Going Steady with Herman Daly: ‘The canary has fallen silent’

We follow Herman from the lecture halls of Louisiana to the forests of Brazil – and through a period of global upheaval and personal transformation. Herman was profoundly shaped by the realities of inequality and ecological fragility in the Global South. These experiences helped crystallize his vision of a steady-state economy; one that operates within the planet’s ecological limits and prioritizes human wellbeing and ecological boundaries over endless growth.

With reflections from his family and followers, this episode captures the moment Daly’s thinking moved from quiet resistance to creating economic theories that would go on to have a truly global influence. 

Featured in this episode:

Colvis Cavalcanti, ecological economist

Brian Czech, Author of Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train and executive director of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy

Rob Dietz, Program Director at the Post-Carbon Institute, co-author of Enough is Enough, and co-host of Crazy Town

Terri Daly Stewart, Senior Occupational Therapist and Herman and Marcia's eldest daughter

Karen Daly Junker, Senior Manager of Provenance Research at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Herman and Marcia’s youngest daughter

Denis Lynn Daly Heyck (Deni), Professor Emeritus of Spanish language and literature and Herman's sister

Katy Shields, Regenerative economist and co-creator/host of Tipping Point

Peter Victor, Professor Emeritus of ecological economics & author of Herman Daly’s Economics for a Full World

Kate Raworth, Author of Doughnut Economics and co-founder of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab

Thank you to the Daly family for their generous support in sharing Herman’s story.

Thank you also to our series consultants and fact checkers, Peter Harnik, Rob Dietz, and Peter Victor, who also graciously supplied the interview tape with Herman Daly, recorded in 2022.

Visit the Cities 1.5 podcast page on UTP’s website for the media citations used in this episode.

If you want to learn more about the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy, please visit our website: https://jccpe.utpjournals.press/

Cities 1.5 is produced by the University of Toronto Press and Cities 1.5 is supported by C40 Cities and the C40 Centre for City Climate Policy and Economy. You can sign up to the Centre newsletter here. https://thecentre.substack.com/

Cities 1.5 is hosted by David Miller, Managing Director of the C40 Centre and author of the book Solved. It's written and produced by Peggy Whitfield and Jess Schmidt: https://jessdoespodcasting.com/

Our executive producer is Chiara Morfeo.

Edited by Morgane Chambrin: https://www.morganechambrin.com/

Cities 1.5 music is by Lorna Gilfedder: https://origamipodcastservices.com/

Transcript

[Going Steady with Herman Daly theme music plays]

Herman Daly 00:04

It did occur to me that if I’m saying one thing and nearly everybody else is saying the opposite, maybe I’m wrong. And so, I did go over it and over it and over it, and I tried to elicit criticism. I thought first that, you know, I was within the fold of economics. I was saying something that was going to give economists something to work on that they could contribute to that was important, because I didn’t have all the answers. All I knew was growth is not going to go on forever. That an economy that plans on this happening is going to be disappointed in various ways so let’s try to do something different that respects these limits. We’re part of a larger system, which is also containing it. That’s not hard to understand, but that’s not the way it happened. People would not see that. The best answer I could give myself as to why this is not accepted is that without growth the only solution is sharing, and we’re not willing to face up to share. Redistribution is anathema. That may just be an impasse. [chuckles] It may just be that the truth is unacceptable, and so what’s going to happen? I said, “Well, you know, you’re faced here with a conflict between a political possibility on the one hand, and a biophysical impossibility on the other hand. So, which do you think is more impossible?” [music ends]

David 01:43

[fast rhythmic music] Last episode, we traced the roots of Herman Daly’s intellectual rebellion against conventional economics, which measured progress by the size of the economy, not by the health and wellbeing of people and planet. Here is Brazilian ecological economist and friend of Herman, Clovis Cavalcanti. You’ll hear more from him in later episodes. [music continues then ends]

Clovis Cavalcanti 02:15

The concept of GDP, gross domestic product, is the sacred cow of the economists. In Brazil, for instance, the president has a plan of accelerating growth. Accelerating growth from the perspective of ecological economics means accelerating destruction. Because to promote growth you have to extract resources from some source and return, transform the resource at the end of the process, as degraded matter and energy to the environment. So, you destroy to grow. But people only think about growing as something that does not have any effect on the environment, and Herman Daly explains that when you have the measures embodied in GDP what you have is the measurement of the supposed benefits on meeting the cost of economic growth.

David 03:36

[melodic music] This concept formed a key building block in Herman’s revolutionary work. But to fully understand how Daly’s ideas came to be, we need to step back a bit into a world ablaze. The post-war boom ushered in a new culture of affluence across the Global North, with the United States of America at its center. But promises of consumer prosperity were quickly overshadowed by mounting unrest, and before the 1960s was through the USA was plunged into turmoil. The Vietnam War and the rise of the Civil Rights Movement were some of the first fissures in the illusion of comfortable post-war stability.

Timothy Leary 04:26

Turn on, tune in and drop out.

