Richard Norgaard, Part 1 of 2

Spectrum

Richard Norgaard Prof Emeritus of Energy and Resources at UC Berkeley. Among the founders of ecological economics, his research addresses how environmental problems challenge scientific understanding and the policy process. Part one of two.

Transcript

Speaker 1: Spectrum's next.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 3: [inaudible]

Speaker 2: [inaudible].

Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum [00:00:30] the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news.

Speaker 4: Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today we are presenting part one of two interviews with Richard Norgaard, professor emeritus of the energy resources group at UC Berkeley. Richard Norgaard received [00:01:00] his phd in economics from the University of Chicago in 1971 he was among the founders of the field of ecological economics. His research addresses how environmental problems challenged scientific understanding and the public policy process, how ecologists and economists understand systems differently and how globalization affects environmental governance. In today's interview, Norgaard talks about the origins of economic science defines [00:01:30] ecological economics and discusses certainty and uncertainty in science. Here's that interview Richard Norgaard. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Would you describe how economic theory and the science of economics has been forged over time?

Speaker 5: I hesitate to use that word science with economics, but like other patterns of thinking in in scholarly endeavors. It's a mix. There were the physiocrats [00:02:00] who basically were in admiration of physics and said, well, we ought to be able to think of the economy as a bunch of flows and they were on 1750 or so, didn't work out very well in the 19th century. As we knew more about energy, we had people more again from the physical side thinking about value, think about the economy as energy flows and we're still trying to do that well. What we really think of as sort of conventionally economics comes out [00:02:30] of moral philosophy and Adam Smith is sort of asking what makes a good society? How do people behave? And the markets have been around for Millennia. He took another look at markets and said, Gee, this is interesting to people acting in their own interests, make both of them better off.

Speaker 5: And this was just a thought experiment. If that's true, then then what? Then what and any expanded that thought experiment, what does it mean [00:03:00] with Spec to the role of markets and the role of government? And that's been the dominant pattern. But what I would say thought experiments, if we look at what's going out out there and say she has it like this, if this this was happening, and then expand that to a more systemic understanding of the economy as a whole is not been by hard data collection and patterns emerging from the data though there is that element to it though, right? Reinforce the [00:03:30] thought. Oh to be sure. Malthus's thought experiment was one of the most important ever and he just thought, well, you know, it looks like agricultural production increases linearly and population increases geometrically and what does that mean? And that meant that you're going to come to the limits and clashes and war and bad behavior and and therefore abstinence would be good.

Speaker 5: Late marriage would be good. And he definitely tried to back [00:04:00] that up with data. The data were very poor at the time. But yes, we've always tried to back up our thought experiments with data and sometimes that exchange changes how we think and makes our thinking more elaborate. But when I say we're different from other sciences in that we're less data-driven and more just pattern of thinking driven and then within the profession there are these various schools of thought to be sure we can [00:04:30] do get pressure to align yourself in some way. Where the school of thought, well I wouldn't say so much pressure, I would say it's, it's a desire or human desire for a sense of community and shared thinking and it's much more comfortable working with people who think like you do. And so there's pretty strong lines between people who think markets are most important and people who think power is most important sort of followers of Adam Smith or followers of Carl Marx.

Speaker 5: But [00:05:00] yeah, there are times when, I guess you could say you feel the pressure, but it's more just the pressure of a community that and communities are good communities help us think together and dig deeper along a pattern of thinking. But of course they also keep you in the same Rut. And then we, if you become deviant, oh yeah. How are you treated at that point? Well and are you encouraged to be deviant? So anyway, so there are rankings of what's strong economics and what's weak economics. [00:05:30] And on the neoclassical side, the mathematicians have always had bigger Thrones than those who actually go out and study how the markets work. And then those who actually study the, the laws and regulations that determine how markets work. Those are referred to as institutional economists and for many years institutional economists, which are the lowest ranking, they studied the facts, they just studied history.

Speaker 5: They weren't [00:06:00] high theorist, but of course it's, it's how, how laws get written that determine how markets work and not the mathematics. Early on in your career you've stepped out of the mainstream. I never was in the mainstream. I, I was out before I was in and I've always been out. I had a very strong experience as an 18 year old, 19 year old as a river guide in the Glen Canyon of the Colorado. And that's now under Lake Powell. And [00:06:30] I was one of a very small number of people who saw this area, but also saw it go under and I became a fairly committed environmentalist and then started thinking, well, I'm you know, 19 years old, I'm a sophomore, junior in college. What do I want to study, what I want to do in life? And I loved biology. I love geology, but nature is not the problem. We are. If we are, then what's the biggest thing? And it was not too difficult to say, well, it's, [00:07:00] it's our economy. It's how we think about our relationship with nature as determined by our economics and economic beliefs. And so I went into economics from the outside knowing that I was always on the outside. I don't recommend it.

