The next step: what does an ecological or environmental economist do?

 Perhaps a good place to pick up is where I left off in the last post. I left off where I had come to a realization about how I wanted to use my skills but still needed to learn what that looked like. 

 At this point in my journey, I have come back from my trip to the Blue Mountains and have hit the ground running on a busy semester.  Every semester I have a ritual where I go to the university library and borrow out my textbooks plus a heavy selection of other material in line with whatever piques my interest to read over the next 12 weeks. Eager to expand upon what captured my interests in the Blue Mountains, I was particularly interested in forests, geology, and water. 

My pile of books was so heavy I almost had to take it home in two loads. This ultra heavy pile included a book called "Wild Foresting" which was a collection of papers centered on forests. Its topics were broad but each was as interesting as the next. Some were academic papers detailing scientific functions of forests, others were from people that worked closely with forests that included teachers, foresters, professors, and first nations people. All of them were fascinating and eye-opening but one particularly so because it opened my eyes to how economics can be used in support of the environment. 

The paper was written within a broader context of how economics and nature need to work together. It started off very theoretical but I was really looking for the bread crumb trail to lead me to what my day to day work might look like in this career I had decided to pursue but I actually knew absolutely nothing about. Lucky for me, this paper contained such a clue. 

About halfway through the economist cited an example of this theory in action. Some of the exact details are a bit hazy as I don't have direct access to the paper right now but it was about a fishing village in either Thailand or the Maldives. This town relied on its fishing industry to survive but found the fish were slowly disappearing and no one fully knew why. The town was starting to struggle with the low catches and was facing some hard choices about its future. 

The economist proved in clear dollar terms that looking after the natural resources that sustained the fish created more value than just fishing as usual. By looking after the mangroves, the mangroves could do their job of creating the right environment for the fish hatcheries and in turn, this met the town's ongoing need to rely on large fish stocks to feed mouths and bring in money.

That example showed me what it is I wanted to do. With every fiber of my being, I want to use economics to prove to the world that there was more value to be gained from looking after our natural resources than there was in exploiting them until depletion.

Not much has changed since then. If anyone asks me what it is an environmental or ecological economist does I would answer that they use the language and tools of economics to show that looking after nature and managing our assets wisely, in perpetuity, creates more value than short-term gains in profits.

Now, of course, that is a very simplistic notion of what professionals in the field are all about. While they might not be on the covers of newspapers or household names, they do some incredibly important and valuable work on ensuring important resources like water are fairly distributed (as best they can), forests are sustainably harvested so we have timber to meet all our needs, and provide valuable strategic advice on a wide range of other important things that are necessary to the functioning of human society and on-going economic opportunities for people. 

The tools at their disposal are continuously growing and I would say that a good environmental economist acts as a connecting puzzle piece that brings many people from different professions together and pools their resources to create a holistic view of our natural resources and how to best care for them using an important tool of understanding value: money.

Money is a wonderful tool to help us understand what people value and while it can be a tricky tool to use, it helps to clearly show what it costs to take care of something, but also how much there is to be gained and there is so much to be gained. I firmly believe there is so so much value to be created from caring for our beautiful blue planet and enhancing what we already have that it far outweighs any costs.

But...lots more on that later in future posts. 

Thanks for reading today's post and I look forward to seeing you back here again next time as we continue this journey.

Take care

Aeronwyn