are somehow disadvantaged. It may be paying higher wages to its employees then other furniture companies in the belief that all people deserve a living wage. It may be investing heavily in a strategy to protect the ecological integrity of its forestland from which it draws the wood for its furniture or, having a noisy mill in a location being increasingly surrounded by people's homes, the company operates only one shift out of respect the people living in the neighborhood.

In a world where money is the only acceptable measure of success, however, all these considerations count as naught because traditional economists assure us that a linear notion of progress, which means full steam ahead in the strictly material realm, is always the right course of action (ready, fire, aim), whereas ecology is a discipline that teaches us the folly of speeding blindly into the future (ready, aim, fire). In the scenario of full steam ahead, the quality of the products and the welfare of the people and the environment are all irrelevant in the face of a bottom line that is not performing as desired. The irony is that the bottom-line profit actually accounts for only the last ten percent of the total income earned, whereas the ninety percent of the monies that have been paid to earn the ten percent are overruled and overshadowed by the ten percent bottom-line profit.

This type of valuation clearly points out that market economics places value on that which is scarce instead of placing value on the real work and worth of people and their potential for being loving and caring and for being an honest, just, and thoughtful person and neighbor. If we are to keep the softer social capital of mutual caring from becoming scarce, we must reward it. This, however, is one of the many areas in which the last ten percent of the dollars, squeezed into profit margins at the expense of the ninety percent along the way, is simply not effective in meeting human welfare because it does not build families or communities, does not tackle poverty or protect the environment.² Instead, adherence to the notion of Gross Domestic Product as a measure of economic viability is destroying the very ecosystems on which it must depend for biophysical sustainability.

The exploitive forestry practices employed by some—but not all— timber companies is illustrative of what I mean:

  • Annually clear-cut as much timber, primarily old growth, as one could sell, preferably as whole logs, overseas

  • Measure prosperity by economic activity and success by the automation that both eliminates people's jobs and simultaneously increases the profit margin

  • Measure progress as a continual technological advancement in the utilization of wood fiber from ever-younger trees

  • Promote personal self-interest, which requires thousands of complex and often competing regulations to keep self-centered, greedy people from clear-cutting entire landscapes

  • Encourage clear-cutting the entire riparian zone right down into the stream bottom

  • Leave nothing as a reinvestment of biological capital in the soil

  • Erode and ultimately destroy biological, genetic, and functional diversity through centralized corporate competition that converts as much of the world's forests as humanly possible into quick monetary profits

Clearly, therefore, the Gross Domestic Product, with its myopic focus on dollars and its flawed logic, cannot be a measure of sustainability as it relates to human welfare. If not Gross Domestic Product, then what could speak for human welfare? Many industrial participants of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, touted a strategy of "eco-efficiency" that would not only refit the machines of industry with cleaner, faster, and quieter engines but also allow unobstructed prosperity while simultaneously protecting both economic and corporate structures. measures

ECO-EFFICIENCY

Industrialists hoped that "eco-efficiency" would transform the economic process from one that takes, makes, and wastes into a system that integrates economic, environmental, and ethical concerns. Here you might ask what this notion of eco-efficiency is that industrialists around the world herald as their chosen strategy for change.

Eco-efficiency is a term that primarily means doing more with less, a precept that Henry Ford was adamant about when he wrote in 1926, "you must get the most out of the power, out of the material, and out of the time." His lean and clean operating policies saved his company money by recycling and reusing materials, reducing the use of natural resources, minimizing packaging, and setting new standards of human labor with his timesaving assembly line.³

Although eco-efficiency is a well-intentioned concept that looks good on the surface, it is still within the bowels of the reductionist mechanical world view with its current overlay of economic expansionism, and thus is little more than an illusion of change. Rather than focusing on a new way of thinking, such as how to effectively save the environment, industrialists once again attached their hope to efficiency—the swan song of the environment—with which, unconsciously perhaps, they have set themselves up to quietly, persistently, and completely commercialize the entire world. This is but saying that eco-efficiency, while it aspires to make the old world view less destructive, languishes from the fatal flaws hidden within the embrace of such destructive practices in the first place.

