1 Introduction

Regard for the dignity of life is a central and persistent theme throughout Joan Martínez-Alier’s work and a distinguishing feature of The Barcelona School of ecological economics and political ecology. It will serve here as a narrative thread for this brief essay in Joan’s honour, elaborated from an ecological economics perspective.

I once heard Joan refer to himself as the mid-wife of ecological economics: a remark that reveals a great deal about him and about the works he has created, recovered, recorded, represented and inspired over the years. A mid-wife’s work is humble work: supporting another in the sacred act of bringing life into the world. It is also woman’s work – and like so much of the work done mostly by women or by most women, it is often taken for granted and overlooked, precisely because it is of such fundamental worth (Mellor, 1997), making, as it does, the very act of being possible.

As an historian, communicator, activist and mentor, Joan Martínez-Alier has, in many ways, made the very act of being possible for ecological economics: helping to create, through his writings and activism and through establishing intellectual and physical spaces, including the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) and L’Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA), where a host of counter-hegemonic narratives about environmental values have been able to gestate, be born and flourish. He has also been, personally, a pioneer of third-wave feminism (Plumwood, 1992), highlighting and integrating throughout his work ecofeminist insights related to the embodied embeddedness and complex value of life, serving as a role model for hegemonically advantaged European male scholars, showing the way, with collaborations across experiential perspectives (be they gendered, colonial or of other forms) that are neither paternalistic nor dismissive.

His success in this regard is clear to see in the composition of authors in this collection, with a whopping, albeit still abysmal, 30+ percent of the lead authors being wymyn and a better than average proportion of contributors, almost 10%, based in the majority world. As both he and Val Plumwood remind us, the work of paying due regard to the dignity of life is a team endeavour and ‘tis in that spirit that the following reflections are presented: a positioned perspective, on positioned perspectives.

2 Context

Ecological economics was originally conceived of, in the late 1980s, as a transdiscipline (Costanza, 1989, 1991), situated at the frontier between, but by no means limited to, the modern eurodescendent academic discourses on economics and ecology (Costanza, 1989; Giampietro & Mayumi, 2001; Norgaard, 1989), going “beyond our normal conceptions of scientific disciplines… to integrate and synthesize many different disciplinary perspectives” (Costanza, 1991: 3). With one of its central tasks being “to investigate how sustainable development is possible” (Faber et al., 2002: 324), ecological economics is practiced under post-normal science conditions (Farrell, 2011b; Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1991, 1993, 1994) where “[e]xperts from government and firms are challenged by untitled ‘experts’ from environmental groups, or indigenous groups, or local groups of neighbours…” (Martinez-Alier, 1999: 137).

Concerned with the production of quality knowledge (Funtowicz & O’Connor, 1999; Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1990, 1997) fit for the purpose of doing ecological economics, the Barcelona School incorporates, as Giampietro and Mayumi (2001: 2) put it: “… ability to understand and scientifically represent ecological processes… [and] socioeconomic processes… ability to integrate the two systems of scientific representations in a way that makes possible to improve both understanding and representing the predicament of sustainability in a holistic way…” and, because humans are endowed with awareness and intent, the ability to describe, understand and engage with the processes through which humans translate understanding of that predicament into collective action.

At its best, ecological economics employs a range of expertise in collaborations among and between academics and other social actors, in order to address a common matter of concern:

how to halt, reverse and replace with something better, the current rampant destruction of the biological substrate of life on earth that is being caused by modern industrialized human activity?

We might, today, call this the “‘how to’ question of the Anthropocene” (Farrell, 2020). But, as Joan points out (see Martinez-Alier, 2002; Martinez-Alier & with Schlüpmann, 1987), it arose almost in parallel with modern industrialization and was clearly and poignantly articulated at that time (Goethe, 1996). Still, the fruits of industrialization proved a powerful tranquilizer (Marcuse, 1969, 1978, 1991 [1964]), and the discourse waned, coming back to the fore with the historic publication of Carson’s (1963) Silent Spring and giving rise, in due course, to the environmental studies discourses, and in that to ecological economics.

