An interesting presentation by Joshua Farley, who along with Herman Daly wrote /Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications.
Beyond Economic Growth April 14, 2007 Total time: 57:03 Speaker: Joshua Farley, Assistant Professor, Community Development and Applied Economics at the University of Vermont and Fellow with the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics. /Farley challenges the view that continuous economic growth on a planet with finite resources is possible or even desirable, particularly in the wealthy countries. He asks the question, "Is it the magic of the market or the magic of fossil fuels (which we're rapidly depleting) that has driven economic growth and consumption?" He discusses why the market economy has failed to account for declining ecosystem services, the life support services of the planet, suggesting that economic growth actually has the opportunity costs of eliminating or severely degrading the ecosystem services that belong to the commons. He goes on to suggest that the scale of the economy and just distribution have to take precedence over the neoclassical economic focus of allocation of scarce resources and offers some solutions to replace the conventional economic paradigm with a sustainable economy based on ecological economics. From listening to Farley it's fairly easy to conclude that economic growth is actually the root cause of most of our environmental problems and, while we have to address the symptoms imposed by market failures such as climate change and biodiversity loss, likely not much will change in terms of conservation, our happiness, or poverty, for example, until we address that root cause. http://www.themadisoninstitute.org/audio/Josh_Farley_final.mp3