To view the fatal flaws inherent in the tenets of eco-efficiency, I will refit tenets of Gross Domestic Product with the current notion of eco-efficiency, which would look something like this:

  • Annually clear-cut fewer acres and purposefully hide them

  • Measures prosperity by less economic activity and success by introducing automation more slowly

  • Promotes less blatant personal self-interest by meeting or exceeding many or most of the complex and often competing regulations

  • Encourages saving a minimal buffer zone of non-merchantable trees but only along streams with anadromous fish

  • Encourages leaving two non-merchantable logs per acre as a reinvestment of biological capital in the soil

  • Standardizes and homogenizes biological, genetic, and functional diversity by replacing forests with cloned fiber farms for corporate economic benefit

Clearly, while eco-efficiency aspires to make the reductionist mechanical worldview more benign through reduction, reuse, and recycling, it does not stop these economically driven processes of exploitation, needless overproduction, acquisitiveness, and pollution. The real message of eco-efficiency is to restrict industry and slow or curtail growth— to put limitations on the creative and productive capacity of humankind. This message is simplistic, however, because Nature itself is highly industrious, creative through unpredictable novelty, astonishingly productive, and even "wasteful" when viewed in the short term. The salient point is that Nature, unlike human industry, is effective— not efficient.

Consider the pine, which annually casts billions of pollen grains to the vagaries of the ever-shifting wind so that a few might land in just the right place at just the right time to consummate the union of male and female gametes to form a few viable seeds. The seeds, in turn, must then ripen and drop to the soil in a place conducive to their germination and growth, all the while beset by the unpredictable elements of weather and the potential for a vast array of hungry microbes, fungi, insects, birds, and mammals to find and eat them—all of this so that a few, a very few, new pines might germinate in sufficient numbers to replace those that died and thus maintain the species. There is little, if any, waste in this apparent inefficiency because pollen and seed alike are sought as food by myriad organisms. Effective, yes; efficient, perhaps not, which brings me to the Genuine Progress Indicator. measures

GENUINE PROGRESS INDICATOR

The notion of a Genuine Progress Indicator is critical because it is the best—and perhaps the only—accurate way to balance our social values with our growing knowledge of how ecosystems work and the limitations their long-term integrity impose on both the potential and actual sustainability of our activities. Without such an indicator, environmentalists are often viewed and chided as being deviant, radical, subversive, extremist, anti-business, and un-American by business people because environmentalists rate the ecological values embodied in saving ancient forests and wetlands to be greater than those of economic growth.⁴

On the other hand, environmentalists often view business people as necessarily evil, greedy, and myopic by nature. Most of the problem with the economic point of view espoused by business people, according to Thomas Gladwin, director of the University of Michigan's corporate-environmental management program, is that business executives and managers often lack good cross-training in science, as evidenced by the fact that less than one percent out of 1.2 million articles written by business professors includes the words "pollution," "air," "water," or "energy."⁵

The Genuine Progress Indicator, in contrast to both Gross Domestic Product and eco-efficiency, is a measure of total economic activity that includes both benefits and costs (credits and debits).⁴ The notion of a Genuine Progress Indicator fits well with the aims of social-environmental sustainability, which passes to the next generation a healthy, economically viable society based on a healthy, biophysically viable environment.

In this way, the owner of a farm could measure the true value and ecological well-being of his or her property over time by assigning an economic value to non-economic indicators, such as the amount of organic material left on a harvested field as a biological reinvestment into the soil, the amount of petrocBees are enormously valuable to the functioning of virtually all terrestrial ecosystems and such worldwide industries as agriculture. Pollination by European honeybees, for example, is 60 to 100 times more valuable economically than is the honey they produce. In fact, the value of wild blueberry bees is so great that farmers who raise blueberries refer to them as "flying $50 bills."⁷

While more than half of the honeybee colonies in the U.S. have been lost within the last 50 years, 25 percent have been lost within the last five years. Widespread threats to bees and other pollinators are fragmentation and outright destruction of habitat (hollow trees for colonies in the case of wild honeybees), intense exposure to pesticides, a generalized loss of nectar plants to herbicides, as well as the gradual deterioration of "nectar corridors" that provide sources of food to migrating pollinators.

hemicals that annually leach into the groundwater from fertilizers, the amount of soil erosion due to wind and water, and so on. By assigning either a positive or negative value (a credit or debit) to each indicator, the indicators and their respective values can be combined into a single Genuine Progress Indicator for the ecological welfare of a particular owner's farmland.

The Genuine Progress Indicator would then serve not only as a baseline for all subsequent deliberations concerning sustainable farming practices but also as a means of measuring the effectiveness of the criteria used in ascertaining what is and is not sustainable. Another function of the Genuine Progress Indicator would be to add value to those resources and activities that have no value in terms of the Gross Domestic Product, such as contour plowing, leaving organic residue in harvests fields, creating and protecting fence-row habitat for native pollinators, and so on.

