Thoughts on Green Economics

I believe that the Green Party economic program should be developed as the synthesis of three mutually-supporting schools of economic thought.
The first, Environmental Economics, is based on the simple recognition that we must maintain a healthy environment and that it is absurd to think that we can indefinitely maintain a linear, growth-based industrial economy on a finite planet with ultimately limited resources and limited capacity to absorb waste. Herman Daly, E.F. Schumacher, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, William Kapp (1944), and Karl Polanyi (1950) developed a strong framework that shows it is possible to have a healthy, non-growth economy that includes consideration of environmental and societal health.
Developing from this but focusing more on microeconomics is Ecological Economics. Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins , in Natural Capitalism, examine how we can decrease pollution and our impact on our world just through increased material and energy efficiency. Their work focuses primarily on the many existing and simple ways of reducing or eliminating waste across our industrial system, since we currently waste about 40% of energy and up to 70% of materials to create goods, and there are huge gains to be found in copying natural systems which do not waste anything. They allude to the need for a restructing of the tax system to focus on waste and pollution.
This proposed tax restructuring is best developed in the third school of economics concerned with social justice and earth rights. Known as Georgism (after Henry George) this school deals with the problem of inequitable distribution of wealth across society as a whole, but more than that, the question of providing opportunity instead of welfare. Our existing welfare system is largely a bureacracy that manages to exclude many needy people while at the same time being abused by a significant number who have figured out ways to exploit the system and avoid meaninful work. The solution to these problems, along with discouraging pollution and environmental degradation, is developed from the work on land rent by David Ricardo and popularized at the end of the 19th century by Henry George, is a very simple premise of reclaiming unearned profits through taxation of land values. The major effect of this type of tax is to prevent the concentration of wealth that we now have in Canada (75% of all property in Canada is owned by the richest 20%) and especially the U.S., and, instead, ensures that the bulk of property is owned by the bulk of the citizenry. There are, of course, other ways to achieve this through complex regulations and laws, but this simplest is also the most powerful: tax site value, tax raw material extraction, tax unearned income (such as stock and currency speculation), and tax pollution. (These, BTW, cannot be squirreled away in some offshore account or hidden in some black market profits.) Do not tax earned income, sales, or personal property, giving people an incentive and reward for improving their lives.
These three schools, taken together, provide a complete, effective, and proven theoretical and practical framework for creating economic incentives and behaviours that reduce to an absolute minimum the amount of raw materials we extract, the amount of pollution we produce, and disparity of wealth, while still respecting the balance between societal constraints and the individual rights, all with a minimum of regulation and interference.
No matter which school of thought you begin with - and I'll bet most Greens will most likely begin to think about economics from the ecological perspective - each avenue of thought leads to the same conclusions about how to prevent the ecological and social devastation we are wreaking on our planet.