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By Steve Szeghi PhD (ECON), Professor of Economics, Wilmington College, Wilmington, Ohio, USA; Co-Author Right Relationship: Building A Whole Earth Economy, and a GCGI Senior Ambassador
‘Let us remember Rachel Carson this April 14th, 2014, fifty years since her death. May her memory enliven our hearts and give us the endurance and passion to fight the battles we need to fight in order to be able to pass on to our children and our grandchildren a beautiful world teeming with the diversity and abundance of life.’
IN MEMORY OF RACHEL CARSON
Photo: Rachel Carson, In Memoriam
Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964)
By Steve Szeghi
'For all of the harm we have caused the natural world since the time of Rachel Carson, at least the springtime is not as yet silent. We are faced though with the prospect of serious climate change, compromised eco-systems, habitat loss, over hunting, over fishing and a multitude of invasive species, all occasioned by human economic activity, greed, and a refusal to modify even in small ways, our lifestyles. But with the coming of the blossoms of spring today; we can still relish the songs of countless aviary species. Spring has not been rendered silent.'
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'What a fate that would have been! How the world would have been impoverished had it occurred. DDT and many other pesticides have since been strictly regulated. And we have Rachel Carson to thank. With the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, which occurred after the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon, Rachel Carson played a crucial role in getting the world to take seriously numerous environmental threats, among them the threat to birds from the unrestricted use of pesticides. A species so numerous that very few ever contemplated could go extinct, the Passenger Pigeon, had gone extinct and rather quickly in the early 1900’s. The public could easily imagine what spring would be like without the songs of birds. And the public didn’t care much for such a thought. Rachel Carson thus paved the way for the environmental movement, for the Wilderness Act, for the creation of the EPA, along with stricter controls on pesticides.
'We are now at a critical juncture. The environmental movement has stalled, even as climate change intensifies, polar bears face disruption and even extinction, as do the few remaining wild elephants, lions, tigers, gorillas, and grizzlies. In addition many species of birds remain threatened, so much so that unless human beings choose to vastly constrain and modify their actions we may in the foreseeable future face the resurgent threat of a far too real silent spring.
'The very magic and meaning of human life is at stake. The quality of human life depends upon our linkages and connections to the natural world. The very real prospect of massive specie loss fills my heart and soul with an incredible sadness. Human beings may well continue to exist physically for quite some time, for thousands of years even, on a plundered planet without wilderness, and without an abundance of other species and biodiversity. But a world without wild lions, without elephants and polar bears, without gorillas in the wild, and cougars in the mountains, just as readily as a spring without song, will be an impoverished world where human joy and happiness are in short supply.
'What kind of world do we desire to pass on to our children and to our grandchildren? The greatest gift, the greatest inheritance, that we can pass on to posterity is a rich natural world abundantly filled with biodiversity, harmony, and the beauty of this earth. There is treasure in the roar of a lion, in the howl of a wolf, and in the caw of a raven. There is majesty in the flight of an eagle, in a whale breaking the water’s surface taking a breath, and a ram scaling a cliff. There is a marvel in the gaze of a grizzly, in the race of a gazelle, and the gate of a bison.
'Yet there is little that any of us can do to stem the tide of ecological destruction as individuals. There is little we can do alone to pass on to future generations the beauty of the natural world. Voluntary efforts, except as they give encouragement for ultimate collective action, will not be sufficient. We as both national and global communities need to devise bolder incentive structures which safeguard the environment. So very much needs to be done and on so many different levels, global, national, and local. What comes foremost to mind, particularly for the sake of guarding against a potential future silent spring?
'A greater amount of public lands with wilderness designation and enhanced protection is absolutely essential in order to maintain, safeguard, and expand critical habitat for wildlife. Agencies charged with protecting wildlife from poachers and other threats, with safeguarding our air, water, and soil, and with eradicating invasive species need expanded enforcement powers, increased staff and budgets, as well as better state of the art technology. Penalties for environmental and wildlife infractions need to be dramatically increased. Regulatory mandates must sunset particularly troublesome production methods and products. And an assortment of fines, taxes, and penalties must be used to discourage fossil fuel consumption even as subsidies and other incentives are combined to encourage the development of clean energy solution.