While this discourse remained marginal for most of the twentieth century, today, being green is sexy. As climate calamities and ecological collapses have come to characterize the early twenty-first century, now the Pollyanna proposition that everything is going to be fine is becoming marginal. Questions of fairness and equity are also now gaining prominence in sustainability discourses (Farrell & Löw Beer, 2019; Kehoe et al., 2020), as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic makes ever more apparent the inhumanity of leaving the majority of living beings on this planet (including huge numbers of humans) to bear the entropic burden of a wanton and conspicuous consumption practiced by an elite minority.

3 Courage

Among the proto-ecological economists who first attempted to address, in a comprehensive and rigorous way, this now fashionable ‘how to’ question of the Anthropocene was Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen: a Romanian mathematical genius, polyglot and erudite economist, shunned by his Harvard colleagues for having demonstrated, in forensic detail (Georgescu-Roegen, 1999 [1971]), the ontological paucity of their physical mechanics–based economic models and analytics. Both that censure, which lasted from the early 1970s until his death in the mid-1990s, and a recent renaissance of interest in Georgescu-Roegen’s work, help to illustrate something exceptional about The Barcelona School; openly critiquing the systematic dis-regard for life (human and non-human) which has accompanied the fetischization of technology in late-industrial global society is an act of both moral and professional integrity.

It is an act of moral integrity because ignoring this disregard means ignoring the lives and livelihoods it destroys, and it is an act of professional integrity because the ecological and social deterioration of the Anthropocene is not accidental. Rather, it is a direct and logical consequence of the same political economy of accumulation that structures and finances the universities and institutes within which we work. Practicing this critique at all requires courage, because contemporary academic institutions and culture do not reward stepping out of the disciplinary matrix. Practicing it responsibly requires, in addition, (i) systematic and structured attention to the historicity of contemporary socio-ecological situations, because they are shaped by their pasts and (ii) formal attention to constructing what Michel Foucault called, in response to Immanuel Kant (1990), “a critical ontology of ourselves” (Foucault, 1984: 47), because the eurodescendent culture of scientific knowledge production is intimately bound up with that historicity (Farrell, 2008, 2011a, 2020; Marcuse, 1991 [1964]; Ravetz, 1971).

All three of these, courage, historicity and a critical ontology, can be found in Georgescu-Roegen’s (1999 [1971]) work, of which Joan has long been a champion, and in related ecological economics discourses that Joan himself has developed and that he has encouraged in the work of others.

4 Historicity

Georgescu-Roegen, who worked closely with both Schumpeter and Samuelson, was highly attentive to historicity in general and, in particular, to the role that institutions, an inherently historical, anthropogenic phenomenon, play in structuring both the social and material dimensions of economic processes (Farrell, 2018). In this respect, he was one of the first institutional ecological economists (Farrell, 2018; Paavola & Adger, 2005), calling to our attention the inescapable historicity of human acts intended to bring about qualitative change in material manifestations of the physical world: i.e. in processes of production. However, his work tends to be employed today either in quantitative or qualitative contexts (Farrell & Mayumi, 2009), leaving out his attention to the relationship between the two, which he discusses in terms of institutions, obscuring, in the process, this aspect.