The Genuine Progress Indicator is an important tool because most, if not all, activities in on a farm or in a forest are omitted from valuation within the context of traditional economic measures, which becomes readily apparent when a landowner deliberates over the ecological well-being of his or her land in terms of traditional economics and as a legacy for the future. Having said this, it is imperative at this juncture to elaborate on some Nature's services that are omitted from traditional economic valuation.

The inherent services performed by Nature constitute the invisible foundation that is not only the wealth of every human community and its society but also is the supporting basis of our economies. In this sense, Nature's services are also the wealth of every farmer or owner of forestland.

For example, we rely on oceans to supply fish, forests to supply water, wood, and new medicines, rivers to transport the water from its source to a point where we can access it, soil to grow food, grasslands to produce redmeat, and so on. Although we base our livelihoods on the expectation that Nature will provide these services indefinitely and free of charge, the economic system to which we commit our unquestioning loyalty either undervalues, discounts, ignores, or actively destroys these services when computing the Gross Domestic Product and the real outcomes of eco-efficiency. This is but saying Nature's services, on which we rely for everything concerning the quality of our lives, are measured poorly or not at all.⁶

Because of the importance of Nature's inherent services, usually thought of as ecosystem functions, it is worthwhile to examine one such service in greater detail— pollination. Wild and semi-wild pollinators account for the pollination of eighty percent of all cultivated crops—1,330 varieties, including fruits, vegetable, coffee, and tea. Between 120,000 and 200,000 species of animals perform this service.⁷

In Germany, for instance, the people are so efficient at weeding their gardens that the nation's free-flying population of honeybees is rapidly declining, according to Werner Muehlen of the Westphalia-Lippe Agricultural Office. Bee populations have shrunk by 23 percent across Germany over the past decade, and wild honeybees are all but extinct in Central Europe. To save the bees, says Muehlen, "gardeners and farmers should leave at least a strip of weeds and wildflowers along the perimeter of their fields and properties to give bees a fighting chance in our increasingly pruned and … [sterile] world."⁸

Besides an increasing lack of food, one fifth of all the losses of honeybees in the U.S. is due to exposure to pesticides. Wild pollinators are even more vulnerable to pesticides than domestic European honeybees because, unlike hives of domestic honeybees that can be picked up and moved prior to the application of a chemical spray, whereas colonies of wild pollinators cannot be purposefully relocated. Since wild pollinators service at least eighty percent of the world's major crops and only fifteen percent are serviced by domesticated honeybees, the latter cannot be expected to fill the gap by themselves, as wild pollinators are lost.

Ironically, economic valuation of products as measured by the Gross Domestic Product fosters many of the practices employed in modern intensive agriculture and modern intensive forestry, which actually curtail the productivity of crops by reducing pollination. An example is the high level of pesticides used on cotton crops to kill bees and other insects, which reduces the annual yield in the U.S. by an estimated twenty percent or $400 million.⁷ In addition, herbicides used for a variety of reasons often kill the plants pollinators needed to sustain themselves when not pollinating crops.

Finally, the practice of squeezing every last penny out of a piece of ground by plowing the edges of fields to maximize the planting area can reduce yields by disturbing and/or removing nesting and rearing habitats for pollinators. With the above in mind, it seems obvious that the notions embodied in eco-efficiency are hardly going to be effective in reversing the economic rationale supporting the processes that drive environmental degradation.

Unfortunately, too many people are fueled by their unquestioning acceptance of current economic theory, which not only designs and condones but also actively encourages the above-mentioned destructive practices. Such people simply assume that the greatest value one can derive from an ecosystem, such as a forest, is that of maximizing its productive capacity for a single commodity to the exclusion of all else.

Single commodity production, however, is usually the least profitable and least sustainable way to use a forest because single commodity production simply cannot compete with the enormous value of non-timber services, such as the production of oxygen, capture and storage of water, holding soils in place, and maintaining habitat for organisms that are beneficial to the economic interests of people. These are all foregone when the drive is to maximize a chosen commodity in the name of short-term monetary profits. Ironically, the undervalued, discounted, and/or ignored uses of the forest are not only more valuable than production of wood fiber in the short term but also more sustainable in the long term and benefit a far greater number of people.

