Join us Thursday August 23, 2012 at 11am PT as we host Maggie Winslow, PhD for an interactive webinar on her insight from ecological economics and what thermodynamic limits tell us about the economy.

The financial crisis that began in 2008, and the efforts to remedy the crisis, lay bare a troubling dichotomy.  Our economy depends on increasing levels of consumption to maintain its health.  However, the planet we live on is finite.  Decreased consumption that has resulted from the crisis is a blessing for ecosystems and dwindling resources.  However, it has also led to rising unemployment and all of the related negative social consequences.

Thus we find our economic system in a bind.  We need to keep buying new goods to keep employment levels high and the economy strong. But buying all of these goods is not sustainable and is actually deleterious to the ecosystem upon which all life depends.

How did we end up in this situation?  Part of the problem lies with the theory that underlies our market economy, neoclassical economics.  This model, while elegant and useful in many ways, does not explicitly recognize ecosystem limits nor does it value lost natural capital and ecosystem services.  

Maggie Winslow will present the basics of an alternative, transdisciplinary field called ecological economics.  Ecological economics provides a view of the economy that takes into account the laws of thermodynamics, needs of future generations, and overall scale of the economy relative to the ecosystem.  It also provides a framework from which business people can evaluate their firm’s performance and interconnections to the economy and ecosystem.  

Dr. Maggie Winslow has been a professor of economics at Presidio Graduate School for the past nine years where she has taught Managerial Economics, Macroeconomics  and Ecological Economics.  Starting in the fall of 2012, she will be teaching in the Environmental Sciences Department at the University of San Francisco. Previously she taught at UC Berkeley, Antioch University, the Central European University, and for the Conservation Strategy Fund.  She has also been a researcher for Redefining Progress, the Pacific Institute, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Conservation Law Foundation, and Lawrence Berkeley Lab where she worked on the economics of energy efficiency.  She has a BA in Political Science from Williams College, a MS from the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources, and PhD from the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley.  Her dissertation work examined the relationship between economic growth, environmental quality and democracy.  Her current research is on labor productivity, wages, and environmental quality.

For more information and to register: http://ow.ly/bk84d