A favorite show from the Sustain What archives for your weekend! Start with this snippet, which is one of my favorite Herman Dalyisms:
I’m reprising this Sustain What webcast from the early weeks of the pandemic (on March 31, 2020) and it remains one of my favorite conversations.
I invited leading sustainability analysts from two generations to help rethink how human progress should be pursued and measured in a period of intertwined unfolding risks and opportunities.
Herman E. Daly, a founding force behind “steady-state economics,” examined possible paths to less fragile global systems with Kate Raworth, whose “doughnut economics” model aims to build economic policies and metrics that put thriving ahead of growing. I’d been consulting with Daly in my Times reporting for about 20 years.
I particularly loved this classic Dalyism:
I think there's a problem in economics. I'm all in favor of empiricism. But some things are sort of clear. If you jump out of an airplane, what you really need is a parachute, not an altimeter, you know. It's nice to track your fall. But I think first principles are sufficient to know the basic direction in which we have to move. And I get impatient sometimes with, 'Oh, well, is it optimal? How do we measure it?' You know, after awhile you just accept that gravity exists and you don't measure the fall of every apple. You know, you just take it and go from there. I think we're at that point, I think we know enough to constrain growth.
After Daly’s death at age 84 on October 28, 2022, I reached out to a batch of young and veteran scholars whose work built or or intersected with his and we convened to explore his work and next steps building on it. Here’s that marvelous episode:
Exploring Herman Daly’s Work Building an Ethical, Ecologically Tuned Economy
Please watch and share both on whatever platform you prefer:
YouTube, Facebook, Periscope, LinkedIn
My guests included Kate Raworth, Joshua Farley, Jon Erickson, Juliet Schor and Peter Victor. Rigo Melgar-Melgar, a doctoral candidate at the University of Vermont, and other representatives from the next generation building this field also joined.
Visit Melgar-Melgar's Ecological Economics For All website to learn more.
As a parting shot, here’s a visual card to share:
SUSTAIN WHAT is a global conversation identifying solutions to the complicated, shape-shifting and epic challenges of humanity’s Anthropocene moment. A prime focus is making sense of, and getting the most out of, the planet's fast-forward information environment -- the one Earth System changing faster than the actual environment.
Herman Daly and Kate Raworth on Pandemic-Resistant Economies