 Good morning and welcome to Moments with Melinda. I am your host Melinda Moulton and my guest today is John Erickson. Hey John. Hi, how are you? Hi, thanks for being on my show. I'm so excited to talk to you. Oh, it's my pleasure, thank you. Well, let me tell my viewers a little bit about you. John Erickson is the Blithersdorf Professor of Sustainability Science and Policy at the University of Vermont. He is a faculty member of the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and a fellow of the Gund Institute for Environment. Does that sound right? That sounds great. Well, it's a lot of things. You are a man of a lot of things, of talent, of renaissance man. Now, I first met you when we were working on the local currency project. And so I'm gonna bring up Will Rapp who just passed away the other day. And he was the one who pulled me onto that project. So I wanna say to my viewers and to all of Vermont and to all of the world that our hearts are with Will and his family and all who loved him so dearly. Will was someone, John, who did subscribe to your way of thinking about the world and how everything is connected to our environment, including our economics. He was, yeah. I mean, Will, what a giant. We've lost another giant. And then I had many conversations, many debates over economics in the future of the Vermont economy. And he always was so giving with his time. He met with our students. He hosted them down at the Intervale. He was on our board of advisors at the Rubenstein School. He was just so generous with his ideas and enthusiasm. And boy, you wanna talk about an eternal optimist. It was Will Rapp. I'm kidding. Way too young. Well, thank you for that, John. Can you tell us a little bit about your early life and who would you say had the greatest influence on you choosing the path you've taken in your life? Well, I grew up in a single parent home with my mom. So I would say my mother always and everywhere had a pretty big imprint on my life, two younger brothers. And yeah, I mean, she was a Head Start teacher. And then she was a preschool teacher. And she saw the good in everybody. I mean, some of my earliest memories of as a kid was waking up to the woman who had been beaten by our alcoholic husband on our couch, or the kids who didn't have anything to eat at our home. And we certainly didn't have much. She was someone who taught me a kind of a set of values and an ethic both for each other, but for the earth. She spent every waking moment making sure that myself and my two younger brothers lived a full life outdoors. And so yeah, I think my mom had a huge influence on me. Bless her heart. Is she still with you? She is, yeah. She has Alzheimer's now. We tried to move her in with us here in Vermont and that didn't go so well. So we currently have a husband and wife that are living with her at her home in Saratoga Springs. And so- In honor of your mother, we're so glad that she created you and gave you to us. Were you born and raised in Vermont? No, I grew up in Saratoga Springs, New York. Yeah, what brought me to Vermont was the job at the University of Vermont in 2002. So I've been here for a good stretch, but my first life was a competitive ski racer. So I always thought about Vermont in terms of its mountains and its ski areas and always wanted to figure out a way to move to Vermont. And along came this job and here I am. Do you still race? No, I wish I did. I wish I had time to. Both of my boys grew up, my brothers grew up racing. I know your granddaughter who races? There is, but you know, there's this Thursday night group with my son and all of these folks that are in their fifties who are racing up at Bolton on Thursday nights. I should connect you with them. It's only a few hours and boy, they have a ball. I'm gonna do that when this show's over. It is a gravity sport. And I've got that on my side these days. But you are a scholar, a Renaissance man and I wanna jump into your work. You, I tell us a little bit what ecological economic theory is which drives so much of your work, John. Yeah, I think it's nothing more than thinking of the economy as a ecosystem, right? The economy as a system that is interdependent on society and culture. That's interdependent on our environment. Not this kind of abstracted human thing that has its own set of rules and its own sort of internal goals. But truly thinking of the economy as embedded inside of the natural environment. You know, one of my mentors, Herman Daly, who also recently passed away, spent a whole career just drawing a square inside a circle, right? Here's the economy and here's the environment and one sits inside the other. And the economy as it expands, it doesn't expand into the void, it expands into a fixed finite planetary system. So ecological economics to me is just simply 21st century economics, right? Where we come to terms with those kinds of trade-offs. Thank you for that. Now you are a prolific writer with over a hundred conference papers, research reports and press articles and seven books. Your bio is extensive and deeply impressive. Now you just finished what I believe may be your seventh book, The Progress Illusion, which was released just a couple of weeks ago. Tell us about your new book, which has been described by James Speth as a story that is as deeply disturbing as it is hopeful. You describe an emerging brand of economics that shifts our focus from the GDP to wellbeing. And you have said that economics as currently taught and practiced today will ensure a planetary path to ruin. Can you talk to us about that, John, in this new book? Yeah, I mean, this is in some ways my midlife crisis book, right? It's a reflection back on my career, thinking about our struggles, our push, our due diligence to try to reform both the study and the practice of economics, to make economics more human, to make economics a study of resilience and sustainability and equity, to move economics away from its obsession with growth and competition and towards something that is focused more on cooperation and care and stewardship. So, the kind of economics that I was taught in school was born