Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

Thirty years have passed since a number of insightful scholars drew our attention to the broken circle among ecology, economics, and ethics, and argued for the need to mend that broken circle if we are to value the Earth as the sustainable home for humans.* The sad fact of the matter is that ecology, economics, and ethics, as these academic disciplines are practiced today, are not linked in a way that would provide a unified support for promoting sustainable development for a single nation, let alone for the global community of nations.

Economics, despite its privileged status as a discipline that has direct impact on social policy, has yet to incorporate important insights obtained in ecology into its theoretical foundation. Nor, for that matter, do economists admit the need to incorporate ethical values in formulating social policy. In fact, economists working in the mainstream tradition continue to prescribe the policy of pursuing higher standards of living in terms of per capita GNP, paying little attention to the damage such pursuit does to the natural environment.

With the mounting evidence showing the strain the universal pursuit of economic growth imposes on the natural environment, it is clear that ecology, economics and ethics need to be integrated into a unified discipline. While international institutions such as the United Nations Development Program and the World Bank try to support programs that propose to promote sustainable development, these programs would not go very far unless, and until, ecology, economics, and ethics are integrated into a unified discipline that will serve as a guide for social policy and people’s conduct of their lives at the global level.

Ecology, economics, and ethics, while not recognized as respectable academic disciplines that they have become, used to define an unbroken circle of human inquiry until the emergence of modern industrial societies. In classical Greece, the three disciplines were united as the science of managing the household economy in order to secure good life for its members. These disciplines were also united in agrarian societies because the code of responsible behavior on the part of humans was fairly transparent as our subsistence crucially depended on maintaining a sustainable relationship with the natural environment.

The circle linking ecology, economics, and ethics started to be broken with the emergence of industrial societies. For one thing, the industrial mode of production did not require the same kind of sensitivity towards the natural environment as the agricultural mode of production. For another, life in the cities, which has become a predominant way of life for a majority of population, cut off the sense of connectedness with nature for them. Most importantly, the brand of economics that emerged with industrialization has been promoting the myth of human progress defined in terms of the rising material standards of living.

Mending the broken circle among ecology, economics, and ethics requires that we develop an integrated discipline that connects these three disciplines within the unified space of human existence. Considering that we humans are a biological species endowed with spirituality living as societal members, the unified space of human evolution consisting of the three spheres of the bio-sphere, the socio-sphere, and the psycho-sphere can be considered as forming an integrated space of interaction among different aspects of human existence.

In the context of the unified space of human evolution, ecology can be defined as the disciple that studies the bio-sphere. By the bio-sphere is meant the space of interaction among all natural systems such as animals, plants, lands, and oceans. It is the space of interaction between living and non-living systems, in short, between life and matter. The bio-sphere is the source of “environmental capital” in the creation of wealth in the livelihood of humans.

Economics can be defined as the discipline that studies the socio-sphere, which is the space of interaction among all social systems such as families, groups, organizations, and nations. As members of these social systems, we humans interact with fellow human beings and man-made institutions and technologies in the conduct of social life. The socio-sphere can thus be defined as the space of interaction between humans and man-made institutions and technologies, in short, between labor and machine, with these two terms more broadly conceived than they are in conventional economics. The socio-sphere is the source of “social capital” as embodied in such things as customs, conventions, laws, and regulations.

Ethics can be defined as the discipline that studies the psycho-sphere, which is the space of interaction among all cultural systems such as languages, art works, stories, and myths. It is the space of interaction between human symbols and the human mind, in short, between language and mind. The psycho-sphere is the source of “human capital” such as creativity, inventiveness, self-discipline, and the work ethic.

Ecology, as a broadly conceived study of the nature of ecological interaction between life and matter, includes all of the natural sciences from biology to chemistry, from cosmology to physics. Economics, as the study of the socio-sphere, cannot be dissociated from the biophysical and ethical foundations of human existence, and studies, in addition to how different societies go about organizing economic life in the space of interaction between labor and machine, how different societies go about combining environmental capital, social capital, and human capital in promoting people’s wealth and welfare. Ethics, in the sense it is defined here, includes all of the human sciences such as psychology, information sciences, and the humanities. Most importantly, it includes environmental ethics, which studies the ethical mode of conduct in the unified space of human evolution.

What unites all the systems that exist in the unified space of human evolution can be regarded as the process of “self-organization,” where that term is broadly interpreted to refer to the process of “pattern formation,” “configuration,” and “conformation.” Interpreted as the process of generating patterns of connection among things in nature, the concept of self-organization finds its counterpart in the Buddha’s idea of sankhara, the process of formation and dissolution of all systems in nature.

While many efforts are now being made to conduct our social life compatible with the sustainability of the bio-sphere, what is crucial is a change in the people’s consciousness about the fragile nature of our existence in that sphere. While economists have traditionally avoided getting involved in the debate about values, there is simply no way to get around the question of values when it comes to the challenge of promoting sustainable development. If social policy for sustainable development prescribed by economists is to be effective, a change in the people’s values will be essential.

What is also needed is a change in our idea about the progress of humankind. We need to abandon the conventional idea of progress measured in material terms as an increase in per capita income, for there is no possibility of sustainable economic growth in a finite universe we live in. It is imperative, therefore, that we move away from the notion of progress defined in material terms and conceive of sustainable development as the process of viable transformation of all systems in the unified space of human evolution.

* See, in particular, Bormann, F.H., and S.R. Kellert, Ecology, Economics, Ethics: The Broken Circle, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991, and Daly, H.E., and K.N. Townsend, Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.