For example, one study of alternative strategies for managing the mangrove forests of Bintuni Bay, Indonesia, a study more in keeping with the posits of the Genuine Progress Indicator, found that leaving the forests intact would be more productive than cutting them.⁷ When the non-timber uses of the mangrove forests, such as fisheries, locally used products, and control of soil erosion, were included in the calculation, the most economically profitable strategy was to retain the forests.

Maintaining healthy mangrove forests yielded $4,800 per hectare (2.5 acres) annually over time, whereas cutting the forests would yield a one-time value of $3,600 per 2.5 acres. Maintaining the forests would ensure continued local uses of the area worth $10 million per year and provide 70 percent of the local income, while protecting a fishery worth $25 million per year.

Another way landowners can make money from their forests without focusing solely on the cutting of timber is to use their forests for sequestering carbon. In New South Wales, Australia, for example, David Brand, executive general manager of the state forests, watched the demand for timber declining, and in that decline he saw an opportunity to sell environmental services to local and foreign power companies that were looking for ways to offset the carbon dioxide their generating plants were releasing into the air. What would he sell? He would sell the sequestration of carbon (called "carbon storage rights") in the trunks and root systems of the forests' trees, for which he soon had an agreement to plant 2,500 acres of degraded pastureland in eucalyptus trees for $10 for each ton of carbon sequestered. In Japan early in 1999, Tokyo Electric Power Company signed a letter to intent of plant up to 100,000 acres of trees over the next decade. "We don't need to cut timber at all any more," Brand said. "Our forests are being driven completely by environmental values."

Selling carbon storage rights is a smart move because forests are increasingly recognized as a major factor in the reduction of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas of global warming. Creating a market for this service requires three main ingredients: a market framework, a demand from willing buyers, and a supply from willing sellers.

The three ingredients necessary to succeed at a significant scale are (1) formulating a framework of policy and political support to establish a level playing field that defines the commodities to be traded (and their varying qualities) and implements a system of credits and crediting that reduces financial risk; (2) creating a foundation of interested customers, which means educating people who want to reduce carbon emissions about the options that conservation of forests and sustainable forest management can fulfill as avenues for effectively reducing the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide and thereby mitigating emission from generating plants; and (3) building the supply, which means helping private forest landowners understand the dynamics of carbon in their forests, how to increase the storage of atmospheric carbon in their forests, and how they can enter the carbon market with high-quality domestic carbon credits to sell.

To this end, the Pacific Forest Trust, headquartered in Boonville, CA, has analyzed carbon storage under four types of variable retention silviculture and compared them with clear-cutting, in which no carbon is stored. Results of the analysis show that an additional 32 million tons of carbon would be stored on a given site for over 50 years under variable retention harvesting. The analysis was based on three structural principles to ensure the credibility of the resulting carbon credits:  permanence, additionality, and verifiability.

The foundation of the analysis is the permanence with which the carbon will be stored, which means one must assume that the gains in stored carbon are permanent by using such tools as conservation easements that would not only protect a forest from being converted to a non-forest use but also ensure that its management would be permanently altered to increase the storage of carbon. The latter would ensure that changes in future ownership would not reduce the gains in carbon storage. In Costa Rica, for example, high-quality carbon credits are currently derived from permanently dedicated parks and permanently secured conservation easements.

Additionality is a newly coined term, which means a forest landowner must do something significant in addition to daily operations to ensure the trees on his or her property are increasing their storage of carbon, such as letting them grow for a notably longer period of time than was previously allowed before harvest. Additionality is also ensured by the conservation easement, which makes changes in management goals permanent and above prevailing norms.

The third structural principle is verifiability. Verifiability is ensured as much as possible by using well-documented data on the forest type, and state-of-the-art modeling based on decades of published scientific research, an annual third-party assessment that is required by the conservation easement.⁹

Although selling carbon credits has the potential to help reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, we can no longer assume that the services Nature offers free for the taking are always going to be there because the consequences of our frequently unconscious actions affect Nature in many unforeseen and unpredictable ways. What we can be sure of, however, is that the loss of individual species and their habitats through the degradation and simplification of ecosystems can, and will, impair the ability of Nature to provide the services we need to survive with any semblance of human dignity and well-being. Losses are just that— irreversible and irreplaceable. To keep such things of value as Nature's inherent services, we must not only shift our thinking to a paradigm of sustainability but also calculate the full costs of what wedo—Genuine Progress Indicator.