in the late 1800s. And it was tweaked a little bit in the 1930s and 40s by Keynes and others in reaction to the Great Depression. But during the Reagan-Thatcher era, during the 80s, when I grew up and was sort of told by my father, go study economics, greed is good, right? This is the way to think about society's problems. It's sort of left us with problems of a growing economy and then the solutions that are presented are to grow the economy some more. It's kind of what they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, right? That if you think you can solve problems with the same type of thinking that created the problems, that's a little bit delusional. It's a kind of insanity. So yeah, this book is going back, looking at my own upbringing, thinking of myself as a white American male who was in high school in the go-go 80s and thinking about all those other white American males that have gone out and forged ahead in economics and forged ahead in business and have kind of drank the Kool-Aid of greed is good. And my reflection on what went wrong and how we can fix it. Well, you spoke earlier about Herman Daly, who you said just passed away and I'm sorry about that. He was the greatest professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. And he said in the forward of your book, the errors of economics are disastrous and we are currently suffering from them. Now you call humanity greedy and independent and during your entire adult life, you have worked to merge human compassion, cooperation and interdependence and stewardship with our economic wellbeing. Is that so? Yeah, that's been the journey we've been on to build a more ecological economics, to build an economy that recognizes first and foremost that we are interdependent, right? We depend on each other. We're a social primate species. We depend on community, we depend on family and we depend on our environment. And that when we grow the square inside the fixed circle, it creates problems, especially on a planet that's just crossed 8 billion people mark. Have you read the book, Sapiens? I know the book, but I haven't read it yet, no, but. You have to read it because the modern Sapien is the greedy warlike and we wiped out seven other Sapien groups. So you should read the book because it really, I think it'll resonate with you in a very big way. Now you were born in 1969. Yes. At the height of the 60s revolution of my generation. Do you think we have evolved very much from those days of rebelling against the status quo and seeing the world as we felt it should be and not as it was? Well, I reflect on this sum in my book. I think in many ways we've gone backwards. You know, I compare my generation to my parents' generation. And I compare, you know, my mother and father, you know, look to someone like Kennedy and bought into the idea that, you know, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. My generation in the read as good 80s, you know, grew up with a president who was saying, my job is to get government off your back. Government is the problem. It's not the solution. And, you know, the so-called neoliberal turn that took a course that reduced all social relations to market logic. And I talked some about, you know, the sort of early warnings that were put in place in the 1940s and 50s. In particular, the political economist Carl Polani, who wrote a book while he was actually in Vermont called The Great Transformation. And he warned about the coming of a market society, right? Where market principles, overwhelmed social principles pushed aside democratic institutions, created a kind of society led by corporate profits and corporate control. And so, unfortunately, I think some of those prog... What's the word? Prognist, I can't say the word. Some of those future-looking books written in the 40s and 50s have largely come true. So how important is your work today to help save ourselves from the planet that is heating up? Vermont in the last 50 years has seen its temperatures rise four degrees in the winter and two degrees in the summer. So is the human race salvageable? Well, I hope so, but in my darker moments, I feel like what we're doing is preparing for the alternative when the next crisis happens, when the civilization built on market logic fumbles. And we see this, we see this coming out of, for example, the Great Recession. We saw all of a sudden a lot of mainstream writers and mainstream economists start to talk like and think like ecologically economists. We saw this during the COVID crisis, right? Where communities started to realize what is essential work, right? And what makes the economy tick and communities that had good social safety nets and had neighbors and had informal economies were able to weather the storm more than those communities here in the US and around the world that were fundamentally dependent on an international supply chain. So there's these warning shots all the time, right? And then the powers that be say, it's our job to get us back to normal. And I feel like this time around, I mean, maybe I'm naive, but this time around people are saying, hey, we don't wanna go back to normal. Normal was in crisis, right? Normal was a planet that is dying. Normal was a highly inequitable income and wealth distribution. Normal was putting more and more power in the hands of fewer and fewer people. So each time these kinds of crises happen, each time the pendulum swings, feels like ours and ecological economics and other kind of more diverse perspectives of the economy start to become more relevant. So talk to us about your vision for the new economy and is it taking root around the world? And if not now, when will it? How much time do we have? I think so. I think there's a lot of resistance. There's for example, a very, very vibrant social movement that many people call degrowth or agroth or post growth, right? Imagining a future would look like that didn't fundamentally depend on always and everywhere growing the economic system, growing the economic system by creating more and more debt, right? More and more claims on the future, more and more reliance on a system