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Key words: Biodiversity, climate change, co-evolution, collapse, generalized Darwinism, Walrasian economics, well-being, world systems analysis
SUMMARY
The critical problems that scientists warned about decades ago are now upon us. There is a near universal consensus that global warming is human-caused and that its effects are now accelerating. Biodiversity loss and ecosystem disruption is now well-documented. The global connections between social disruption, resource use and environmental degradation are now all too familiar. This information is all the more disturbing in view of the well-documented collapse of scores of past civilizations whose cultural patterns of behaviour have been described as 'self-organized' extinction. Policies to deal with the issues of sustainability have been hampered by a one-dimensional economic theory that has until recently dominated pubic discourse. Using the concept of 'generalized Darwinism', this paper focuses on the contributions a revitalized science of economics can bring to the sustainability debate. It ends with a cautiously pessimistic assessment of the prospects for sustainability.
True crises are those difficulties that cannot be resolved within the framework of the system, but instead can be overcome only by going outside of and beyond the historical system of which the difficulties are a part.'
- Immanuel Wallerstein, World Systems Analysis (2004: 76)
'No matter how cynical you get it's hard to keep up.' Woody Allen
INTRODUCTION
Most current analyses of sustainability focus on one particular thing to be sustained, for example, particular ecosystems or economies, the human population or biodiversity. Sustainability for most economists means sustaining the output of market goods and services (Solow 1993). Biologists are concerned with maintaining the planet's biological diversity and supporting ecosystems. Others are concerned about a deteriorating climate, continuing rapid population growth, the widening gap between rich and poor, disintegrating social institutions, and now the destabilizing effects of political and religious terrorism. It is increasingly clear, however, not only that these crises are interconnected, but also that they have the same root cause in a particular set of human cultural institutions and belief systems now dominating the planet. This core set of beliefs - radical individualism, insatiable wants, natural order - have a history going back hundreds if not thousands of years (Sahlins 1996). In the mid-twentieth century these beliefs became embodied in Walrasian economic theory. I...