David 04:35

Alongside the societal upheaval came the first public whispers of a looming ecological crisis. In 1962, American marine biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, an incendiary accounts of the environmental destruction caused by synthetic pesticides like DDT. The book triggered an uproar, but it also galvanized an entire generation to become conscious of their environment, eventually leading to a complete reversal in the USA’s pesticide policy, a nationwide ban on many harmful chemicals, including DDT, and the formation of the US Environmental Protection Agency. [music ends]

Brian Czech 05:21

I had been starting to think about the conflict between economic growth and wildlife conservation, I would say, as a teenager growing up in the interface between rural and suburban area in Wisconsin. And I saw the survey flags come up in the field, in the woods next to the house, and I knew it was the end of the road for all that wonderful wildlife that I had enjoyed there as a kid.

David 05:52

[melodic music] More than a scientific warning, Silent Spring delivered a deeper insight. The unprecedented post-war global expansion completely ignored the depletion of a natural world and the first signals of rising inequality. This was the same pattern in many countries, and an early sign of the collapse of the Commons. In 1968, Garrett Hardin, a friend of Herman’s, would publish his formative article Tragedy of the Commons. He explained that when individuals are encouraged to act in their own self-interest, the result is that they overuse, deplete and destroy shared resources known as the Commons. This includes things like the air we breathe and the oceans that envelop us. He used the example of shepherds overgrazing a shared pasture, but another example might be that in Canada the real-world crisis of overfishing cod in the Atlantic had already begun to tip over into unsustainable levels. [music continues then ends]

Rob Deitz 07:07

It seems so obvious now, and it’s sort of silly, but if what you’re doing economically requires energy, requires materials, and you’re continuously growing it, you will end up being way too exploitative of the ecosystems that, you know, is the life support system of the planet and we’re all dependent on it. So, you cannot erode the biosphere over time. You can’t keep taking away and hope that everything’s going to be all right.

David 07:40

[melodic music] But it was not only academics and advocates who were questioning whether unrestricted growth was the right path, Robert F. Kennedy gave a speech at the University of Kansas on March 10th, 1968, as part of his ill-fated candidacy for president of the United States of America. [music ends]

Robert F. Kennedy 08:01

Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and it counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities, yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.

David 08:54

[rousing music] Kennedy’s words struck at the heart of the problem. GDP, he said, measured everything except that which makes life worthwhile. Just weeks after RFK delivered this speech, Martin Luther King was assassinated. [music ends]

Martin Luther King Jr. 09:15

It’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good solid job. It’s much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary, decent housing conditions.

David 09:39

[slow rhythmic music] A handful of months later, RFK would also be shot. Shock, grief, fear, anger, and a profound sense of disillusionment hung heavy throughout the United States of America. [music ends]

[jazz music] At this time, Herman Daly was a young father and a budding economist. But against the turbulent cultural backdrop of the 1960s, he began to weave an alternative economic vision, a design for a more harmonious world. While grappling with these profound economic and philosophical concepts, Herman and his wife Marcia were also trying to build a life together. Their daughters, Karen and Terri, recall that it wasn’t always easy.

Karen Daly Junker 10:38

It was hard. It was really hard for my mother, and she was in a brand-new country. I think pretty early on they moved up to New Haven and it was cold. [chuckles] I mean, here’s a Brazilian up in New England, and, you know, she was used to being around a lot of people. I think she was lonely, and it was challenging. They were very quick to say, “Yes, it was romantic. Yes, you know, it was this beautiful thing,” but those first few years were hard, and I’m sure they were hard financially. And, you know, dad was working so hard trying to find a good position in a university and [other 11:13] opportunities, but he was also working on his dissertation which was very a difficult process that’s been, I think, pretty well documented with Georgescu-Roegen. But there was a love there that helped sustain them through, and their faith.

David 11:29

[melodic music] In 1968, Herman and Marcia moved their family to Baton Rouge, where he took up a professorship at Louisiana State University. While this opened up new professional doorways for Herman, Marcia found that not everyone was accepting. [music ends]

Terri Daly Stewart 11:48

I think my mom felt that at times, especially in Baton Rouge. She felt like, “Oh, my skin’s darker. People are—they kind of say things to me a little bit sometimes.” I never felt the discrimination, but I think she did. She would say that sometimes.

Karen Daly Junker 12:04

Yeah. I mean, and I remember times where people would kind of focus in on her accent—

Terri Daly Stewart 12:10

Oh, yeah.

Karen Daly Junker 12:10

—or say, “Where—Oh, you know, where are you from?”

Terri Daly Stewart 12:11

“Where are you from?” Yeah. She hated that. Yeah.

Karen Daly Junker 12:14

She hated that. And, you know, she was a very proud voter.

Terri Daly Stewart 12:19

Proud Brazilian, yeah.

Karen Daly Junker 12:21

Proud Brazilian, but also a proud American.

Terri Daly Stewart 12:22

Oh, American. Oh, yeah.

David 12:24

But despite the problems of the outside world, at home Herman was busy being a good dad and husband.

Terri Daly Stewart 12:31

He is down to earth. You know, he is a down-to-earth person, intellectual, thoughtful. I think he really enjoyed being a professor. He enjoyed being a teacher. He liked just sitting with you and having a cup of coffee or a beer, a glass of wine, talking about whatever. He definitely liked good food, good company. You know, he loved to be silly, but he was also very serious. He really could get down about things in the world sometimes. And I was probably a lot more optimistic, you know, personality, and I’d be like, “Oh, dad, just share the joy, damn it! Just share the joy. Just stop being so down.” [laughs] So, that would be something I would tell him a lot.

