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SCHOOLS OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT ON ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY 5] economic growth is not possible (Szigeti 2022). Efforts have to be made to maintain economic performance within Earth’s carrying capacity. Instead of economic growth, people’s well-being should be enhanced; these are two different things (Easterlin 1974; Gébert 2022; Csutora 2022). The advocates of this school of thought consider themselves prudent — or cautious — pessimists and propose to set as their goal Boulding’s equilibrium’; they are critical about growth (including green growth), and recommend a steady-state or degrowth economy (Harangozó et al. 2018). On the whole, NEO is a practice-oriented school of thought, with short-term ideas having a predominant role, while ECO lays the emphasis on harder and larger-scale problems which require consideration from a long-term perspective. NEO holds that pollution is an externality rooted in market failures, but it can be optimized if the polluter (or the victim) pays the additional social costs. Risk management is also an important aspect here. ECO regards pollution as a depletion of resources. Therefore, it does not accept social optimization, but instead wishes to make financial efforts to prevent pollution (see the principle of pollution prevention pays, which is not unfamiliar to NEO either). ECO’s aim is not just risk management, but the need to identify situations in which even the approximate assessment of risks is impossible (uncertainty, post-normal science, wicked problems — Ravetz 2004; Kerekes 2023). Since NEO attempts to monetize the impacts of the economy on the environment, it also indicates that it regards nature as part of the economy: a strictly social entity (money) is extended to the natural environment. However, the monetary valuation of environmental resources allows for those with zero monetary value to acquire positive weight in analysis in order to avoid environmentally erroneous decisions by economic decision-makers. The chief methods of valuation include cost-benefit analysis, willingness to pay (WTP) for the conservation of certain natural values, and willingness to accept (WTA) the loss of a natural value (Marjainé Szerényi 2011). In defining the total economic value of a natural resource, the aspect of future generations is also taken into account (optional value, existence value). There are further methods of evaluation which share an attempt to define the given natural factor’s value by means of social value judgment. According to this, NEO’s evaluating method is ethically closed (Kelemen 2022). Since ECO focuses on the whole biosphere, it grasps the relationship between the economy and the natural environment in its natural terms, hence, instead of valuation in monetary terms, it prefers energy and material flow analysis. Evaluation does not depend on the preferences of society but on the real impact on the environment and on the effects that disturbs interspecies relations. Of special importance are system analyses, analyses of diverse social traps, and the assessment of an areas carrying capacity (Kelemen — Pataki 2014). These are open methods from an ethical point of view, as they take into consideration several types of nonhuman relations as well. In sum, compared to NEO’s focus on technology, economic policy and anthropocentric ethics, ECO expands all these branches with physics, ecology, and often theology. ° Kenneth Boulding used the term “cowboy economy” to describe an economy of infinite natural resources, and of “spaceship Earth” to describe a situation in which all of human needs are satisfied by renewable resources (Boulding 1966).
