The shallow or the deep ecological economics movement?

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Social ecological economics Resource and environmental economics Pragmatism Radical economics Ontology Epistemology Methodology Ideology Ecological economics and its policy recommendations have become overwhelmed by economic valuation, shadow pricing, sustainability measures, and squeezing Nature into the commodity boxes of goods, services and capital in order to make it part of mainstream economic, financial and banking discourses. There are deeper concerns which touch upon the understanding of humanity in its various social, psychological, political and ethical facets. The relationship with Nature proposed by the ecological economics movement has the potential to be far reaching. However, this is not the picture portrayed by surveying the amassed body of articles from this journal or by many of those claiming affiliation. A shallow movement, allied to a business as usual politics and economy, has become dominant and imposes its preoccupation with mainstream economic concepts and values. If, instead, ecological economists choose a path deep into the world of interdisciplinary endeavour they will need to be prepared to transform themselves and society. The implications go far beyond the pragmatic use of magic numbers to convince politicians and the public that ecology still has something relevant to say in the 21st century. The emergence of ecological economists from their former relative obscurity marks a turning-point in our scientific communities. However , their message is twisted and misused. A shallow, but presently rather powerful movement, and a deep, but less influential movement , compete for our attention. That opening paragraph is borrowed from Arnae Naess (1973: 95) with the replacement of 'ecologists' by 'ecological economists'. Some twenty-five years after its modern incarnation the ecological economics movement has reached a parallel with the concerns Naess had for ecology in the early 1970s. 1 The movement has expanded to include all sorts of academics and researchers, it has a successful journal as measured by such things as citation indexes, and an international society which has spread regional branches globally. Some of the founders have gained a second life while others have risen from relative obscurity to international renown. Economists well embedded in the establishment (including winners of the Sveriges Riksbank prize in economic sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel) have seemingly paid attention by gracing the movement with their presence at conferences (e.g., Sen), their thoughts in print (e.g., Solow, Stiglitz), their collaborations (e.g., Arrow) and some, possibly …