Karen Daly Junker 13:10

One of my actual favorite memories growing up were the parties that my parents would have. My mother could locate any Latin American person within a 25-mile radius. Wherever she’s lived, she can find them. And then dad had all these sort of academic friends, and at some point they just combined them all and we would have these parties. My mom would make feijoada, you know, black beans and rice, and music. And if we had a party, it’s the only time my father would turn down the freaking temperature in the house, literally. He was always conserving, and it was freaking hot in Baton Rouge. Okay? It was like a sauna down there. So if we had a party, the temperature would go down. And I remember hearing the adults still dancing and having a good time, and I’d be in bed and it was almost chilly because of the air conditioner and just how happy that memory was. I felt so safe and excited that I was cold. You know, they were so social and fun-loving, and I think that’s something people don’t always realize about him.

I think my mother being the life of the party and a music lover really brought a lot of that out in him. He really was someone who wanted to enjoy life. He was very serious about his work, but he was very fun-loving. He loved nature. A lot of our vacations were about the beach or, you know, going on a nature trail somewhere. And I didn’t appreciate at the time. I was a sullen teenager or preteen being dragged out on a boat, but, you know, it was the Atchafalaya Basin or just incredible places. I think he loved that landscape. I go back occasionally and see friends, and just driving through there I’m like, “God, this is so beautiful!” And it’s all eroding away. You know, it’s just like they’ve predicted.

David 14:57

[jazz music] From 1967 to ‘68, Herman spent a series of extended periods in Brazil teaching, researching, and reflecting, working alongside Brazilian economists. [music continues then ends]

Herman Daly 15:15

I took a leave from LSU and went for, I guess, a year and a half, supposed to be two years. I’d finally finished my PhD on Uruguay and there was this opportunity with the Ford Foundation to teach at the University of Ceará. That’s a state in the northeast. The northeast, of course, is the poor area of Brazil, and the students in that area would not usually [went out at 15:38] competition to go study abroad or anything. And that was during the dictatorship. Actually, one of my students disappeared. And it was sort of known that he was kind of a radical, but that was a terrible thing. He was a good decent kid. It was just horrible.

David 15:59

The bravery that it takes to stand up for ideas in the face of oppressive authorities and institutions would stay with him for the rest of his life.

Herman Daly 16:10

The students at the university went on strike against the dictatorship, and so there was a two-month strike in which I was just sort of there. So I devoted that time to reading everything I could get on population development, and I wrote this paper on The Population Question in Northeast Brazil. It was ideological conflict between Marxists and the nationalists and the militarists and the Catholic Church, and there was a whole alliance in favor of high fertility. I guess the other influence was, of course, population environment balance. Population resource balance in northeast Brazil. Because at the time when I was there, you know, the population growth rate was very high, and the resource base was pretty scarce and punctuated by frequent droughts. Seeing that and being right there with it, that had an effect on me and the ideological debate regarding development.

David 17:15

[rousing music] This experience affirmed his growing belief that economics wasn’t just failing, it was fundamentally misaligned with the biosphere. Our planet simply couldn’t support ever increasing levels of consumption, and in Brazil the evidence of that was already clear. The gulf of inequality was increasing in step with its expanding growth. Here’s Herman’s sister, Denis Daly Heyck, who you heard in the last episode. [music continues then ends]

Denis Lynn Daly Heyck 17:50

I remember one of the details that he mentioned was that he and Marcia had to have a lot of servants. A lot of people helping. That was expected that they would hire a lot of the locals to do, you know, so many things: chauffer, cook, whatever. And that they had a gardener, someone to cut the grass, and that that person would come and he would cut the grass with a small pair of scissors. So, that was a very concrete, you know, specific example of becoming very aware in your daily life of the inequality that existed.

David 18:29

Of course, Herman’s wife, Marcia, was herself Brazilian. Her life experience had a profound impact on how Herman looked at the world, as their daughters Terri and Karen explain.

Terri Daly Stewart 18:43

She was born in Olímpia, Brazil, it’s in the state of São Paulo, in 1934, and it was a very rural, small town in kind of the interior of Brazil. They kind of lived more on the outsides of town. A small house, but lots of fruit trees and lots of ability to [go out, inside 19:03] and climb trees and go fishing. She kind of describes it a lot as a different world. You know, a very small town, a lot of politics, prejudice, have, have-nots, you know, a lot of machismo.

Karen Daly Junker 19:19

There was a lot of love.

Terri Daly Stewart 19:20

Oh, yeah.

Karen Daly Junker 19:21

It was challenging. It was hard financially.

Terri Daly Stewart 19:25

Definitely. Yeah.

Karen Daly Junker 19:26

They had a lot of challenges with that. I just remember her saying, “We may have been poor, but we—you know, we had fresh fruits. Yeah. She talked a lot about the fruits. [laughs]

Terri Daly Stewart 19:34

Mm-hmm. The fruits. [laughs]

Karen Daly Junker 19:36

She’s all about the fruits.

Terri Daly Stewart 19:38

Yeah.

Karen Daly Junker 19:38

You know, picking the right mango, even today.

Terri Daly Stewart 19:41

Yeah.

Karen Daly Junker 19:42

But there is—there was a lot of difficulty there, and I think a lot of illness over the years—

Terri Daly Stewart 19:46

Mm-hmm.

Karen Daly Junker 19:47

—because of lack to a lot of medical care, I think.

