Ecological Georgism

Definition

Ecological Georgism (sometimes "green Georgism") extends Henry George's principle beyond land to all natural resources and environmental sinks. If the value of land belongs to the community, so does the value of the atmosphere, oceans, minerals, water, and the spectrum — and the right to pollute or extract from them.

The Argument

Pollution and resource extraction use commonly-owned natural assets without paying for them — a form of unpriced resource rent. Ecological Georgists support carbon taxes, severance taxes, congestion charges, and pollution fees as the environmental application of rent capture: charge for the use of the commons, and (often) return the proceeds as a citizen's dividend. This aligns the Georgist tradition with Pigouvian environmental economics — both charge for socially-costly use of shared resources.

Significance

Ecological Georgism reframes climate and environmental policy as a rent problem, and is a major theme in modern Georgist writing (e.g. Alanna Hartzok's The Earth Belongs to Everyone).

Book Findings

Daly: Steady-State Economics and Throughput Limits

Herman Daly's framework in Ecological Economics and the Ecology of Economics (1999) provides the ecological-economic foundation for ecological Georgism. Daly argues that the economy is "a subsystem of a larger ecosystem that is finite, non-growing, and materially closed, while open to a flow-through (throughput) of solar energy that is also finite and non-growing" (Daly 1999, p. 14). This framing directly supports the Georgist extension of rent-capture to natural resources: if the economy is bounded by a finite ecosystem, then resource extraction and pollution are uses of a commons whose capacity is limited, and charging rent for that use is the Georgist response. (C-claim; theoretical)

Daly's concept of "uneconomic growth" — growth that costs more in sacrificed ecosystem services than it contributes in production value (Daly 1999, Ch. 2) — provides the analytical bridge between ecological economics and Georgist rent theory. If growth becomes uneconomic because ecosystem services are sacrificed without compensation, then the failure to charge for resource use (the Georgist "commons" problem) is a root cause. Ecological Georgism applies the rent-capture principle to this problem: carbon taxes, severance taxes, and pollution fees charge for the use of finite ecological capacity, internalizing the costs that make growth uneconomic. (D-claim; interpretive)

Daly's critique of the standard neoclassical paradigm — which treats nature as "a sector of the economy" rather than as "an envelope containing, provisioning and sustaining the economy" (Daly 1999, Ch. 3) — parallels the Georgist critique of the neoclassical merger of land into capital. Both traditions hold that the failure to distinguish land (and natural resources) from produced capital leads to systematic mispricing and misallocation. The ecological Georgist synthesis draws on both: George's rent-capture principle provides the policy instrument, and Daly's throughput framework provides the ecological constraint. (D-claim; interpretive)

See Also

• Geoism — the umbrella scope
• Barnes — Who Owns the Sky? (sky trust)
• Pigouvian Taxation
• LVT reduces urban sprawl
• Land as Commons
• Resource Rents · Citizen's Dividend · Georgism
• Alanna Hartzok — leading advocate connecting land rent to environmental justice
• Narrative: Green Georgism — Charging for the Earth — the persuasive deployment of this concept
• Who Owns the Sky? (Barnes) — the flagship policy design (Sky Trust / cap-and-dividend)
• Ecological Economics (Daly) — steady-state economics and throughput limits
• The EU ETS reduced CO2 emissions despite low prices (Bayer & Aklin) — empirical evidence that charging for the atmospheric commons curbs its overuse
• Carbon Taxes and CO2 Emissions: Sweden (Andersson) — the cleanest causal carbon-tax case

Sources

1. Alanna Hartzok (2008), The Earth Belongs to Everyone — used for the earth-rights framing of ecological Georgism (C-claims; advocacy source). wiki summary
2. IMF (2012), "Issues in Extractive Resource Taxation" — used for the mainstream fiscal treatment of resource rents (A/B-claims). PDF
3. Herman E. Daly, Ecological Economics and the Ecology of Economics (Edward Elgar, 1999) — used for the steady-state economics framework, throughput limits, and the connection between ecological constraints and rent theory (C/D-claims). Book page