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European Association
of Environmental and Resource Economists
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EAERE President Correspondence
N. 2 - September 2004 - Recognising Excellence
Colleagues,
With our Eric Kempe Awards, we recognise outstanding achievement in contemporary scholarship. We now wish to extend this idea to recognise excellence in achievement in two new areas. The first is for Lifetime Achievement by scholars in our field. The second is for Practitioners in the policy or business arena who have made signal contribution in the application of economic ideas. Your nominations in both categories are invited. Below I explain the background and the process for nomination
Your nomination for European Lifetime Achievement Award in Environmental Economics
One of the most attractive features of our profession is its sense of moral purpose. We practise our art not only to enrich and to gratify, but to make this world a better place. We believe that if those in the policy process would act on our advice, we would be 'better off.' But truth does not easily reveal her secrets. WB Yeats observed that 'every truth has a counter-truth.' The process of discerning what advice to give is not an easy process.
Addressing the creative process, Seamus Heaney observes:
Of course, in any poetic music, there will always be two contributory elements. There is that part of the poetry which takes its structure and beat, its play of metre and rhythms, its diction and allusiveness, from the literary tradition…….But there is a second element in a poet's music, derived not from the literate parts of his mind, but from its most illiterate parts, dependent not upon what Jacques Maritain called his 'intellectual baggage,' but upon what I might call his instinctual ballast.
And this captures also the creative pulse in economics, the necessity to have grounding in tradition, but to be open to the unexpected, the 'instinctual ballast' that makes breakthroughs possible. But in addition to these twin forces of tradition and instinct, productive creativity requires also perseverance, the daily grind; inspiration does favour the well-prepared mind.
We live in times of celebrity culture, where it seems that all of us are heir to Andy Wharhol's 15 minutes of fame; we think of Big Brother not as an Orwellian nightmare, but as egocentric mediocrity manifest on television. But beyond the ever shortening horizons of modern culture, we know that real class is found in the achievements of those who devote a lifetime to discerning, distilling and communicating truth, to enriching our endowment of knowledge, so as to make this world a better place. And so we have decided to create the 'European Lifetime Achievement Awards in Environmental Economics' to recognise those who have devoted themselves productively and persistently to this task. And we are not seeking perfection. Creativity sometimes requires courage, the willingness to challenge and be different, to make mistakes, to push the boundaries of the acceptable. We invite you to send us your nominations for these awards, to be presented at our Annual Conference in Bremen June 23-26th 2005. Those eligible for nomination are those who:
- have already or are about to retire from their full time post at the age of 65 or whatever is the relevant retirement age (It is accepted that for most nominees, the idea of 'retirement' is notional);
- have been significantly involved in the profession in Europe, e.g. by working here, or contributing regularly to our annual meetings and/or Summer Schools;
- have made an outstanding and sustained contribution to the field, including some combination of scholarship, institutional development and communication/dissemination.Your nominations for European Practitioner Achievement in Applying Environmental Economics
But 'the right idea' is only one side of the coin. We also need politicians, business men and women and administrators who have the courage, the persistence and the skills to get our ideas implemented. And this combination is uncommon, because the ideas of environmental economists typically require changing the status quo, disturbing received wisdom, alienating powerful interest groups, imposing present costs for future gain. As economists, we are often like the character in one of Ibsen's plays who proposes to "raise a revolution against the lie that the majority has the monopoly on the truth."
But for politicians the 'majority' cannot be so easily dismissed. In democracies, they ultimately have to command public support, and this is not always forthcoming. Speaking of his fellow politicians, Edmund Burke observed that There is a mob of their constituents ready to hang them if they should deviate into moderation. Administrators and business men and women also have to struggle with their own colleagues, shareholders and vested interests to move an agenda forward.
And political, commercial and administrative realties often ordain that what we advocate cannot be fully implemented. And so, instead of celebrating the achievement of the possible, we encourage future timidity by joining the Greek Chorus bemoaning the inevitable failure to achieve the ideal.
So bringing our ideas to fruition is lonely and often thankless work. To make a small contribution to overcoming this asymmetry, we are inaugurating the 'European Practitioner Achievement in Environmental Economics.' Those eligible for nomination are those who:
- work or do substantive business in Europe;
- have demonstrated courage and skill in successfully achieving the implementation of environmental economics' ideas.As in the case of our Lifetime Achievers, we are not looking for the unattainable perfection, but we are seeking performance, as opposed to rhetoric or good intentions.
We need your nominations for one or both of these categories.
You can fill in the on-line form(s) (Lifetime Achievement Award or Practitioner Award) or simply send an email to Monica Eberle giving Award Category ('Lifetime Achievement Award' or 'Practitioner Award'), and your case for their selection. Please keep your nominations confidential to yourself. We do not want to create a gratuitous sense of 'failure' amongst those nominated but not selected.
We want to make decisions at our Council Meeting in early November, so we need your nominations not later than September 20, 2004. So don't delay. If you have someone in mind, get back to Monica right away with your nomination. The Awards will be presented at our Annual Conference in Bremen, June 23-26, 2005.
We have enlisted the generous help of Scott Barrett and Thomas Sterner to advice Council on both of these categories.This is a 'learning by doing' process. At this point, we envisage doing this every second year, alternating with the Kempe Award. Unlike Kempe, we see no need to necessarily confine the number of awards to one per category, but, in the event that the field of exceptional nominees is large, we may defer the awards of some worthy nominees to future years.
A favourite quote: Add for 100 Pipers Scotch Whiskey: Great with haggis, fantastic without. (with apologies to Nick Hanley and other Scottophiles).
Frank J. Convery
EAERE President
Past Correspondence