Terri Daly Stewart 19:51

I’m sure her stories and her culture definitely impacted his worldview. Because, you know, when you go to another country, you see the poverty. You see it in your face, and you can kind of understand more where they came from versus just hearing about it, so, of course, it had to impact him.

Herman Daly 20:12

I remember thinking about—I was in Brazil sitting on the park bench fine little town called Porto de Galinhas, sort of warm springs. A little resort town where Marcia’s parents lived for a while. I had been working and reading, and was still reading and thinking about things, and I just sort of said, “You know, this whole business that I’d been working on at the time, Rachel Carson, Georgescu, all these things. These things all fit together into something fundamentally important.” You know, I just had kind of an epiphany, and I said, “This is important.”

David 20:55

[fast rhythmic music] Back in the USA, a newfound environmental awareness was stirring. In April 1970, the first ever Earth Day brought 20 million Americans into the classrooms and the streets demanding clean air, clean water, and an end to unchecked pollution. At this time, Herman and his family were also stateside again. He was working as a research associate at Yale University where he was thinking deeply about what he had learned during his time in Brazil. Herman was unaware that this moment was to set off a cascade that would fundamentally shape his life and career. That would eventually culminate in one of his greatest epiphanies and set him on a totally new trajectory, away from the neoclassical ideals he had been taught throughout his degrees and towards a wholly different kind of economic thinking. [music continues then ends]

Herman Daly 21:59

When I was visiting Yale, I had time to write. I gave a talk to the Yale chapter of Zero Population Growth. At that meeting, there was a physicist present, John Hart, and he was editing a book with another physicist on environmental problems, and he liked what I said and he said, “Would you be willing to write this up as a contribution to this book we’re editing?” And then at the same time, the Yale Alumni Magazine asked me if they could publish it. The Yale Alumni Magazine is read by a lot of important people who graduated from Yale, one of whom happened to be Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times. And so he read it and calls me up and says, “Would you write an op-ed on the same thing?” I said, “Sure,” and then I wrote a little op-ed called—‘The Canary Has Fallen Silent’ was the title that they gave it, and the only thing I’ve ever posted on The New York Times. [chuckles]

David 23:03

‘The Canary Has Fallen Silent’ was published on October 14th, 1970. Here’s an excerpt from that essay read by our producer Jessica Schmidt.

Jessica Schmidt 23:15

One may theoretically agree that eventually the stationary state is necessary, but yet argue that it is only relevant to the remote future. How do we know that the time is now? Coal miners used to take a canary into the mines with them. When the dust and gases had so fouled the subterranean environment that the canary had trouble staying alive, then the miners knew it was time to stop. With entire species of birds and animals unable to survive in our environment today, and with human life expectancy falling in some areas, it would seem that mankind is very much in the position of the miner whose canary has just died.

David 23:57

Unlike the canary in his New York Times piece, Herman would not fall silent. This article would be the first attempt of many to tell the world just how much damage our economic system was doing to both people and planet.

Jessica Schmidt 24:13

Depletion and pollution of the environment are inevitable by‐products of production and consumption. Matter and energy can be neither created nor destroyed. Production must deplete the environment. Consumption must pollute it.

Herman Daly 24:30

That was then read by Dennis Meadows, who at the time they were working on Limits to Growth and he said, “Oh, wow!” He says, “You know, this is very close to the kind of thing we’re doing.” And so, he wrote me and said, “We should get together and talk about this. Are you going to be at the AAAS meetings in New York?” And so, I said, “Oh, yes, I am,” and so we got together and met. And, of course, the first thing Dennis asked me is, “What is your scenario?”

David 25:00

[melodic music] The scenario was a first of its kind, a computer simulation project that Dennis Meadows and his team were working on at the same time at MIT. Their findings would eventually be published in 1972 in the book titled Limits to Growth. Though they didn’t know it at the time, it would become a seminal precursor to modern ecological economics, but we’ll get to that. [music continues then ends]

[jazz music] In the early 1970s, there was a groundswell of economists who came to the same realization at the same time, ‘the world was not infinite’, and yet our economy was reliant on infinite growth. The incompatibility of this equation could only have one outcome.

Herman was still trying to figure out the best way to communicate his idea for what a solution could look like, a struggle which would define the rest of his career as an economist. In the end, he decided to call it ‘the steady-state economy’, inspired by a term created by 19th century political economist John Stuart Mill. [music continues then ends]

Herman Daly 26:21

I took the term ‘stationary state’, you know, straight from the classical economists. I got a lot of criticism. People said, “Oh, ‘stationary state’, that sounds so static. You know, just people aren’t going to like that. That’s going to be a turnoff.” So I thought, “Well, steady-state. You know, that’s a term used in science, and it has resonance across different scientific fields,” and I defined it to mean basically the same thing as stationary state. So, I thought that would be a—you know, a terminological improvement. In some ways, I guess it was, but, of course, the stationary state term has also, I should have realized, been used by neoclassical growth economists to mean a state in which capital and labor are growing at the same rate and maintaining the same ratio but you have growth. I didn’t mean that and so that introduced a bit of confusion, which I’m partly responsible for. I kept asking people, “You know, give me something better,” and I didn’t really receive anything, and I couldn’t think of anything.