Notable exceptions, which simultaneously employ quantitative and qualitative aspects of Georgescu-Roegen’s work, tend to come from the Barcelona School (Farrell, 2018; Farrell & Löw Beer, 2019; Farrell & Mayumi, 2009; Farrell & Silva-Macher, 2017; Giampietro et al., 2006; Giampietro & Mayumi, 2000a, b; Mayumi & Giampietro, 2006; Mayumi et al., 1999; Moreau et al., 2017; Ramos-Martin et al., 2007; Scheidel & Farrell, 2015; Scheidel et al., 2014; Silva-Macher & Farrell, 2014). The place of historicity within his theoretical work gives some clues as to why this should be the case (Mayumi, 1995). For Georgescu-Roegen, historicity is a defining feature of living systems, which, in persisting as organized systems (or organisms), are constantly appropriating energy and materials and generating residuals (Schrödinger, 1948 [1944]). Being alive is a complex, thermodynamically open process, positioned along the irreversible passage of experienced time (Georgescu-Roegen, 1999 [1971]: C.5; Prigogine, 1997). Products of the combination of their own constitution, circumstances and choices, theirs and those of others, living systems are characterized by novelty (Prigogine, 1997). This is what makes it possible for a living organism to persist whilst their environment changes. However, this feature complicates the work of tracing causalities, since novelty cannot be predicted based on purely quantitative referents.

Georgescu-Roegen’s strategy is to consider the historicity of organisms and organizations, which includes both qualitative and quantitative data concerning from whence they came and toward whence they are likely going. Arguing that the biologically contextualised character of early twentieth century eastern European rural village institutions had mitigated against a successful Bolshevik transition from village based to industrialised agricultural production, Georgescu-Roegen proposed that the productive flexibility and reliability afforded by the complex social organisation of village-based peasant agriculture be understood as a biological characteristic of that economic process (Georgescu-Roegen, 1965a).

He identified this social complexity as a defining characteristic of the successful ecologically dependent agricultural production processes of those villages, which he described as organisms, defining them as “social forms in the superorganic domain” (Georgescu-Roegen, 1999 [1971]: 13): i.e. the domain of living systems, where organic materials are combined together into living organisms, which are able to maintain low entropy at the organism level, in spite of being constantly active, by processing low entropy inputs and disposing of high entropy residuals (Schrödinger, 1948 [1944]).

The organism to which he is referring, in this context, is an ecologically embedded combination of (i) environment-attentive actors constructing, performing and being guided in their practices by institutions (Bromley, 2006; Vatn, 2005) and (ii) locally designed and operated organizations that have evolved over time, within an historical, biological context (Beer, 1994 [1966]; Maturana & Varela, 1994 [1973]; Varela et al., 1974): understood to be simultaneously both a product of and producing its own economic history.

By focusing on the historicity of environmental problems and solutions, Georgescu-Roegen is able to shift the focus from symptoms to causes, calling upon us to think ahead in evolutionary time, to be conscious not only of the immediate but also of the evolutionary implications of our choices, as we participate in configuring the physical and cultural fitness landscapes to which we and our successors will be adapting in the future (Bahro, 1977; Farrell, 2009 [2005]; Laland et al., 2000; Lewontin, 2000).

5 Ontology

While his flow-fund theory introduces a number of new economic analysis categories, not least, of course, those of flow and fund elements, it is with the concept of “economic Anschuaung” or “cultural propensities” that Georgescu-Roegen (1999 [1971]: 362–363) introduces the role of the purposive economic actor – Kant’s enlightened rational being, Foucault’s aspiring adult, today’s co-author of the Anthropocene, as it were – into his bioeconomics ontology. This adjustment makes it possible for him to formalise analyses that explicitly link together the institutionalisation of economic decision-making processes (and with this, questions of responsibility and environmental justice so central to Joan’s work) and the material manifestations of the associated decisions taken, which are of such pressing importance for halting the course of currently looming irreversible cascades of ecological collapse (Steffen et al., 2018).

While the role of economic Anschauung in the ontology of The Entropy Law and the Economic Process is easy to miss, as the concept is introduced quite late in the text, Georgescu-Roegen (1999 [1971]: 363) is very explicit as regards its importance: “…the complete data in any economic problem must include the cultural propensities [economic Anschauung] as well.” Reaching back to his earlier work helps illustrate the role of this concept within his flow-fund theory, its contribution towards both his moral and professional postures and its legacy in the Barcelona School of ecological economics and political ecology.

