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44 | Tue Puttosopuy or Eco-Po rics
4. Ecology and economy
A significant part of the dominant ideas of our time are related, in one
way or another, to the economy. The market is the place where social
achievements are compared: either they prove competitive, i.e., saleable,
or not. The indicator of good governance is the growth of the economy,
whatever that may mean. Science is explicitly or implicitly identified
with research and innovation that serve the goals of the economy; the
schools provide the economy with a trained, competitive workforce;
welfare is the state where the consumer can satisfy his needs for various
products. Culture is consumed; politics is sold; the human being is a
resource. Everyone buys or sells. To become the object of a sale, they
first has to become property: the various forms of life are patented,
climate pollution or the ecological performance of the forest is “priced”
and what cannot be owned, loses its value. ‘This is the fate of the forms
of knowledge that cannot be sold as information and the human abilities
not justified by market performance. Human coexistence has been
successfully confined within the rules of a single abstract, utterly
simplified role-playing game in a way that is unparalleled in history:
this is effectively the explanation of the civilisational catastrophe that
triggered the ecocide. ‘The ecological worldview is the rejection of this
completely anti-life way of thinking.
Ecological economics questions the attempt to detach the working
of the economy from its social connections and explain it with its own
perennial laws, with some kind of economic necessity. As a first step, it
aims to disprove the anthropological bases of this approach. In this area
it can rely primarily on the views expressed by Karl Polanyi in his work
The Great Transformation. Polanyi emphasises that profit-based market
exchange does not arise from unchanging human nature and is not the
cause but the effect of the capital-based economy. He examines historical
forms of exchange to prove that the motive behind the exchange is
usually not the desire for profit and that society usually punishes, not
rewards profit-maximalising behaviour. He writes that “...man’s
economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not
act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material
goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims,
his social assets. He values material goods only in so far as they serve
this end. Neither the process of production, nor that of distribution is
linked to specific economic interests attached to the possession of goods,
but every single step of that process is geared to a number of social