'As a child I remember going to the Cincinnati Zoo in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, close to my home, and looking at the memorial to the Passenger Pigeon there. The last known Passenger Pigeon died at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914. Her name was Martha. I remember thinking then what would it be like to be the last of one’s species still alive, awaiting death? It struck me as such an utter tragedy as a child. At risk of exposing my childhood sentiments, I could imagine the loneliness Martha might have felt before her death, such a tragedy it seemed to me then. Yet it is a tragedy that we are likely to repeat again and again even as we have already repeated it many times since. Unless we human beings find ways to restructure our economic systems and our lifestyles many species will follow Martha into extinction even as many others flounder far from flourishing, so close to extinctions door.
'Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring was published shortly after my ninth birthday. My parents gave me a copy of Silent Spring for Christmas 1962. I made the connection to the fate of the passenger pigeon. It was quite easy for me as a child to envision what a spring time without song birds would sound like. I could hear in my mind the soulless soundless lack of joy and happiness filling the air. I think I became an environmentalist that Christmas of 1962 and I have my parents and Rachel Carson to thank.
'Let us remember Rachel Carson this April 14th, 2014, fifty years since her death. May her memory enliven our hearts and give us the endurance and passion to fight the battles we need to fight in order to be able to pass on to our children and our grandchildren a beautiful world teeming with the diversity and abundance of life.'
See Also: My Guest Blogger Steve Szeghi: Fifty Years After Silent Spring
KAMRAN MOFID’s GUEST BLOG: Here on The Guest Blog you’ll find commentary, analysis, insight and at times provocation from some of the world’s influential and spiritual thought leaders as they weigh in on critical questions about the state of the world, the emerging societal issues, the dominant economic logic, globalisation, money, markets, sustainability, environment, media, the youth, the purpose of business and economic life, the crucial role of leadership, and the challenges facing economic, business and management education, and more.
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'Can economics really describe love? Well, it starts with greed…' Image sourced from www.shutterstock.com/
ECONOMICS is “not a ‘gay science,” wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1849. No, it is “a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.”
But, happily today, more and more economists are discovering that their discipline is not really a “dismal science”, but a subject of beauty, elegance and relevance, if it was to return to its original roots. More economists are realising that the focus of economics should be on the benefit and the bounty that the economy produces, on how to let this bounty increase, and how to share the benefits justly among the people for the common good, removing the evils that hinder this process. Moreover, they are noticing that economic investigation should be accompanied by research into subjects such as anthropology, philosophy, politics, ethics and spirituality, to give insight into our own mystery, as no economic theory or no economist can say who we are, where have we come from or where we are going to. Humankind must be respected as the centre of creation and not relegated by more short term economic interests.
Two such economists are Professors Paul Frijters and Gigi Foster, whom have recently published a very interesting book on 'humanising economics'. Their book: An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks is a compelling reading, where concepts of love, friendship, loyalty, power, coalitions, ideals, joy and compassion are all explored, and are used to temper, leaven and expand the insights of self-interested maximisation.
This is how they explain it:
“Economists understand greed very well; after all, the urge to get rich is our discipline’s main explanation for human actions. Economists further recognise that greed can be good. When our greedy urges are constrained by institutions, so that we compete with each other by means of specialisation in production rather than by killing or cheating one another, our economies produce growth.
But the phenomenon of love has flummoxed us economists. We have followed much of the rest of society in seeing love as something that is a cosmic accident: neither predictable nor manipulable, love has been thought to arise mysteriously. Once finding himself by chance in love, a person suddenly cares about more than just himself. It is allegedly by happy accident that people love their children, their spouses, the constitution of their country, and many other people and constructs.
In our new book, An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks, we behold and treat love in an entirely different way. It would be fair to say that we take the stance of aliens looking at humans as just another species, with love merely one behavioural strategy available to that species. Blasphemous as this may sound, our goal is to apply the scientific method to the realm of the heart.
At the most basic level, we contend that love is a submission strategy aimed at producing an implicit exchange. Someone who starts to love begins by desiring something from some outside entity. This entity can be a potential sexual partner, a parent, “society”, a god, or any other person or abstract notion.