David 27:29

[rousing music] From his erstwhile mentor, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Daly gained the thermodynamic theory he’d been searching for, the economy, like all physical systems, must obey limits. But it was Daly’s own moral clarity, his conviction that economics should serve human and ecological wellbeing, that transformed these influences into something original and groundbreaking. [music continues then ends]

Herman Daly 28:01

Well, I never really abandoned the focus on Latin America. That stayed with me and the idea of economic development. But just going along parallel with that was this whole new way of looking at economic theory and it began to slowly dawn on me the implications of this. If you coupled, you know, the finitude of the earth with the first law and the second law of thermodynamics and the expansion of the economy and the throughput flow from Boldrin and all these things, it sort of added together.

I had been reading Rachel Carson and the whole idea of the ecology and that sort of fit together, so I put that together with the idea of economics as a life science, and the whole entropy thing too: the solar energy, the primary input through the whole system and then the final output and waste. I thought I was within the boundaries of economics and that I was helping to push the boundaries.

David 29:09

[fast rhythmic music] This was how the steady-state economy was born. A vision rooted in limits, balance, and long-term responsibility for the prosperity and wellbeing of people and planet. GDP-driven growth was not an endless ocean. It was a rushing river that was already bursting its banks. [water gushing] The solution was to recalibrate our measure for success, to live within our limits and means. Herman began to set pen to paper writing several more articles outlining this realization. But, of course, Herman was not the only thinker concerned with limits in 1970s America. [music continues then ends]

Katy Shields 30:00

I am Katy Shields. I describe myself as a renegade economist. I used to call myself a recovering mainstream economist, because that’s what my background is.

David 30:10

[jazz music] Katy is also a fellow podcaster. She’s the co-creator of the limited series Tipping Point: The True Story of “The Limits to Growth”. Like myself, and others we’ll hear about in this and other episodes, Katy has also experienced an ecological epiphany. Hers came from Herman’s contemporary, Dr. Donella “Dana” Meadows. Dana was a brilliant scientist, researcher and academic who would eventually be credited as one of the first scholars of sustainability. She was also married to Dennis Meadows, who Herman met in New York and who was a key figure in organizing the first Earth Day back in 1970.

Katy Shields 31:01

Donella Meadows, Dana as she was known to her friends, she was the author of Limits to Growth. The book was about a study that had been produced by a group of system scientists working in MIT in the early 70s. It was commissioned by the Club of Rome, which is a think tank set up by Aurelio Peccei, who was an Italian industrialist, who wanted to understand what we could do about what he called the ‘problematic’. The concept of the problematic was this sort of nested set of interrelated problems. So, on the one hand exponential growth, on the other hand pollution, poverty, deprivation. And so, the task of this team, which Donella Meadows was part of, was to figure out essentially what humanity could do.

They built a model where he had all these interconnected elements, you know, human population, industry, food pollution, and what they did was based on sort of the best [signs 31:56] available of the day, they tried to work out kind of where we were heading, and they developed these scenarios. And one of the famous scenarios, and there’s a famous chart that some people may be familiar with, called the Standard Run, which looks a little bit like where we are heading today. So, you have this rapid growth in the industry and food and productivity and also population, but then sort of a dropping off and a collapse because we run into these ecological limits.

David 32:22

Here’s an excerpt from Tipping Point episode one, ‘The Problematique’.

Katy Shields 32:28

The team tried to find a scenario. They investigated how much land, resources and income would be needed to afford everyone around the world with sufficient food, water and necessities for a good life and tested ways to provision this without surpassing the Earth’s limits. Solutions like renewable energy and efficiency technologies, organic agricultural techniques and regulations to ensure products last longer and can be easily recycled. They also made provisions for investments in education and family planning, and changes in how people live, work and travel to help protect nature, reduce land use and curb urban sprawl. This time they ran a scenario with limits to growth. The solution worked. Still, the team found that it would take some decades to reach a so-called equilibrium society, one in balance with the earth’s carrying capacity. Because of the natural delays in making changes to our industrial processes, our policies and laws, cultures and traditions, the sooner we started on that path, the better our chances of success. 

David 33:27

[fast rhythmic music] This equilibrium state that Dana and the team had calculated was not a new concept. It was more of a return to pre-industrial values. This idea of equality of balance was one that was shared clearly by Herman in his own work. This must have been at least part of what he and Dennis Meadows talked about when they met in New York, because Limits to Growth cites Herman’s ‘toward a stationary-state economy’. This was a chapter published in the 1971 anthology titled The Patient Earth, edited by John Harte and Robert Socolow. These ideas would later become the backbone to Herman’s steady-state economy. Herman, Dana and Dennis would continue citing each other’s work for decades. All of them and their fellow like-minded scholars of this period were sculpting a language and a set of tools to challenge the myth of endless expansion. [music ends]

[jazz music] But when Limits to Growth was published in 1972, it landed like a rock in a pond; rippling out waves of fascination, skepticism, and gross misunderstanding. Neoclassical economists were outraged by the so-called ‘lack of faith in human ingenuity’. Journalists perpetuated misinterpretation that the MIT team was predicting the world would end by the year 2000. It was a clear sign that society was not ready to accept its limits, despite the fact that the science clearly showed that the limits would be reached regardless.

