ABSTRACT
Herman Daly articulated concern at the conflict between economic and environmental policy using the expressive language of 1970s environmentalists. Nearly 40 years later, the divergence between economics and environmentalism, far from being solved, has become more pronounced and the fault lines are showing. On the one hand, macroeconomic policy is dominated by market fundamentalism, free trade and an obsession with growth as the prime measure of success. On the other, environmentalism has embraced the concept of balance between society and the environment under the notion of sustainability, with the prime measure of success the extent to which we live within the limits of the planet. Macroeconomics has been judged a success because it has delivered growth in global GDP, but sustainability has failed by its own measure as consumption overshoots the ecological capacity of the planet by over 50 per cent (WWF 2012). It is now urgent to reconcile macroeconomic policy ‒ something we can control ‒ with the imperative to live within planetary limits ‒ a fixed constraint.