From a position of relative weakness, the loving person tries to gain control over this entity by incorporating the entity into his own sense of self. Of many examples, that of the child is perhaps easiest to see in this framework: a weak infant starts to love the parents who provide for his needs, and starts to see himself as part of the family. We contend that the same fundamental process explains why men and women start to love their partners, their countries, their jobs, and their gods.
The consequences of this basic mechanism are immense for any human organisation. Without it, there could be no families, no religions, no science, and no countries, because the loyalty of those who love is part of what keeps families together, soldiers loyal, scientists truth-seekers, and the religious faithful.
Naturally, within any group, not everyone loves to the same degree, and in fact many members of groups do not love at all and instead merely pretend to share the group ideal. But without any real love, created when lovers are weak and needy, human organisations would fall apart and our economies would cease to function.
There is much more to say about love: how it conferred an individual evolutionary advantage long ago; how the neural mechanisms responsible for it relate to our cognitive and non-cognitive development throughout life; how to define weakness and how to describe human desires; how “love” relates to other difficult concepts that economists have long struggled with, such as “power” and “networks”; and, most excitingly, what steps lead from this essentially individual mechanism to the highly organised societal structures we see today. We explore all of these paths in our book. We argue that love is a vital element in almost everything that is important to economists and social science, from why people by and large pay their taxes to why they are able to work happily together in teams.
Why did we decide that love had to have something to do with economics? Because reality forced us into acknowledging the importance of love. If you want to understand yourself and your society but are prepared to make no mental space for love in your explanations, then all we can say is good luck. We hope you have more success than we did. For more than 10 years, we independently worked on understanding society without an explicit role for love, and we basically got stuck. It took us another 10 years to develop our best guess for how love relates to greed and to all of the complexities of humans and their societies.
Finally, why do we see the discipline of economics as the natural home for our theory of love’s genesis and consequences? Because economics offers an extensive discourse on the other crucial ingredient propelling human action – greed – and also because economics is a science whose nature and ideal is to offer simple stories to capture social complexity. By combining love and greed to construct a simple, tractable model of our social world, we hope to have advanced the discovery of what humans and their societies are all about.”
This article was originally published in The Conversation. Read the original article
Buy the book:
Read more:
Calling all academic economists: What are you teaching your students?
Economics and Economists Engulfed By Crises: What Do We Tell the Students?
A comment on a Financial Times editorial (November 12, 2013)
My Guest Blogger Anthony Werner: Ethical Economics
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Flowers are blooming, birds are singing, the days are getting brighter. What better way to sing the praises of Spring’s arrival than to read beautiful poetry.
Here are two poems I would like to share with you: One from Hopkins and the other from Wordsworth.
Gerard Manley Hopkins : The Poetry Foundation is one of the three or four greatest poets of the Victorian era. He is regarded by different readers as the greatest Victorian poet of religion, of nature, or of melancholy. However, because his style was so radically different from that of his contemporaries, his best poems were not accepted for publication during his lifetime, and his achievement was not fully recognized until after World War I.
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‘Hopkins begins, “Nothing is so beautiful as spring.” If there is anything more beautiful, it is this poem. It has a heightened, rapturous and intoxicated quality: “The glassy pear tree leaves and blooms, they brush / the descending blue; that blue is all in a rush / with richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.” On a spring morning it is a poem one can recite that makes spring seem more intensely itself: even the lambs have been partying, and how that hallucinogenic “glassy” carries the line forward, unexpectedly filling it with light.’
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
BBC - History - Historic Figures: William Wordsworth (1770-1850) William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 at Cockermouth in Cumbria. As a young man, Wordsworth developed a love of nature, a theme reflected in many of his poems.
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Of all the famous poems of Wordsworth, none is more famous than "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud".
In this poem, Wordsworth says that, wandering like a cloud floating above hills and valleys, he encountered a field of daffodils beside a lake. The dancing, fluttering flowers stretched endlessly along the shore, and though the waves of the lake danced beside the flowers, the daffodils outdid the water in glee. He says that a poet could not help but be happy in such a joyful company of flowers. He says that he stared and stared, but did not realize what wealth the scene would bring him. For now, whenever he feels “vacant” or “pensive,” the memory flashes upon “that inward eye / That is the bliss of solitude,” and his heart fills with pleasure, “and dances with the daffodils.”
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Read more Spring Poems: