 Welcome to Books, Books, Books. I'm your host, Mihaila Stoops, and today we're talking about dictionaries, more precisely about the dictionary of ecological economics. My guest is Barry Solomon. He co-authored and co-edited this dictionary with Brent Haddad. Am I saying the name right, Barry? Yes. Thank you. And Barry is a professor emeritus in geography and environmental policies at Michigan Technological University. And Barry has been here on island in Maui living full time since 2015. And we're definitely happy to have him on the show and on island. Thank you for coming, Barry. Yeah, glad to be here and glad to have this conversation about our dictionary. Well, and we're gonna start this conversation predictably with trying to define what ecological economics means. Well, to understand ecological economics, you have to start with conventional economics. If you look in standard textbooks of economics, they typically show a circular flow diagram between consumers and producers. Where's the environment? It's usually absent. If anything, the environment is an afterthought or something external to the workings of the economy, sometimes called an externality or pollution is a good example of an externality, something that's an unintended side consequence. Ecological economics in contrast takes the assumption that the economy is actually a subsystem of the biosphere that we can't have an economy if we didn't have nature, if we didn't have energy and natural resources that provide input to economic systems. And of course, as we manufacture and make things that people wanna consume, we end up with a lot of waste and pollution going back into the environment. So ecological economics recognizes that the economy has to be closely tied to the biosphere ecosystems not separate from that. And this is a newer term. As a matter of fact, the stop title of the dictionary is terms for a new millennium. So it is something rather new even in the academia. Yes, ecological economics was founded as a formal field in the late 1980s. Before that, there was a professor named Herman Daley who wrote some books about the steady state economy. The idea that the economy can't and shouldn't grow forever instead it maybe it's desirable to try to get to some eventual steady state. And that ties in with what we often refer to as sustainability and sustainable development. So Herman Daley and some of his students and others decided to form this new field in the late 1980s because they saw conventional economics as failing and its fundamental mission and fundamentally focusing too much on economic growth as the be all and end all, which is impossible to do forever in a finite planet. So everybody has heard and used the term sustainability. It's used a lot more than ecological economics. Am I missing a nuance there where why would I say ecological economics rather than economics with sustainability? Well, ecological economics tries to be what we call transdisciplinary to link economics and ecology more directly together in terms of systems, right? Sustainable development and sustainability has over a hundred different definitions. And in our dictionary, we have a lot of different definitions of sustainable energy, sustainable transportation, sustainable cities and so on and so forth because people use these terms in the field. But ecological economics focuses primarily on the interrelationships between ecology and economics most directly and to try to get beyond the traditional blinders we have of focusing on only one discipline at a time. So are the terms related? Absolutely, but they're not really the same thing. I see. Now, the dictionary has over 1,100 words that are defined and there's context and there's correlations with other words as well. How did you and your co-editor come up with this list? Why these 1,100 words? Why not more? Why not less? Well, we had to do a pretty massive literature search of the field. There's certain scholarly journals in ecological economics. The main one is just called that, the ecological economics journal. And there's a lot of books in the fields as well. So we had to do a keyword search of a lot of the key journals and books in the field. And from that, we narrow down the terms to the ones that were showing up the most, sort of like a content analysis of the literature, if you will. And this is a very tedious process actually because there's a lot of related terms kind of at the margins. So if you work in ecological economics, do you have to be an expert on ecology as well as economics, for example? Not necessarily overall, but in certain areas of those fields, you need to know quite a bit. So there's some basic terminology in economics and ecology that anyone working in this field should be familiar with as well. So we included those kinds of terms in the dictionary. And when we went through the process of actually writing the definitions and inviting other experts from around the world to contribute, many of them suggested terms that we hadn't thought of. And we considered those on a case-by-case basis. Some we included, some we didn't. And there were some new terms. Any field evolves. And so there's some new terms that haven't been used in the field a lot. And there's also some terms that are maybe popular at the beginning of the field that aren't used as much today that we include. So inevitably you're gonna get some words and terms. And when I say words and terms, some of the things in the dictionary are two or three words together. So they're not just single words, right? And so you'll find a range of terminology and phrases in the dictionary. Some that are very commonly used and some less so. So we had to inevitably use our judgment on what belongs and what doesn't based on what people are actually doing in this field and to best represent the field. And when I say the field, I don't mean just in the United States, I mean around the world as well. Ecological economics is very popular in Europe. There's societies in Canada, South America, East Asia and so on. So it's really a worldwide association of people working in this field. So how many scientists and maybe linguists have you consulted