Witnessing this polarizing reception, Herman was spurred on to publish Toward a Steady-State Economy in 1973. The book was a collection of essays featuring thinkers who shared Herman’s core concerns about the limits of economic growth, including his mentor Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, future collaborator John Cobb, Jr., and friend Garrett Hardin. In 1977, Herman published a solo work, Steady-State Economics, which contained the key framework upon which he hung later theories. This was the book which would become the foundation of a new school of economic thought. Herman wove the previous insights from his epiphanies and academic influences together into a simple but devastating observation: the economy is not the whole, but merely a subsystem of the biosphere. Here is our producer, Jess, reading from the 1977 edition of Herman’s Steady-State Economics. [music continues then ends]

Jessica Schmidt 36:31

A steady-state economy as an economy with constant stocks of people and artifacts, maintained at same desired sufficient levels by low rates of maintenance “throughput”, that is by the lowest feasible flows of matter and energy from the first stage of production to the last stage of consumption.

David 36:50

[rousing music] The system that we live within works by importing low-entropy matter energy and exporting high-entropy waste. Expansion of the subsystem, our economy, must come at the expense of the total system upon which it depends, in this case the planet and its ecosystems. Herman gave this flow a name, ‘throughput’. The economy runs on the one-way transformation of resources into waste, and on a finite planet that flow cannot continuously grow forever.

Jessica Schmidt 37:32

Our dependence on the natural world takes two forms: that of a source of low-entropy inputs—

David 37:40

That’s things like forests, fertile soil, clean water, minerals, fossil fuels, natural resources from our planet.

Jessica Schmidt 37:48

—and that of a sink for high-entropy waste outputs.

David 37:52

That’s what flows from the resources from our natural world when humans use them, so CO2 emissions, heat from combustion, sewage.

Jessica Schmidt 38:02

Capital stocks.

David 38:04

This is structures of the economy like buildings and factories and also us. [music ends]

Jessica Schmidt 38:11

This throughput may be negligible for low levels of stock, but for high levels it involves sacrifices (especially if the stocks are made of non-renewables) and becomes a cost-the final uncancelled real cost. This cost consists of the benefits sacrificed as a result of the entropic degradation of the natural world that is speeded up by economic activity.

David 38:36

[melodic music] Put simply, there is a limit to the scale of the economic subsystem relative to the ecosystem. Beyond that limit growth and production and consumption becomes uneconomic and it increases costs by more than it increases benefits, which is what we are seeing today. This was more than a technical and a moral argument as Herman warned that growth pursued for its own sake eventually became destructive and deepened inequality. [music ends]

Jessica Schmidt 39:15

We are addicted to growth because we are addicted to large inequalities in income and wealth. What about the poor? Let them eat growth! Better yet, let them feed on the hope of eating growth in the future! We have been growing for some time, and we still have poverty. It should be obvious that what grows is the reinvested surplus, and the benefits of growth go to the owners of the surplus, who are not poor. Some of the growth dividends trickle down, but not many. The poor are given the sop of full employment-they are allowed to share fully in the economy’s basic toil but not in its surplus-and unless we have enough growth to satisfy the dividend recipients, even the booby prize of full employment is taken away.

David 40:03

[rousing music] These ideas challenged the very core of economics, and are even more relevant today than when Herman wrote them. His concept of a steady-state economy begged the question that if the planet’s limits meant that infinite growth was impossible, what would life under a steady-state economy look like? Here is Peter Victor. [music continues then ends]

Peter Victor 40:30

Small or large, I think the fundamental requirements of a steady-state economy is to place limits on materials and energy that we bring into the economy. The idea of limits is not, of course, foreign to anybody. Governments impose limits of all kinds, some deliberately designed to protect the environment and others for all sorts of other purposes. Speed limit is something that we’re all used to, for example, but we also have limits on emissions into the atmosphere. We have limits on land use around Toronto. We have a green belt, which the public is very affectionate towards and likes to defend, as they should, and other cities do the same thing. So, the idea of limits is not foreign to us. What would define a steady-state economy, though, is a set of limits at a level that would ensure the ongoing sustainability of the planetary systems on which we depend.

Herman talked about these macro limits, but he also talked about maximizing individual freedom within those limits. If we were to follow Herman’s prescription for one, we would be spending, in a steady-state economy, less time at work, we would have more time for socializing, spending with family and friends, doing hobbies and things of that sort. What Herman Daly emphasized was the physical size of the economy. He said, “Look, we’ve got to pay much more attention to the quantities of materials and energy that are required to run the economy, because these quantities have become so large that there are serious repercussions for the planet that we live on.” So, he said that we should make, therefore, the deliberate decision to transform from an economy which is growing, both in monetary terms and physical terms, to one that is a steady-state in terms of—he used the term ‘throughput’ to combine inputs and outputs. Throughput of materials and energy. He said, “This is what we should be holding steady.”

David 42:31

[rousing music] At its core, the steady-state economy is a simple but radical idea; the economy should operate within the ecological limits of the planet. It aims not for endless growth, but for balance; stabilizing resource use, population, and material throughput while maximizing human wellbeing. Herman argued that beyond a certain point growth becomes uneconomic; delivering more harm than benefit. While both Toward a Steady-State Economy and Steady-State Economics shared many concepts and ideas with Limits to Growth, they did not make the same splash with the general public. U.S. media completely ignored it, and the reception from academia was one of horror. As Limits to Growth had proved, the economic world was dominated by mainstream neoclassical thought. Anyone who challenged the idea of infinite growth was considered a heretic and an enemy of progress. The professional consequences for Herman were severe. His published ideas were one bomb after another at Louisiana State University. Here’s Denis’ and Peter’s thoughts on Herman’s professional struggles at that time. [music ends]

Denis Lynn Daly Heyck 43:58

I think there were some difficult times, to be sure. At LSU, for example, he wasn’t allowed to have graduate students, because he wasn’t a traditional economist.

