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European Association
of Environmental and Resource Economists
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EAERE President Correspondence
N. 4 - November 2004 - The Importance of Place
Colleagues,
One of the joys of working in Europe in the 21st century is the fact of spatially condensed cultural, linguistic, economic and social diversity of a particularly engaging and stimulating kind - teeming difference is close to hand. From Bilbao to Budapest to Bremen, lessons are there to be learnt from each others experience.And the European Union, at its best, attempts to make the whole more than the sum of the parts by encouraging and facilitating mutual learning, by enabling, facilitating and accelerating knowledge transfers, by setting a direction, and letting the various European strands mobilise their own ingenuity to get there.
For most of us, identity with place is important. We all come from somewhere, and most of us cherish a sense of belonging, the imprinting that geography endows. As Seamus Heaney puts it:
We are dwellers, we are lovers, we make homes and search for our histories….And I am convinced that it is to ..the land itself that we must look for continuity.
But in Europe we are especially conscious of how allegiance to land and folk can easily transmogrify to an impulse that justifies hatred and oppression, a road travelled by the Norwegian writer Knut Hamson. In Growth of the Soil he provided a lyrical interpretation of love of land and place, whereby 'A man had everything; his powers above, his dreams, his loves, his wealth of superstition.' But tragically, the sense of superiority implicit in his world view led him to support the Nazi philosophy and occupation of Norway.
More generally, patriotism of all sorts shades into varying degrees of idiocy. Jorge Luis Borges observed that:
There is no end to the illusions of patriotism. In the first century of our era, Plutarch mocked those who declared that the Athenian moon is better than the Corinthian moon; Milton, in the seventeenth, observed that God is in the habit of revealing Himself first to His Englishmen; Fichte, at the beginning of the nineteenth, declared that to have character and to be German are one and the same thing.
And so we need to be aware that the shadows of the past can stifle the creative wave of self consciousness that diversity can bring. In Europe, as William Faulkner said in a different context, 'The past isn't dead and gone. It isn't even past yet'.
Environmental and resource challenges are spatially defined: Acid rain kills the Swedish lakes, nutrient enrichment damages French rivers and the Baltic Sea, hedgerow removal destroys biodiversity in England, increased extraction of water imposes external costs in Spain and doubling of road traffic in 15 years causes congestion and gridlock in Dublin.
In economics, we recognise that theory is the universal template, the last on which all problems can be worked upon independent of space and place. And this reality and philosophy is recognised in our meetings. This is necessary, but is it sufficient? To be credible witness to our profession, a little of what we do needs also to have spatial co-ordinates. This impulse is already evident in the development of the Spanish-Portuguese Association of Environmental and Resource Economists that met for the first time in Vigo Spain in June 2004. Other national/regional associations are iin place and evolving.
We would like this welcome development to have some expression at our annual meeting, and to encourage and facilitate the coherent development of national or regional clusters of environmental and resource economists. And so, at our Bremen meeting June 23-26 2005, on a pilot basis, we are facilitating regional/national engagement: the Spanish Portuguese Association will conduct their business meeting there, and host a session, there will be an Ireland-UK session, and perhaps others. The Spanish-Portuguese Association has developed Articles of Association which they are happy to share with others who are in the process of developing their own Association. The coverage and extent of these sessions will depend on demand.
Let your colleagues know about this development, If you have suggestions in this regard, get in touch with our Secretary General (monica.eberle@feem.it). Keep an eye on our web site for further developments. After Bremen, we will review the experience and decide whether to drop the idea or to develop it further.
Favourite Quote: I knew this would happen.
Epitaph on tombstone, (McCarthy) in Shanganagh cemetery, County DublinFrank J. Convery
EAERE President
Past Correspondence