all together to or participated in this effort and were they most of them from US and were most of the words, let's say when they were, some of these words are brand new. It's a new area in a way. So I assume that at some point somebody came up with a word to describe something and was that word in English or was it in another language? Right. So most of the words are in English or start in English but there's a few that were more common in French and Spanish and that had to be translated. So we had a total of 450 contributors to the dictionary. I haven't looked at the list recently but my guess is maybe about half of them were from the United States and the other half were from other countries. We didn't really consult with any linguists or the dictionary. We didn't think that was necessary but we made sure to get a very wide range of people who are working in this field because we didn't wanna ignore some terms or phrases that maybe are more popular in Europe than in the United States. Like there's one called industrial political ecology for example, don't ask me what that means but that's more popular phrase in France than in the United States. So you did not write the definition for that term, somebody else? Not for that one. And you asked about new terms, one very popular word in the dictionary that was new at some point is ecosystem services. It's very popular research topic around the world but at some point that was brand new. It's parallel to the idea of economic services, the service sectors that we have and the conventional view of an economy. So you can think of services provided by nature from ecosystems, natural resources, forest, marshes and so on. So obviously the desire to go through such a laborious project comes from your passion for the environment and environmental policies. And you previously worked for the Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of Energy. Am I right? Is this what gave you the idea and the passion to go through with this and compile this dictionary? Yeah, absolutely. I've worked in the field of ecological economics for let's see about 25 years and it's been more or less recognized as a field for about 35 years. So as I said, it started in the late 1980s officially. There's an international society for ecological economics that was founded at a meeting at the World Bank in Washington DC in 1990. And I actually founded the US Society for Ecological Economics about 10 years later at a meeting at University of Maryland College Park. So with a background in geography, geography is also a very interdisciplinary field and it looks at environmental problems as well. Ecological economics has some similarities in terms of being fairly interdisciplinary and even what we call transdisciplinary going beyond the idea of caring that much if ideas or concepts are really coming from a particular discipline or not. It's more focused on problem solving and however is the best approach to address environmental problems. So you mentioned you had to go through a significant body of work to identify which you probably were familiar with most of it I assume because it is your area of expertise but to identify these words that should be included in the dictionary. And my question to you is would artificial intelligence have helped you in this case to pick up these words? Good question. Maybe but we didn't really think about doing that because I know it's a new area and there's some software and technologies that are having some problems with them. So I think we wanted to be a little cautious as far as that goes. The main tool that I use for research is Google Scholar. Google has this system, Google Scholar that quickly identifies all the top published papers and books in a particular subject. And as a professor or emeritus professor, I have access to all the research articles. If I can't get a PDF of them quickly I can get them on interlibrary loan without a fee. Books are a little different. You have to order the books or technically I can get them on interlibrary loan but going from Michigan to Hawaii that might be a little more cumbersome. So we use the more traditional way of researching the field to figure that out. And that works fairly well. And of course I had a lot of help from my co-editor Brent Haddad who's at the University of California, Santa Cruz and their environmental studies department. So why, if somebody like me, not an expert in the area comes across one of these terms in an article and wants to find out what it means, would they go to this dictionary or would they just Google it and see what comes up? Yeah, that's a really good question. Well, you can certainly find things by Googling it but you may not find exactly what you're looking for and you may not know that you didn't get what you really want. See, because a lot of the terms in a dictionary like this have multiple definitions. They might be defined differently in ecology and economics. Take the term resilience. Resilience is very important in natural systems for recovery, say a coastal area from a storm or something like that, but you can also refer to economic resilience or urban resilience, recovering after some natural disaster that affects an ecosystem or a pandemic, if you will, right? So the term resilience might be used three, four, five, six different ways. So if that's the case in ecological economics, we wanna show all of the different definitions, not just one and we'll point out if it's defined differently in economics or ecology. There's also terms that we might use in the dictionary here that have other definitions that are not really relevant to the dictionary. And if that's the case, we chose not to include them in the dictionary. Some examples of that might be demand, sources, things and transparency. Sources and things, for example, in say in global climate change, a source of greenhouse gas emissions would be combustion of fossil fuels, burning of forest. Those would be considered sources of carbon dioxide emissions. And sinks is where they end up. Do they end up on the soil and the ocean in the ground and so on? But there's, of course, other definitions of sources and sinks that