Risky business (Page 3)

"The biggest economic challenges we are facing concern the environment," he asserts. "In the next couple of decades, we'll be seeing crises in freshwater supply and soil exhaustion." In Canada we are pampered by a wealth of water and dirt. But we are an exception. "Think of the Danube," says Naylor. "That muddy stream has eleven countries relying on it, and most of them hate each other. Think about the Middle East, where the West Bank is being sucked dry to fill Israeli swimming pools and provides 40% of the water supply in Israel." The problem will not be easy to fix, he observes. "We need to redesign an economic system that survives not only on zero growth but on negative growth." But the likelihood of such a radical change is remote. Shifting into Swiftian mode, Naylor says, "I see the human race as a collection of pigs that is going to keep sticking their snouts in the trough until it is empty. And then say 'Oops.' Most people won't take a longer view, even with a million reasons to do so."

Not everyone is myopic, though. Indeed, a couple of hours after the underground economy class ends, Naylor is before another, smaller group of students. They are, according to Naylor, a group typified by a strong social conscience. "Two decades ago they would have gone into political economy and been engaged in the labour movement." Now they are enrolled in physical geography, biology, the McGill School of Environment. This is Tom Naylor's "other" class, ECON 326, "Ecological Economics."

"Ecological economics," he says, "is a very small but growing field of dissidence. It does not primarily ask questions about optimum price — the relative price of xylophones or yo-yos — but of optimum scale: how big can the human economic enterprise as a whole become without fatally disrupting the biosphere? And it is clear that it is already past that point."

In fact, Naylor is expected to join the McGill School of Environment (MSE) next year to head up one of the five "themes" under which the MSE develops its programs. His territory will be Culture, Commerce and the Environment.

"Human economic activity is transforming large sections of the earth's surface, the composition of the global atmosphere, and the characteristics of the world's oceans," warns MSE director Peter Brown. "We need to find an alternative economics that can prosper within the limits of the biosphere. Tom is a first-rate scholar in economic history. He knows how we got here. Perhaps he can discern a gentle exit from our current problems. He thinks outside the envelope."

Naylor is more blunt. "Present day economics is essentially a prescription for social and ecological disaster and a tool for apologizing for the results," he says. "Mainstream economists are busy trying to reduce everything to an economic calculus and treat everything as if it were just a matter of allocation, of finding the optimum price. Sanity requires just the opposite: treating allocative issues as a minor branch of industrial engineering to be undertaken only when other much more important issues have been resolved. Economists can occasionally — and often in spite of themselves — say something useful about allocation. They have been largely useless on the more fundamental social question of distribution. And their role has to date been utterly destructive on the even more critical issue of scale."

As interest in new programs like those offered by the MSE skyrockets among students, the kinds of ideas Naylor and the school will explore should eventually prove just as popular as Naylor's work in underground economies. While courses are still in development, "green" fiscal policy, illicit trade in nature (wildlife, animal parts, genetic material), zero growth economic systems, and "detoxifying" the economy (i.e., breaking the economy's addiction to dangerous chemicals) are all subjects that will find their way into the MSE curriculum.

Ecological Economics. It isn't the hottest course on campus. Not yet.

Patrick McDonagh is a Montreal writer