Ecological Economics

Despite its name, the field of ecological economics does more than combine “ecology” and “economics.” It is a transdisciplinary approach that draws from several fields, including both social sciences (e.g., economics, politics, sociology, ethics, and philosophy) and natural sciences (e.g., biology, physics, and mathematics), and it seeks to synthesize these perspectives to address issues of sustainability comprehensively. In contrast to the neoclassical thinking of an economy as a circular flow of exchange value without any direct link with the biophysical world, ecological economists consider the biophysical elements (energy and matter) as foundations of an economy. Recognizing the Earth's resources as finite and irreplaceable, ecological economists call for a combination of scientific and ethical considerations in human economic activities. Critical to ecological economics is its emphasis on the interconnectedness and complexity of various components of our world and on explaining them with a holistic perspective rather than as fragmented parts. It is because of such characteristics that ecological economics becomes more of a movement than a discipline.

Ecological economics in its current form has its roots in some pathbreaking works from the 1960s and 1970s about economic “growth” and its effects on the environment. Economist Kenneth Boulding's 1966 paper “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth” was significant in shaping the emerging paradigm because it raised serious concerns about the overexploitation of the Earth's resources and its threat to the future. Soon thereafter, ecologist Howard T. Odum completed Environment, Power, and Society, which helped create the platform for ecological economics by discussing energy, entropy, human society, and their mutual interactions. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process further integrated biophysical factors into economics. At this time, computers were just becoming more commonplace, and predictive models were being applied to human problems; the 1972 book Limits to Growth by Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, J⊘rgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III showed the consequences of exponential growth on the Earth's finite resources. This important work alarmed the world about the devastating effects that unchecked growth will have on the planet.

Another important line of thinking that contributed to ecological economics came out of the growing discontent among scholars about the shortcomings of the national accounting systems. Because these systems focused solely on gross domestic product, without any concern for the depletion of natural resources, the approaches only boosted the momentum of environmental destruction. More and more economists and ecologists came into consensus about the need to work together and learn from each other to save the planet. These concerns coalesced into a workshop of ecologists and economists in Barcelona in 1987, where the International Society for Ecological Economics was formed. The society was formally established in the United States in 1988 and has since expanded to include branches in a large number of developed and developing countries around the world. The society's journal, Ecological Economics, was first published in 1989, and the field has expanded in several ways since then: Many institutes have been founded in various countries, and hundreds of books on have been written on related topics.

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