that is controlled by the very, very few. You know, degrowth asks us to start asking and regulating in an economy more effectively, right? To say that, why are we investing in more and more fossil fuel infrastructure? For example, when we should be getting off of fossil fuels. We see cities and towns and counties across the United States starting to put in bands of new fossil fuel infrastructure, right? Here in Vermont, you know, I testified when we were looking at expanding the natural gas pipeline through Vermont and said, look, you know, here's the math. When you put in a new pipeline, it creates a kind of path dependence, right? A kind of decade-long dependence on this new infrastructure. We need to stop building this new fossil fuel infrastructure. We need to learn to live better with less. We need to get off of carbon-based fuels as soon as possible. And really the only effective way to do that to make that transition from carbon to renewables is with a smaller economy, a more nimble economy, a more resilient economy, an economy that provides for all rather than, you know, hopes that it'll trickle down from the very few. So how do we conquer the greed and the separation of minds and hearts that we experienced today in order to institute a new way of economics and environmental sustainability? Well, I don't think greed is the default condition of humanity. I think that greed is reinforced and brought out, expressed through the kinds of institutions that we create. Part of this book was an exploration of human nature, Homo sapiens, right? And moving away from this very narrow model that economics is built on called Homo economicus, right? This rational actor, this rational person, an individual at a point in time who always wants more, who doesn't think about those around him or herself, it's usually a him in these models and doesn't even think about the future. You know, my exploration of economics in the areas where economists are cooperating with other fields, such as the neurosciences, such as the behavioral sciences, such as sociology, anthropology, natural sciences, ecology, like my field, you find a very different caricature of the human being, right? A human being that is more oriented towards the group, the human being that values family and love and care and compassion. So I think in many ways, we've created kind of institutions and educational institutions like my own that teaches this economic worldview, that's been kind of a collective brainwashing. And in fact, I think it's very easy to reverse that. In some of my work, when we work at community levels, you see the full expression of humanity come out. You see the greed is good put to the side. You see this sort of selfish actor model that economists preach doesn't actually, isn't actually viable in communities and community settings. So I think there's a lot to embrace on that side of the human persona and suppress the side that's sort of that tends to be a male oriented side that has led to war, competition and destruction. The word sustainability today really freaks me out because I don't think we can sustain what we have anymore. I think we really need to talk about adaptability. Isn't your research about adapting new ideas to forge new economic policies going to help sustain human life? I think so. And it's also about really questioning the human centricity of our thought systems, right? Making room for all of life on planet earth. Economics, law, political science, so many of our thought systems that we teach our young people are entirely human centric, right? They're actually built on a Judeo-Christian faith system that places the human at the top of the ladder of nature, with control over the environment. We're learning through complexity science, through really embracing the lessons from evolutionary biology, through understanding the human as a social primate species. We're learning that these models are not only fundamentally wrong, but they're dangerous, right? So I see this movement towards a kinder, gentler, more compassionate economics as a simple next stage of our own social evolution. If you think of the economy as an ecosystem, right? When an ecosystem is young, or Northern hardwood force, when our Northern hardwood force want to come into a farm field in Vermont, the attention's put on growth and competition and get to the top of the heap as fast as possible. Winter takes all ecosystem, but as an ecosystem matures, right? It doesn't continue to focus on growth and competition. It shifts its attention to resilience and care and cooperation, right? To last and sustain over the long haul. It's a simple evolution that we need to be encouraging in our own institutions to bring about this kind of shift in thinking. So in that vein, John, do you believe that humans as a species have the ability to create a world driven by love, compassion, care and empathy? My faith has been shaken these past six years. Hate groups are rising in the country. I think it's all around us. I think it's, you know, the impetus for this book actually came out of Occupy Wall Street and my participation in that down in New York City. And realizing that, you know, people weren't out there marching and protesting for more greed, right? Or more money or more of anything. They were, yeah, they were protesting for a return to a kind of values that respect all humans of all kinds. It's not, they're not there anymore, but that movement was so powerful for me. Now listen, it is said that the number one most important thing that we can do as humans to save the planet is to educate girls. What do you think about that? Well, certainly has been shown time and time again, empirical studies that when we empower women, when we educate women, when we give women particularly decision authority over their own autonomy, particularly their reproductive autonomy, that takes the pressure off of our populations, that it creates smaller family sizes, that it creates investment in the children that are in our world. Women empowerment is, you know, if there is a secret sauce, it's not such a secret. That's it. And I do feel like fields like mine, economics have gone the way of a very dangerous thought system because they have been so male dominated. So you are a social entrepreneur and you're creating non-governmental organizations that work to bring science and policy together. Talk to us about your four-part documentary series, Bloom, that actually earned you an Emmy, John. Congratulations, John. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, my youngest son, John, is a filmmaker and he kind of brought me into the film world and helped me realize that for every problem, there's a unique communication solution, you know? And certainly in my world, we get rewarded to cranking out more and more academic papers that other academics read. Now, that's part of it, right? You have to sort of push along your own discipline and your own thought systems, but I came to documentary filmmaking really as a leverage point. And so yeah, we made this four-part PBS film, Bloom, to really look at the fate and state of Lake Champlain. Working with my colleague, Vicko Danio, and we started a media company called Brightville Eco Media, which then led to other projects. Our most recent one was working with my colleagues, Jacob Smith and Katherine Goldman, on a film called Waking the Sleeping Giant, where we followed around the Sanders campaign throughout 2015 and 2016 to really try to understand what was happening in the United States. What was Senator Sanders stirring up, right? How was he kind of creating this appeal to a more compassionate, caring economic system, right? Which is a big theme in my own work. So yeah, I have found, as with you, documentary filmmaking is a vehicle of communication, a visualization of alternative futures that's much, much more powerful in many ways than writing a book or writing another paper. You have to wonder when you think about Al Gore and Bernie Sanders and all these great people who could have been leading our country about the divine intervention that those, that they were not elected. Do you remember the bird that landed on the podium when Bernie was talking to like 25,000 people and that's, do you remember that? I do, I do remember that, amazing. His reaction was the best, right? And it sat there for five minutes. I mean, it was just, that was a moment where, it did seem like some sort of divine intervention. Definitely it was something divine there, but Bernie is so divine. So there is so much that you have done and are deeply involved in today to help save our species. What is the most important thing that humans can do to support your belief that we can heal the planet through our economic governance? Well, it's hard to boil it down to the most important thing. So maybe 55, or so many, for our viewers. Where my hope comes from is, and this maybe sounds cliches, is from young people. I mean, again, I think about my generation and when I was in high school, when I was going to college, we grew up in this hyper-individualistic society, right? And a society that really put power into the hands of white men like myself. And I've of course benefited from that. I see a turn that's happening. I see our young people now, every year I'm a year older and my students are the same darn age. And every year I'm so enthralled, inspired by their lesson that less is more, that we all don't need to have a car, we can share, that we all don't need to have a 4,000 square foot home. We can share, that we can create the sharing and caring economy. We can create less material consumption. We can create a world where well-being increases by contracting shrinking our material economic system. In fact, the statistics show this, right? If we plot per capita income across nations, across the world, we find that the high per capita income countries, especially the countries that have high income inequality have some of the worst social outcomes. So I feel like our next generation, our students coming up through that are starting to get into positions of leadership that are starting to be elected to boards and nonprofits and state legislatures and school boards. This is that kind of slow wave change that I've invested my life in that where I think there's the most hope. Will it happen fast enough and far enough? Boy, I don't know. I know Senator Sanders has put a lot of his attention on getting more people elected from the grassroots right on up through the system. And I think there's a lot of lessons to be learned here instead of focusing on the charismatic leader that we elected every four years, that we have to see investment in leadership throughout our communities and economy. Beautifully said, beautifully said. Are you excited about fusion? I mean, nuclear to me is always a big freak out, but at the end of the day, fusion. I mean, yesterday, big day, right? Big day for physicists. I'm not sure it's a big day for society. All right, well, that's important. That's a whole nother interview, but listen, I could talk to you forever, John Erickson. You have done so much in your short 50 plus years. And to me, you are as close to a superhero that there is. So thank you for all you do and all that you are into my viewers. Please order your copy. This is a great story. This is not a geeky book that you can't get your head around, although I can be quite geeky. This is a beautiful story about your life and how you've applied your life to bringing the planet and the economy together to help save our species. The Progress Illusion by John D. Erickson. And as he says, we can reclaim our future from the fairy tale of economics. And perhaps if we all come together, we can do just that and save our species. So John Erickson, to you, I thank you for your time. I thank you for your mind and all that you've done. It's just been grand following your career. And thank you. Thank you so much. And to my viewers. Thank you for all your work. You are what makes Vermont special. Thank you. Thank you, John. And to all my viewers, I wish you a happy holiday. We have some snow out there and it looks like it's gonna give us a big snowstorm on Friday. So enjoy this holiday and I will see you next year. Bye-bye.