Peter Victor 44:13

It was pretty clear to him that he was out of favor. Other faculty members were advising students not to take his courses. Herman told me that it was PhD students who he ended up, really, not being able to take them on because he just thought it would be too difficult for them to get awarded the degree if he was their supervisor.

Denis Lynn Daly Heyck 44:36

When you go up against orthodoxy, you know, a lot of people who depend on that and who are established in that field as orthodox, whatever, economists in this case, you know, a lot of people’s oxes get gored and they don’t like it. You just don’t want to accept the new person who’s this maverick or worse.

Peter Victor 45:00

I don’t think any of his colleagues—I’d be very surprised if any of them read his book. I’d be very surprised.

David 45:05

[rousing music] While there was no official rule or decree, Herman’s department at LSU deterred him from passing on what they considered ‘heterodox views’ to the next generation of economists. Preventing him from advising PhD students was a massive blow to his career and was undoubtedly a major disappointment. But as his daughter Karen recalls, her dad was not a man who gave up easily.

Karen Daly Junker 45:36

I think from a young age I saw him as such a fighter. Because, you know, we would overhear him complaining about LSU and other things, and people, you know, disagreeing with him, and he always was like, “You know, I’m doing the work and working hard and I just think I’m right. You know, this is what I’ve discovered.” [laughs]

Herman Daly 45:59

My interest was frankly not really in capturing attention, but being clear in my own mind and saying it the way I thought it should be and then hoping that, you know, with argument and elaboration it would be clear.

David 46:16

[melodic music] For now, we’re going to leave Herman with those thoughts, attempting to pick up the pieces of his career and reputation. Bear with me for a moment as we jump forward in time to another book by Herman, one which iterates on the same powerful ideas that he first put forward in his steady-state writings and which is about to turn another man’s life upside down. [music continues then ends]

Brian Czech 46:48

Brian Czech, executive director of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy. We pronounce it CASSE.

David 46:57

[melodic music] You already heard from ecological economist and conservation biologist Brian Czech, who recognized, as a young boy, that our natural world was disappearing at a frightening rate due to the impacts of increasing economic growth. [music ends]

Brian Czech 47:14

For my PhD, I’m doing this policy analysis of the Endangered Species Act. I looked at the causes of decline for this list of federally threatened and endangered species, 877 of them at the time, it struck me that, “Oh, man! These causes of endangerment, they’re just like a who is who of the American economy.” And so, I thought to myself, “Am I missing something?” I looked at the decades of history of the journals in the scientific professional natural resources societies, like the Wildlife Society, the American Fisheries Society, Ecological Society of America, and I found there had been zero mention of the phrase ‘economic growth’. So, I thought this is a huge glaring hole. Finally, I found this phrase ‘steady-state economy’ and then I saw the name Herman Daly, and it instantly resonated with me, that phrase ‘steady-state economy’, because, you know, any wildlife biologist worth their salt has studied population dynamics so they know about different types of growth paths, exponential growth, they know about a stabilizing size of population at the end of a sigmoid growth curve. And so, right away I thought, “Yes, that’s what I’m looking for as this solution to this fundamental conflict between growing the economy and conserving biodiversity.” It struck me that those were the most potent policy implications—conservation policy implications I had ever seen. And unfortunately, there had been nothing to that point bringing steady-state economics, per se, into the wildlife profession, so I took that upon myself to make that happen.

David 49:21

[rousing music] Brian took his epiphany seriously, moving into what would become an 18-year career in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But shadowing Herman’s own struggles to get his ideas taken seriously by the establishment, Brian’s attempts to meld steady-state principles into ecological and wildlife protection meant fierce resistance. [music ends]

Brian Czech 49:47

Pretty early on in my U.S. Fish and Wildlife career, I encountered gag orders in writing. You know, “Czech, you will not talk about the conflict between economic growth and wildlife conservation.” And that was extremely frustrating because by then that had become essentially my specialty, what we might call the ecological macroeconomics of biodiversity conservation, and very much based on Herman Daly’s steady-state economics.

David 50:20

But just like Herman, Brian refused to be silenced.

Brian Czech 50:24

So when I started getting those gag orders, I started pushing back. I was in the National Wildlife Refuge System and my work was national in scope. You know, I had networking with all of the national wildlife refuges and regional offices and I thought, “We’re going to be able to use our visitor centers to help raise awareness of the conflict between growing the economy and conserving wildlife and ecological integrity at large.” Again, that didn’t work. Got the gag orders.

David 51:00

[melodic music] While Brian was struggling with authority, he also found like-minded souls to share his misgivings with. We heard from Rob Dietz earlier in this episode.

Rob Dietz 51:12

I’m Rob Dietz, the program director at the Post-Carbon Institute and Resilience.org.