Speaker 2: [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. [00:07:30] Richard Norgaard is our guest. He is an ecological economists. In the next segment, he defines it, logical, economic [inaudible].

Speaker 5: And what role do you think ecological economics has to play in shaping and informing policy? Well, we should probably describe ecologically economics a little bit first. And [00:08:00] I like to put it in a little bit in juxtaposition with environmental economics. Environmental Economics is basically a pattern of thinking that says things are left out of the economy or we don't get the opportunity to buy clean air. We don't get the opportunity to buy healthy environments and, and we just need to put everything in the market. And when everything's in the market, the market will be perfect. And so environmental economics is about [00:08:30] making the economy evermore inclusive by bringing more and more things into it. Ecological economics is not just an extension of economics. Ecological economics is a real effort to understand ecological systems and economic systems and try to understand where they may come into clash ecologies, basic premises, everything's connected to everything else.

Speaker 5: And a basic premise of at least mainstream economics is that things can be divided [00:09:00] up and made into property and exchanged the one hand. The economic worldview is everything's divisible and ecological worldview. Everything is connected and that's a fundamental tension and human understanding of systems. And so at least to me is that tension that signifies sort of our ultimate limits of how we understand systems that's embedded in ecological economics. So how do you reveal that tension and then try [00:09:30] to have an impact on policy that would affect that tension. In Our world today is not set up that way. Our world today is set up that science brings answers and a better informed society can make better choices. But we also have sort of the idea that that we can have scientists inside of government that can say this is how things are, and then democracy is just about choosing between options.

Speaker 5: [00:10:00] If you really see that fundamental tension all the way down and then science can't give answers and science can say, well look at the world as a divisible world. I see this. If I look at the world, isn't there connected world? I see this and it's up to all of us to then sort of get involved in the judgment process and the way policy is set up now it's very much in the context of a legislature that has certain roles and then the agencies that have certain roles and courts [00:10:30] that have certain roles and then policymakers are sort of in this process trying to set up options and pathways that if you follow ecological economics to its logical limits, we all need to be involved in this. And so I push ecological economics to discourse of democracy that we really need to think of democracy as a shared learning system, not as a vote counting system.

Speaker 5: It's a process by which we all come to [00:11:00] better understanding and make compromises and that's very different than the way we think of policy and democracy and and science. Now the long step to their, and by no means do all ecological economists think this way. We do get involved in policy, but then it frequently comes into contradiction with sort of the fundamental problems of, of our understanding. Whenever you're in a system that's not where you think the system ought [00:11:30] to be, you're still stuck with these dilemmas of how do you intervene and, and transform the system. And so I myself get involved in and policy sort of positions and you know, you don't understand the nature of the world you're in unless you're engaged with it. You can't just sit back and say, well, I'm not gonna, I'm not going to engage until it's all set up. Right? So to be sure they're economists who don't see the tension and just say ecological economics ought to fit in the [00:12:00] policy process as it is, or ecologically economists who do see the tension and need to work or choose to work with the system to help transform it.

Speaker 4: So in a sense, trying to build a consensus across the political world and just the general population as to the ongoing learning experiment that democracy could be.

Speaker 5: Yeah, and we're so far from that now. We presumed that the enlightenment, everybody would become more educated. Everybody would be in a better position [00:12:30] to make rational decisions. But we actually created a world in which we have experts in various fields. We have a market system that divides us into very specialized tasks. And so our understanding is very fractured. And so partly the fact that economics is built on a divisible world has been used to create policy as further divided the world. And it's divided the world with through globalization to the point [00:13:00] where very distance from the production process of the materials, the clothes we wear, the food we eat. And so it's very hard to come to common understanding and make decisions collectively so that the system we devised as created serious problems for common understanding.

Speaker 4: There seemed to be some people who are recognizing that more often and pushing back or asking for an alternative to that globalization [00:13:30] and division with this to hope,

Speaker 5: this gives me hope, this, this division, this specialization, this fracturing of our sense of common understanding. Yeah, I see it in the drive for interdisciplinarity and the drive or you know, trying to understand the full effects of what we do, the and the bringing all the scientists together to understand climate change. As an example, I'm very involved in a process [00:14:00] in the California delta where we're trying to understand a complex system and we have procedures to try to bring in public input, but we still very much stakeholder staked down. We've got our positions and they're sort of a tension between the common understanding and let's just go to court. Let's sue each other. Let's battle it out. Let's you know I'm right, you're wrong. And that gets back to the community. I am mentioned with economists that you want to be in a shared [00:14:30] community, but if you've already got a shared community of laborers or shared community of capitalists or shared community of neoclassical economists, that's where you go back to and environmentalist are in a similar situation.

Speaker 6: Spectrum is a public affairs show on KALX Berkeley. Our guest is [00:15:00] professor Richard Norgaard of UC Berkeley. In the next segment he talks about certainty and uncertainty in science.