aren't really relevant. So we're not gonna put every definition only the ones that are relevant to people working in this field. So who are the professionals or the people that could really use this dictionary? Right, well, there are some academic programs in ecological economics, not a lot, but certainly courses in this are taught in many universities in the US as well as other countries. So in Hawaii, for example, there's no degree program in ecological economics, but there's several professors and natural resources fields at University of Hawaii, Manoa, who would be very interested in this dictionary. Also, there's some other professionals in NGOs, non-government organizations that might be interested. In the case of Hawaii, it would be the nature of conservancy of Hawaii would be an example and another one would be the Hawaii Land Trust. They certainly work with a lot of the concepts and terminology that would be included in a dictionary like this. So we, our language evolves. There's new words and the words that nobody uses anymore. Right. Now, when there is a new word and it's included in a dictionary, it kind of gets validated. Like I'm going to give a very basic example because that's one I know and not one from ecological economics, like a selfie. That's a new word that somebody came up with. We don't know who. And then next thing you know, it's official. We know what that is. How, I mean, do you anticipate that there's going to be new words in this area of expertise as well? Are there some that are just kind of emerging and not validated yet by including them in a dictionary? Yeah. I mean, there's a few terms we use are included in the dictionary that we originally were not planning to but a contributor sort of talked us into it. Gave us examples of where it's used more commonly maybe that we weren't aware of. So, yeah, there are some new terms that are coming along in ecological economics as well. And you asked about artificial intelligence earlier and that would be an area that could have some effect on some new terms. One example there is in artificial intelligence kind of a sub category is called machine learning. This originally started in computer science but it's basically algorithms, the computer programs and models that have been developed to help computers think more intuitively like humans to become more effective problem solvers, right? And so with the emergence of big data and very large data set and a lot of academics like to use big data sets, machine learning can be very useful there. And I've noticed in the last few years in the sciences there's a big increase in that as a research method people are using to pour through a lot of data as well as a related technique called data mining. So that's gonna be used more in ecological economics and then you would end up with some more specialized statistical terms, technical terms related to that that maybe don't seem all that environmental. The thing about ecological economics in terms of methodology is that it's very open minded. The first year that the Journal of Ecological Economics came out, one of the professors from University of California at Berkeley named Dick Norgaard wrote a paper called A Plea for Methodological Pluralism. And what that means is he wanted the field to be very open minded to using a lot of different kinds of methods in the fields and not get kind of constrained as was often the case traditionally in conventional economics and only preferring certain types of models of the economy and not others. Okay, so with methodological pluralism, anything goes to the extent you agree with that. So machine learning is gonna be more commonly used. And something else that is raised by artificial intelligence of course is ethical questions. There's already some ethical and philosophical terms in our dictionary because that's been recognized as important in the field, importance of fairness and equity and the distribution of resources among the rich and the poor within a country and across generations. So as artificial intelligence becomes even more popular, our catch is on, I'd imagine there's gonna be even more use of terms from bioethics and environmental ethics and ecological economics as well. Sort of, you know, firms that maybe are already out there in those other fields but get carried over into ecological economics more. As well as possibly brand new terms. Well, this is very interesting. I speak for myself here that I've learned a lot from you today and there's two takeaways for me. One is, you know, Googling things may not give me the right results, particularly when it's very specific terms that need to be put in a certain context. And secondly, you know, I think this area of expertise, this ecological economics really hit home here in Hawaii where we have to make a lot of economic decisions that affect our environment. And we can all think about, you know, over tourism, the sea level rise issues and many more. So I hope that there will be many professionals in the islands that will be consulting this dictionary and using it to present ideas and generate ideas to solve some of these issues that we're confronted with. One more thing about the dictionary that, you know, the basic dictionary first comes out in a hardcover and it's rather expensive and the commercial publishers of dictionaries like this, they like to see how well it does in the first couple of years and then if it sells enough books, they'll switch from a hardcover to a softcover. But it's also already available in an ebook format, electronic book format through Google Play that's a lot less costly. And if to the extent we update the dictionary that would be the easiest way to do it, the electronic version, because it's already out there on Google Play. Thank you for that clarification. Well, Barry, thank you again for joining us today. And I hope that there's going to be a second edition of this dictionary with more words or new words coming up soon. Thanks for having me and I really enjoyed our conversation. And to our viewers, a hui hou. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. 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