If the reductionist mechanical worldview, as refitted with the aforementioned notion of eco-efficiency, were replaced with sustainability, it would look something like this:

  • Eliminates clear-cutting, except where ecologically necessary to create or maintain biological sustainability

  • Measures prosperity by the choices saved and passed forward to the next generation and the richness of things from which to choose (natural capital) that accompanies those choices

  • Measures productivity by the ecological integrity and health of one's forestland

  • Measures progress by the consciousness with which one cares for one's forestland as a biological living trust as measures by the Genuine Progress Indicator

  • Integrates aquatic habitats and riparian zones into the forestland as part of a seamless, interactive whole

  • Eliminates the notion of waste by seeing everything in the forest as part of the recyclable, reinvestable biological capital that maintains forest integrity and productivity through fertile soils

  • Sees the need for regulation as a failure in forestland trusteeship

  • Honors and protects biological, genetic, and functional diversity as the principal of the biological living trust in order to protect the productive capacity of a given forestland to provide a sustainable level of interest in terms of economic goods and services for present and future beneficiaries

To achieve the kind of revolution in consciousness that is called for by the paradigm of sustainability, we would do well to heed an ancient Arab proverb as a point of departure:  Each word we utter should have to pass through three gates before we say it. At the first gate, the keeper asks, "Is this true?" At the second gate, the keeper asks, "Is it necessary?" At the third gate, the keeper asks, "Is it kind?"

How might this fit into caring for one's forest as a biological living trust? Each thought and action in caring for one's forest must pass through four gates:  At the first gate of forest sustainability, the trustee asks, "Is this which I am about to do ecologically sound?" At the second gate of forest sustainability, the trustee asks, "Is this which I am about to do necessary to the ecological integrity of the forest over time?" At the third gate of forest sustainability, the trustee asks, "Is this which I am about to do ecologically kind to the forest?" At the fourth gate of forest sustainability, the trustee asks, "Is this which I am about to do something I want to be remembered for?" measures

ENDNOTES

  1. The following two discussion of the Gross Domestic Product is based on (1) Timothy R. Campbell. 1998. Sustainable Public Policy:  It's Meaning, History, and Application. A paper presented at the annual conference of the Community Development Society in Kansas City, July 19-22; (2) Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. 1971. The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA; and (3) Clifford Cobb, Ted Halstead, and Johathan Rowe. 1995. If the GDP is up, why is America down? The Atlantic Monthly, October:59-60, 62-66.

  2. The discussion of money as a measure of success is based on:  (1) Peter Lang. 1999. Money as a measure. Resurgence 192:30-31 and (2) David Boyle. 1999. The new alchemists. Resurgence 192:32-33.

  3. The preceding discussion of "eco-efficiency" is based on:  William McDonough and Michael Braungart. 1998. The next Industrial Revolution. The Atlantic Monthly, October:  82, 83-86, 88-90, 91.

  4. The Associated Press. 1999. Washington to launch new master's program. Albany (OR) Democrat-Herald, Corvallis (OR) Gazette-Times. January 24.

  5. (1) David Orr. 1999. Speed. Resurgence 192:16-20; (2) William McDonough and Michael Braungart. 1998. The next Industrial Revolution. The Atlantic Monthly, October:  82, 83-86, 88-90, 91 and (3) Timothy R. Campbell. 1998. Sustainable Public Policy:  It's Meaning, History, and Application. A paper presented at the annual conference of the Community Development Society in Kansas City, July 19-22.

  6. (1) Janet N. Abramovitz. 1997. Learning to Value Nature's Free Services. The Futurist 31(4):39-42 and (2) Gretchen C. Daily, Susan Alexander, Paul R. Ehrlich, Larry Goulder, Jane Lubchenco, and others. 1997. Ecosystem Services:  Benefits Supplied to Human Societies by Natural Ecosystems. Issues in Ecology 2:1-16.

  7. Janet N. Abramovitz. 1997. Learning to Value Nature's Free Services. The Futurist 31(4):39-42.

  8. Steve Newman. 1999. Earthweek: A Diary of the Planet. Albany (OR) Democrat-Herald, Corvallis (OR) Gazette-Times. June 6.

  9. The foregoing discussion of carbon sequestration is based on:  (1) Joost Polak. 1999. Storing Carbon and Cleaning Water:  How to Make Profits Without Cutting Trees. Trendlines 1(1):4 and (2) Laurie A. Wayburn. 1999. From Theory to Practice: Increasing Carbon Stores through Forest Management. Pacific Forests 2(2):1-2.

The less you need, the freer you become. — E. F. Schumacher


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