\n<\/p>\n
Before you read, remember this: Independent editorial isn’t free. If you enjoy this article, please consider creating an account<\/a> to support our journalism so we can keep going.<\/b><\/p>\n Herman Daly had a flair for stating the obvious. When an economy creates more costs than benefits, he called it \u201cuneconomic growth<\/a>.\u201d But you won\u2019t find that conclusion in economics textbooks. Even suggesting that economic growth could cost more than it\u2019s worth can be seen as economic heresy<\/a>.<\/p>\n The renegade economist, known as the father of ecological economics and a leading architect of sustainable development, died on Oct. 28, 2022, at the age of 84<\/a>. He spent his career questioning economics disconnected from an environmental footing and moral compass.<\/p>\n Herman Daly grew up in Beaumont, Texas<\/a>, the ground zero of the early 20th-century oil boom. He witnessed the unprecedented growth and prosperity of the \u201cgusher age\u201d set against the poverty and deprivation that lingered after the Great Depression. To Daly, as many young men then and since believed, economic growth was the solution to the world\u2019s problems, especially in developing countries. To study economics in college and export the northern model to the global south was seen as a righteous path.<\/p>\n But Daly was a voracious reader, a side effect of having polio as a boy and missing out on the Texas football craze. Outside the confines of assigned textbooks, he found a history of economic thought steeped in rich philosophical debates on the function and purpose of the economy.<\/p>\n Unlike the precision of a market equilibrium sketched on the classroom blackboard, the real-world economy was messy and political, designed by those in power to choose winners and losers. He believed that economists should at least ask: Growth for whom, for what purpose and for how long<\/a>?<\/p>\n Daly\u2019s biggest realization<\/a> came through reading marine biologist Rachel Carson\u2019s 1962 book \u201cSilent Spring<\/a>,\u201d and seeing her call to \u201ccome to terms with nature \u2026 to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature but of ourselves.\u201d By then, he was working on a Ph.D. in Latin American development at Vanderbilt University and was already quite skeptical of the hyperindividualism baked into economic models. In Carson\u2019s writing, the conflict between a growing economy and a fragile environment was blindingly clear.<\/p>\n The economy depends on the environment. Economics can seem to forget that point.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nThe seeds of an ecological economist<\/h2>\n
Courtesy of Island Press<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n