Speaker 5: Would the tension and increasing tension where systems potentially start to fail and common interest then gets galvanized by the failure of really large natural systems. Does the expression of risk management [00:15:30] start to bring people together? I think that's, that's a fair assessment of the situation where in that we have quested for certainty. John Dewey wrote a book on the quest for certainty and in the push for certainty we pretend we're actually reaching that certainty. And yet the very same time we're seeing that the uncertainty rules and sort of the story of climate science, it was always, well we don't know [00:16:00] this, we know none of this. We need to go back and build better and better models. And as we build better and better models, we, we learned how complex the system in is, is. And we can't really build in all the feedbacks of forest fires and uncertain events that are really contingent on particular things coming together particular time.

Speaker 5: If we shift to what we don't know, that very powerful drive to be precautious and to come together and to slow the economy down. But that's also [00:16:30] like asking every scientist is say let's stress what we don't know instead of what we do know. And that's hasn't been, well the public hasn't asked that of scientists. Scientists aren't inclined to put all the emphasis in what we don't know. The whole system is sort of set up that science tells us this and then we can make a rational decision. And you know, you can imagine the climate deniers jumping on the scientific community. Well they do every time the scientific [00:17:00] community on climate becomes more specific and modifies what it knew before it gets jumped on. And so the tension is, is difficult. But yes, in the California Delta we're also in a situation where we really have to confess what we don't know and set up management systems to adapt to climate change, to invasive species to sea level rise and how the future's going to be unfolding is really unclear.

Speaker 5: [00:17:30] But at the same time we have laws and legislation that say we have to write environmental impact statements and these environmental impact statements have to predict what's going to happen. And so we have a 20,000 plus page environmental impact statement for this Delta project. Is that information or is that just, you know, it's, it's, it's crazy. And so then is it kind of a general misunderstanding of science? Because really the flip side of science is the mystery and the unknown and that's really what drives a [00:18:00] lot of science is the unknown. And so it makes it so exciting. And so is it just that policymakers, general population only look to science for answers and don't want to deal with that whole mysterious side of science. I think, you know the mysterious side gets a little quasi religious sometimes and we tend to shy away from that.

Speaker 5: But I think it's also just the way we've been set up in societies. This science has generated [00:18:30] a lot of technology. It's been technology generated out of just parts of what we know that then has consequences when we actually implement the technology. It changes us socially in the environment, but science has delivered lots of hard stuff. And then can we just extend that ability to understand the whole system and the answer does not look good and too says probably not. And that should then drive us to humility. [00:19:00] But when I went in and you get prestige for being a scientist, for coming up with answers, on the other hand, an honest scientist has to say, we're not holding it all together. We're not able to see the whole system and how do we understand the whole system? Who's going to understand the whole system and the level of understanding we have to have now is much greater as we have 7 billion going on, eight to 10 billion people, and [00:19:30] with the technologies we have today, we are intertwined with this system much more deeply and many, many, many, many more ways than humankind has historically.

Speaker 5: And this has dramatically increased just the last 60 years. There's been a tenfold increase in economic activity. That's incredible. To have that kind of change and to think that it can continue, which is the paradigm that's, that will continue. It has to [00:20:00] have by the paradigm, but it, of course, that paradigm is has to be false and it's partly perpetrated by false economics or just reading a portion of what economists know, but that's inconceivable. But as we pushed this system harder, we have to understand it better and better and better and we're clearly not understanding it well enough. Now in your work, which tools and methods do you believe are the most important? I think I'm going to go back to those thought experiments. That's where the breakthroughs [00:20:30] come. Ways of reconceiving. What we're doing that gives us new insights that then help us change.

Speaker 5: So Adam Smith's thought experiment gave us a much clearer understanding of what markets can do and we formulated a lot of our social organization along Adam Smith's ideas. We need new thought experiments that become equally popular somehow. [00:21:00] That's an issue because with markets we have stakeholders and with stakeholders then you get political power and then that reinforces existing system and how do we get a thought experiment within economics or ecological economics or from anywhere it comes that we'll reconfigure how we think about our relationship with nature to get us out of the system we're in now. Yeah. That's really the tool is I see it. That's what's been powerful in social theory. [00:21:30] The data collection, you know, fancy econometric analyses. Not so much model building and data driven stuff. Model building is good for understanding sort of the limits of how much you can understand and model building can be really good for bringing people from different disciplines together to have a shared project. That's fantastic, but as soon as you actually believe in your model, you're in trouble and that's [00:22:00] yeah, frequently happens.

Speaker 3: Be sure to catch her

Speaker 4: to have this interview with Richard Norgaard in two weeks. In that interview he talks about interdisciplinary problem solving.

