I am a peripatetic economist, scholar and teacher whose career has included long stretches at elite places like Wellesley and Barnard as well as to sites of opportunity and crisis – the City University of New York. Somewhere along the way, I became a bit green in my views on economic life and policy, though my “greenness” has a distinctly black undertone.
I suppose I have always been open to green ways of thinking about economic matters, not least because I am a middle-brow macroeconomist with an obsession about economic justice and a real taste for mathematics despite my limited skills. The problem of the “commons” has a well-developed place in economic theory, inspiring some of the subtlest minds to finds ways reconcile the markets and politics to the imperatives of Nature. I have been seduced into the economics of sustainability by way of concerns with economic justice – first by reading Amartya Sen, Partha Dasgupta and many other brilliant theorists whose work is inspired by the drama of economic change in India, then by the sheer complexity and scale of the issues involved in valuing natural capital, using natural capital in ways that provide an ethical as well as efficient balance between current and future generations, and so on.
My growing green sensibility is at odds with my academic as well as street-based understanding of economic inequality in modern America and its global dominion. Economics is, among other things, the study of the distribution of well-being, meaning also the process of exclusion and denial. Market systems work by restricting access to commodities, resources and power to those who can pay or on the basis of citizenship and approved needs. The idea of “the commons” is, I think, full of opportunity and danger, especially in a racially divided society with a fraying consensus on how to distribute access to opportunity and safety across color lines.
I suppose my problem is that I’m still absorbing my Katrina lessons. Katrina showed the world what black Americans learn at our parents’ knee: there is no “commons” in society because the fact of common physical resources or shared space is nothing compared to the structure of social power. The common risks of climate change driven by the disequilibrium between our economic system and Nature’s rhythm are all too likely to become the profoundly unequal risks to life and livelihood between those who control or at least count in markets and politics, and those who don’t. New Orleans was expendable because it was poor, unskilled, powerless and carried the dark stain of contempt by virtue of its African heritage.
Likewise, my view of common property resource mechanisms, like Peter Barnes’ marvelous “sky trust” and so many other proposals for managing our planet’s resources in efficient and sensible ways, is haunted by a deep sense that outcast peoples – vulnerable, marginal, disposable – have no bargaining power in negotiations over the pricing and management of collective environmental risks. For example, cap and trade greenhouse gas emissions systems married to a progressive common property regime that both prices emissions and disburses the proceeds to the owners of the atmosphere – the people – are magnificent examples of how society can be clean, fair and free. In theory, everyone benefits from reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and a progressive system for using the proceeds of GHG pricing can be aimed at the most economically and socially vulnerable populations.
Yet, even as I struggle with mathematical models exploring all the ways that such “sky trust” type systems reconcile efficiency and justice in a narrow sense, my studies evade the ruthless bio-politics of inequality bound to turn “the commons” into another hierarchy of the powerful over the vulnerable. The vulnerable forever stand apart and below the powerful – even green, progressive power – objects of charity or even redistributive justice, but objects nonetheless. Charity becomes thin, stingy, evincing slight degrees of sadism when, when the vulnerable are the wrong color.
Green power, like all power in divided societies, will balance the needs of rulers and ruled, whether the rulers are a clique, a board of directors, or a voting majority with blood-based antagonism toward the Others. Green power – the use of public and private power informed by scientific, particularly ecological, and economic reason – is far more likely to be humane than other forms of power precisely because it is imbued with a sense of limits and balance. Indeed, green power, at its best, constructs better ways of pricing and managing collective risks, thereby mitigating the destruction of natural capital.
But our individual, family and communal access to resources and the resulting unequal control of development are shaped by the bio-political facts of society: we are born into families and communities of color, class, region, religion and language, inheriting access to resources and levers of power or the abyss of powerlessness. We inherit and the bequeath the social wars that grant us access to power or leave us in weakness, even the power to shift policy in a green direction.
As you can see, I am struggling with the uneasy relationship between sustainability and equality in a market and technology driven world economy, where economic and social innovation must now redesign capitalism to make it cleaner and ecologically viable, yet where the mechanisms of social/racial inheritance threaten to reinforce bio-political and social power in unacceptable ways. I ask your patience and your help as I work through the problematic economics of equality and sustainability, hardened as I am by my American blackness. I want to think about the economics of the commons in light of the fact that green power is unlikely to be shared across American color lines, even as it reconciles the way we make a living to the life process of the Earth.
I have a vague notion of “green citizenship” that extends the idea of the physical/environmental commons into the realm of politics, but I need your help in thinking these connections through. The next few blogs will explore everything from a scheme to create “local,” really guerilla, cap and trade systems that evade the behemoth of national corporate power – unorthodox micro and public economics of a most mischievous sort – to the “green conservatism” of John Gray and Roger Scruton. Yet, all these meditations will be bathed in the light of a bruised, bone deep blues understanding of how the fabric of power, desire and rejection arranging the value of human beings by color and shape always infects power in racialized forms of social life.