Handbook of Green Economics: Practitioner's Guide

Preface by Miriam Kennet Green Economics is now firmly a global movement for change in the third millennium. It is an entirely new and exciting discipline, or school, of economics which is based on a completely new assessment of the problems, options and solutions available to society to deal with the challenges of the ever more rapidly changing complex, fragile, and vulnerable physical and social environments. It is the one ray of hope for dealing with the related crises of climate, biodiversity loss, species extinction and the global economic downturn and aiming to preventing poverty and gender imbalance. Green economics reclaims economics from the preserve of purely quantitative measurement, graphs, statistical data and the assumption of "homo economicus" to create a complex, interdisciplinary, holistic, long term, social science which is informed by qualitative and quantitative data from natural science. Its long-termism describes the evolution of societies within archaeological and palaeontological time frames, which provides a better setting and better tools for understanding such problems as climate change than are offered by current conventions and short term business cycles. Economics is reclaimed as an independent science from business administration studies. Green Economics is concerned with establishing definitions of an overall well- being and happiness for all people everywhere and the planet and earth systems, rather than deriving simplistic quantitative statistics. The purpose of economics is redefined, positive and normative statements are clearly differentiated and a distinction is made between destruction on the one hand, calculated and hidden as economic "growth" and true growth and abundance of natural resources for people and nature on the other hand. Green Economics is reworking the philosophy behind economic theory, adding more recent philosophical discourses and ideas of "difference".