Green Glossary: Ecodextrous

This clever term describes the mix of ecology and economics. Vague enough for you? Well maybe that's a good thing. The open-for-interpretation vibe of this term allows for us to think beyond what passes for financial thinking (sic) these days.

"The first thing you could do is to correct GDP (gross domestic product) so that it becomes more a measure of welfare," says James Gustave Speth, dean of Yale University's School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. "Right now it?s a measure of output. If you have more and more crime, build more and more jails, have more and more automobile accidents, your GDP goes up. If you stop washing your own car and hire somebody to wash it for you, and you get paid for washing somebody else's car, GDP goes up. It's just a measure of economic activity, of economic output and it can be corrected to more accurately reflect welfare."

Another ecodextrous vision could be participatory economics, "a proposed economic system that uses participatory decision making as an economic mechanism to guide the production, consumption and allocation of resources in a given society." Also called Parecon this approach has been called "an anarchistic economic vision."

A purer version of green anarchy meets ecodextrous might sounds like John Zerzan: "If we're going to have a future, it'll have to be primitive to stop destroying the Earth, some kind of return to community."