David 51:19

He’s also one of the hardworking consultants on these series. Rob first met Brian Czech when they were both working for the U.S. Federal Fish and Wildlife Service, and he is yet another person whose life was about to be changed by a book, or more accurately two books. [music continues then ends]

Rob Dietz 51:43

Brian had just written this book called Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train. It was kind of a scathing critique of how we’re growing the economy too big. And I knew we had all kinds of environmental problems, but I wasn’t smart enough to connect the dots to the fact that it was due to us overgrowing the economy. And after I read Brian’s book, I was kind of hooked. I picked up some of Herman Daly’s work and read that, and it started me down a completely different path.

David 52:20

Back to Brian.

Brian Czech 52:22

So then I decided to establish CASSE. The way CASSE grew over the years was sort of herky-jerky, if that’s a term. [chuckles] I recruited a couple of people from within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to start with, and I didn’t want any dilution of the mission which was to raise awareness of that conflict between growth and conservation. So, I made sure that I recruited people that were wholeheartedly on board, and then I found another person, Rob Dietz. He was one of my colleagues in Fish and Wildlife Service, but he probably fit even less well than I did in a bureaucracy.

David 53:07

Rob had been profoundly impacted by Herman’s work and took a series of momentous decisions to try to implement the ideals of a steady-state economy in both his personal and professional life.

Rob Dietz 53:21

I ended up quitting my job which, you know, I think several people in my life were like, “What are you doing?” At the time I left what I call Club Fed, the federal government, I was about early thirties and I had just had a daughter with my wife, but I could not see a path where we were going to get the job done. Where we were going to conserve biodiversity, where we were going to have healthy ecosystems if we kept going down the path of continuous economic growth. It was just incompatible. And there are a lot of people that I worked with who agreed. There were also a lot of people who didn’t really want to admit that we had this problem with the economy, because it means so much change. It means so much difference from, you know, kind of the mainstream lifestyles.

So what happened, I moved into this intentional community, a co-housing eco-village, and took a job running this tiny non-profit that Brian Czech had started, CASSE. And so, you know, I had to raise money to pay my own salary, had to get a program to gather, a set of ideas and how we were going to convey them to the public. So, you know, I went from having this nice salary, you know, a good, cush job and living kind of in a normal house in a normal neighborhood, to living in, you know, sort of a weird hippie commune that was about sustainability, and having this different sort of advocacy job. And, yeah, it was quite a ride. Quite a worldview change in trying to make my life congruent with what I had learned.

David 55:12

[rousing music] We’ll be hearing more about the work of CASSE and from Rob and Brian in upcoming episodes. But the reach of Herman’s steady-state economy doesn’t end with them. While neoclassical economists may have scorned his work, Herman’s ideas still managed to cross the ocean to Europe. There, another of his books served as a key inspiration for a movement responsible for massive global impact today.

Kate Raworth 55:45

I trained as an economist back in the 1990s, and I walked away from it because I thought, “This mindset is so limited.”

David 55:52

That’s Kate Raworth, a self-proclaimed renegade economist, author of the global bestselling book Doughnut Economics, and co-founder of Doughnut Economics Action Lab. [music continues then ends]

Kate Raworth 56:06

How can we call the death of the living world an externality? That is absurd. It’s only when I picked up Beyond Growth by Herman—I read it while I was actually doing jury service. I was going in and out of a court case, and while sitting in between that my brain was turning circles because it had in it concepts and diagrams that I had never been taught. And that set me on the path of saying, “Right, I actually want to be an economist now, because I want to help make this economy happen. Can we bring in ideas like Herman’s, that have been waiting for decades, to be the framing paradigms of our generations?” And this is certainly what I’m dedicating my life’s work towards. Is to help make those ideas, the ones that sing through, that make sense, that speak to policymakers, so that we can reorganize this in a way that actually creates something much richer for humanity, that we can thrive within the living world.

David 56:55

[melodic music] In the next episode, we’ll hear about the terrifying threats made against Herman’s family. We’ll also dive into the philosophical side of economics. The steady-state economy framework was only the beginning of Herman’s vision. We’ll be following along with him as he turns to an even bigger question: How can we create an economy that serves the common good? If you want to hear the rest of Dana Meadow’s story, we highly recommend listening to all three episodes of Tipping Point, wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you to Katy Shields and Vegard Beyer for granting us permission to play the excerpt you heard in this episode. [music continues then ends]

[jazz music] This has been Going Steady with Herman Daly: How to Unbreak the Economy (and the Planet). I'm David Miller. I was the Mayor of Toronto, Canada, and I know first-hand the role cities can play in solving the climate crisis. 

Currently, I’m the editor-in-chief of the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy, published by the University of Toronto Press in collaboration with the C40 Centre; The Thinktank for Cities and Climate, where I am also the Managing Director. C40’s mission is to use the voices and actions of the mayor’s greatest cities to help the world avoid climate breakdown.

Special thanks must go to the Daly family for their support and generosity in telling Herman’s story. Thanks also to our consultants and fact-checkers for the series, Peter Harnik, Rob Dietz, and Peter Victor, the latter who also graciously shared his interview recordings with Herman from 2022 to use on the show.

Cities 1.5 is produced by University of Toronto Press, in association with the Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy and C40 Cities. This podcast is written and produced by Jessica Schmidt and Peggy Whitfield, and edited by Morgan Chambrin. Our executive producer is Chiara Morfeo.

The fight that Herman Daly started is still alive and thriving today. To learn more, visit the show’s website, linked in the episode notes. See you next time. [music continues then stops]