Speaker 6: Co-Evolution diversity and sustainability

Speaker 4: [00:22:30] spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We have created a simple link for you to make it easy to find. The link is tiny url.com/k a l X.

Speaker 6: [inaudible]. Now

Speaker 4: the science and technology events happening locally [00:23:00] over the next two weeks. [inaudible] and I presented

Speaker 7: the theme of January seconds after dark explore [inaudible] adult happy hour is sharing. Sharing isn't just about kids and toys. It's at the heart of some of the biggest problems facing all of us. Highlights of the evening include exploratorium social psychologist, Dr Hugh Macdonald, discussing the science of sharing the finer points of interviewing [00:23:30] with StoryCorps and a chance to share feedback on new exhibits about cooperation, competition, and collaborative problem solving. Admission do anyone 18 and over is $15 and is reduced for members visit exploratorium.edu for more information.

Speaker 4: The life sciences division of the Berkeley Lab will hold a seminar on the effects that the deep water horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico [00:24:00] had on the resident fish populations. Dr Fernando Galvez from Louisiana State University will speak about his research on the Gulf. Upon hearing about the spill in 2010 Dr Galvez and his team were actually able to take water and tissue samples from seven marsh habitats around the Gulf before and after the oil hit in order to assess the long and short term ecological consequences. He has more recently been investigating the [00:24:30] ability of the native fish to compensate for crude oil linking effects from the molecular level to physiological performance. The free public event will be held January 7th from four to 5:00 PM in room one 41 of the Berkeley lab building at seven one seven potter street in Berkeley.

Speaker 7: The programs and policies director of the Oakland based National Center for Science Education. Joshua Rose now [00:25:00] well discuss the predecessor of the NC s e the Salsalito based Science League of America at the free Skype talk hosted by the bay area skeptics at Luphinia Cultural Center three one zero five Shattuck in Berkeley on January 9th at 7:30 PM the Science League was formed by Maynard Shipley, a science communicator and former shoe salesman to educate the public about evolution. More information [00:25:30] is that BA skeptics.org

Speaker 4: the Henry Wheeler Center for emerging and neglected diseases. Annual symposium aims to strengthen connections between San Francisco Bay area scientists working on infectious diseases of global health importance and the broader global health research, product development and advocacy communities. The theme for the 2014 symposium is academia and the global health pipeline, [00:26:00] basic science, innovation and translation. The symposium features a dynamic list of invited Speakers from around the world, including scientists from developing countries. Participants include academic researchers from UC Berkeley, UCF, Stanford, UC Davis, as well as representatives from local biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies and global health nonprofits. The event will be held January 10th [00:26:30] from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM in the lead cost Xing Center Auditorium. The event is free to attend, but you must register online at the center for emerging and neglected diseases website by January 6th to attend the symposium. A feature of spectrum is to present new stories we find interesting. Rick Karnofsky joins me for the news.

Speaker 4: The December 23rd issue of nature news reviewed a preprint submitted to archive [00:27:00] by Notre Dame, astrophysicist David Bennett and a large team of collaborators that offers the first suggested report have an extra solar moon, extra solar planets have been found routinely. We now know of over a thousand that are detected by analyzing how it stars. Light, brightens and dims with time, but detecting the moon is exceedingly difficult. The team saw a smeared out brightness as if two objects had magnified the light. [00:27:30] The study is conservative and notes that their observations best fit a model of the moon with a mass smaller than Earth's orbiting the primary planet of a gas giant, but that other models may also fit while they don't fit as well. They have been observed in more systems. These include a lower mass star or brown Dorf orbit by a fast and small planet about the size of Neptune.

Speaker 4: The team stresses that their study shows the power of micro Lenzing to survey such systems and helps [00:28:00] for a higher precision measurements from huddle. The UC Berkeley News Center reports that a team of UC Berkeley vision scientists has found that small fragments of Keratin protein in the I play a key role in warding off pathogens. Professor Susan Fleisig, an optometrist at the University of California, Berkeley says, what we know is people virtually never get corneal infections unless they're a contact lens wearer or unless they have very severe injury to the cornea. Professor [00:28:30] Fleisig, along with other UC Berkeley researchers recently discovered the proteins in the eye called Keratins. We're able to ward off bacteria to test this. Researchers introduced normal cells to bacteria, which predictably attacked and killed the defenseless healthy cells. But when small parts of Keratin proteins were added, the normal cells lived. Scientists have made an artificial version of a small part of the Keratin protein and tested it against different diseases. The proteins [00:29:00] destroyed bacteria that can cause struck throat, diarrhea, and staff. Further research is needed before isolated. Keratins can be used to fight bacteria, but it could be a low cost discovery that might change the way we treat and prevent infections.

Speaker 2: [inaudible] music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Thanks to Renee Rao for help with the calendar. Thank you [00:29:30] for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email. Address is spectrum. Duck [e-mail] join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible].

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