In a number of early texts, where he wrote extensively about institutions, Georgescu-Roegen (Georgescu-Roegen, 1960, 1965a, b, 1969, 1988) was concerned with the question of how to represent the influence that self-understanding of social-ecological place (Farrell & Thiel, 2013) has on the organisation and outcomes of agricultural production practices. There he also explored what this implies for the study of interplay between institutional and material aspects of production. His conclusion, that the material configuration and associated economic and ecological products of these practices are mediated by the cultural propensities of their practitioners, underpins his position regarding the need to specify the economic process, ontologically, as an activity of purposive human society understood as a life-bearing organism.

Under flow-fund theory, the social-ecological composition and performance of a village or society undertaking an economic process is understood to be attenuated by the more or less autonomously selected teleology (final cause) assigned to that process, manifest in the form of an economic Anschauung.

No doubt, the only reason why thermodynamics initially differentiated between the heat contained in the ocean waters and that inside a ship’s furnace is that we can use the latter but not the former… however, …while in the material environment there is only shuffling, in the economic process there is also sorting… [which] must feed on low entropy. Hence, the economic process actually is more efficient than automatic shuffling in producing higher entropy, i.e., waste. What could then be the raison d’etre of such a process? The answer is that the true ‘output’ of the economic process is not a physical outflow of waste, but the enjoyment of life… (Georgescu-Roegen, 1999 [1971]: 282 emphasis original).

The role of purpose in delimiting analytical boundaries pertains, in Georgescu-Roegen’s work, both to the objects of study and to the work of designing tools for scholarly analysis. This brings us then, full circle, back to the moral and professional commitment associated with being a member of the Barcelona School. On the one hand, in order to ensure that one is producing quality, fit for purpose, ecological economic and political ecology analysis, one must never lose sight of the particular economic Anschuaungen of one’s study objects, which shape the purposive intents of individuals, communities and organizations. On the other hand, and of equal importance, one must never lose sight of one’s own economic Anschuaung, that it is present, that it plays a role in shaping how one observes the study space, and that it shapes the purposive intent of one’s own work as a scholar and/or activist. In as much, on empirical as well as moral and ethical grounds, we are obliged to always ask: What is the end being served by the way in which my research is designed? What has been left out? What included? And why?

In other words, to fail to explicitly ask ‘what is the good life?’ “El buen vivir?” (Acosta, 2013), for ourselves and for the worlds we study, is, for Georgescu-Roegen, and for the Barcelona School, to generate ecological economic analysis and political ecology that is less than fit for purpose.

6 Conclusions

Making explicit the underdetermined character of social-ecological complexity, which is always shaped by cultural propensities and cosmologies, and the morally entailed ontological choices that this implies does not always make for easily digestible soundbites and it can get one into trouble with the hegemon. Remaining committed to stay with this trouble, to paraphrase Haraway (2016), means placing the quality of the scholarly work above and before personal gain and professional acceptance. With this commitment, to give due regard to the dignity of life, in all its irreducible, splendorous complexity, the Barcelona School of ecological economics and political ecology is helping to shed light upon viable, if at times awkward, paths into the future: paths that hold out the promise of preserving not only the biological diversity and viable ecological systems of our planet but also, and perhaps more importantly, our humanity.

Practicing regard for the dignity of life is a choice – and what’s more, while it depends upon the commitment of individuals, it is a collective choice. In the Barcelona School of ecological economics and political ecology, this regard is treated as a matter of both empirical and moral concern, manifest in ontological choices.

Paying explicit attention to the ways in which the past has configured the present and to what that implies for the decisions taken today and their implications for the qualities of tomorrows is not only a technical but also a moral task. When we are conscious of the post-normal science conditions within which the work of ecological economics and political ecology is inevitably practiced, we can take responsibility for our actions, as we engage in the historically attenuated work of negotiating “who has the power to simplify complexity” (Martinez-Alier, 2002: 149).