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Lecture 01 - Big Picture and Syllabus Introduction

Assoc. Professor Justin A. Johnson

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Agenda

  • Introductions
  • Lecture on “The big picture”
  • Syllabus Review
  • Discussion of what you all want to get out of this course

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Introducing myself

  • Graduated from HERE in 2014 with my PhD
    • Steve Polasky was my advisor
  • Worked at the Institute on the Environment (5 minutes down the hall) for 5 years as a post-doc and then self-funded researcher
  • Joined the faculty in 2020, Tenured in 2025 (yay)
  • Worked extensively with The Natural Capital Project
  • Now have co-founded a spinoff, NatCap TEEMs, a new research center here in APEC
  • Besides Earth-Economy modeling, I’m super interested in Coding, Open-Source Science, and AI/ML

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Introducing you all

  • This will be a very hands-on, discussion centric class.
    • So let’s get to know each other!
  • Name, program, year, expected fields/focus
  • Name one research idea you are interested in learning more about (from your 2nd year paper, dissertation, or just general interest).
  • What led you to take this course?

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Going from the Holocene into the Anthropocene

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Planetary Boundaries

  • There are biophysical boundaries that should not be crossed.
  • Key takeaway: we should tread carefully
  • Very popular framing, but not very useful.

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The “Safe and Just” corridor

  • Yes, we should not surpass the “ecological ceiling”
  • But we also need to stay above the “social floor,” providing sufficient access to foundational goods and services
    • E.g., everything growth and development economics thinks about
  • Recent book from Raworth 2017 “Doughnut Economics” captured this well

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  • Formalized more recently by Rockstrom et al. (2023) as “Safe and Just Corridor”

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I love this framework, but it drives me CRAZY sometimes.

Doesn’t answer “What policies we should pursue”

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WHAT IS ECONOMICS’ ROLE IN SOLVING THIS?

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Economics has been wildly successful at what it is good at

  • Economics did phenomenally well at improving physical consumption and the wellbeing that comes from that.
  • Provided the “Navigational tools” to make it through the great depression.
    • System of national accounts (SNA) responsible for GDP
    • Computable general equilibrium (CGE) models
    • Fiscal and Growth models
  • Huge poverty reductions in U.S. and worldwide

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Less poverty (more consumption)

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We’re living longer���� (healthcare consumption)

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Less homicide (less clear reason)

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More specifically what did economics do?

  • We built tools to describe the economy
  • It was rather successful

Economy

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Earth apart from Economy vs Earth In Economy

  • Slightly less old:

Economy

Earth

Resources

Economy

Earth

Resources

Waste

Earth

Economy

MANY complex linkages

  • Very old conception of the relationship:
  • Slightly better:

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�Reality?�The economy IS imbedded, but it’s pushing the boundaries of sustainability.��We’ve scaled our consumption to where it is a dominant force affecting the biosphere.��

Economy

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Earth

�The Problem?�We have no adequate navigational system to help guide us to sustainable development��Challenges now are global, interconnected and based on common resources.

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We need detailed models

  • Staying within the Safe and Just corridor requires detailed models of how the Earth and Economy are linked
    • Prior focus was on how humans impact the environment (impacts).
    • But we also need to understand how the economy relies on nature (dependencies)
  • To navigate the Anthropocene, we need a more general general equilibrium.

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Syllabus review

  • See the course site to view the “official” syllabus.

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Recordings

  • Unless I hear otherwise, I will be recording all classes
    • For you to go back and review, etc
    • My plan (that I want to check with ya’ll) is that these will be made available on my website for others to access
      • Is this okay with everyone? The camera will always be on me but your voices might get recorded.
      • How about you can just contact me if you ever said something in class that you want me to edit out? I’ll already edit out most discussion just for the flow of the videos, but this would let me make sure.