Ecological Economics Research Paper

1. Origins

The book that came out of the first world conference of ecological economists in Washington DC in 1990 (Costanza 1991) defined the field as ‘the science and management of sustainability.’ In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the biologist and urban planner, Patrick Geddes, the narodnik revolutionary and physician, Sergei Podolinski, and the engineer and social reformer, Josef Popper-Lynkeus had unsuccessfully tried to promote a biophysical view of the economy as a subsystem embedded in a larger system subject to the laws of thermodynamics (MartinezAlier and Schlupmann, 1987). By 1850 or 1860 the carbon cycle and the cycles of plant nutrients had been discovered, while the first and second laws of thermodynamics (conservation and transformation of energy, but also dissipation of energy and increase in entropy) had been established. The contrived conflict between the ‘optimistic’ theory of evolution which explained the diversity of life, and the ‘pessimistic’ second law of thermodynamics, was a staple of the cultural diet of the early 1900s. The main ingredients for an ecological view of the economy were therefore present long before the birth of a self-conscious ecological economics, which was delayed by the strict boundaries existing between the natural and the social sciences.

The biologist and systems ecologist, Alfred Lotka, born in 1880, introduced in the 1910s and early 1920s the fundamental distinction between the endosomatic and the exosomatic use of energy by humans. The winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, Frederick Soddy, born in 1877, also wrote on energy and the economy. He compared ‘real wealth’ which grows at the rhythm of nature and which, if turned into manufactured capital, is worn down, with ‘virtual wealth’ in the form of debts which apparently could grow exponentially forever. Later, four well-known economists, who did not at that time form a school, are seen in retrospect as ecological economists. Kenneth Boulding, born in 1910, worked mainly on general systems analysis. K. W. Kapp, also born in 1910, and S. von Ciriacy-Wantrup, born in 1906, were both institutionalist economists, and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, born in 1906, who was the author of The Entropy Law And The Economic Process (1971). The systems ecologist, H. T. Odum, born in 1924, studied the use of energy in the economy. Some of his former students were among the founders of the International Society for Ecological Economics in 1987. Other sources of ecological economics are found in environmental and resource economics (i.e., microeconomics applied to environmental pollution and the depletion of natural resources), in human ecology, ecological anthropology, agroecology, and urban ecology. They are also found in the study of ‘industrial metabolism’ as developed by Robert Ayres, now known as industrial ecology.

After an influential meeting in Sweden in 1982, organized by the ecologist AnnMari Jansson, on the integration of economics and ecology, the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) was launched at a workshop in Barcelona in 1987. This was in precisely the same year as the Brundtland Report on ‘sustainable development’ was published. Herman Daly (a former student of Georgescu-Roegen, and today’s best known ecological economist) proposed that the word ‘development’ should mean changes in the economic and social structure, while ‘growth’ means an increase in the scale of the economy which probably cannot be ecologically sustained. ‘Sustainable development’ is thus acceptable to most ecological economists, while ‘sustainable growth’ is not (Daly and Cobb 1994). The first issue of the successful academic journal, Ecological Economics, came out in 1989, edited by the ecologist Robert Costanza, who was also the first president of ISEE. The ISEE has affiliated societies in Argentina and Uruguay, Australia and New Zealand, Brazil, Canada, the European Union, India, Russia and the United States.

Outside the United States and Europe, the Japanese ‘entropy school’ of economic analysis (Tamanoi et al. 1984) studied the environmental services provided by the water cycle and the ancient urban ecosystems of Japan. In India, much work has been done since the 1970s by economists but also by biologists (Madhav Gadgil) on the links between forest or water management and common property rights; which were, in the beginning of the twenty-first century a main focus of interest in ecological economics (Berkes and Folke 1998). Other early ecological economists (whose major works were not in English) are, in France, Rene Passet (1996, [1979]) and Ignacy Sachs who proposed in the early 1970s the notion of ‘eco-development’; Roefie Hueting (1980) in the Netherlands and Christian Leipert (1989) in Germany; as well as Jose-Manuel Naredo in Spain. (For general introductions to the field, see Costanza et al. 1997a, Costanza et al. 1997b, and Common 1995).

2. Scope

Ecological economists see the economy as an open system. In thermodynamics, systems are classified as open to the entry and exit of energy and materials; closed to the entry and exit of materials though open to the entry and exit of energy, such as the Earth; and isolated systems (without the entry or exit of energy and materials). The availability of free energy and the cycling of materials allows life forms to become increasingly highly organized and complex. The same thing applies to the economy. Dissipated energy and waste are produced in the process. At least part of the waste can be recycled or, if not, the economy takes in new resources. However, if the scale of the economy is too large and its speed is too rapid, then natural cycles cannot produce the resources or absorb or assimilate the residues such as, for instance, heavy metals or carbon dioxide. In ecological economics, the economy is seen as embedded in the ecosystem (or, more accurately, in the historically changing, social perception of the ecosystem). The economy is also embedded in a structure of property rights to environmental resources and services, in a social distribution of power and income, and in social structures of gender, social class, or caste.

In contrast, in conventional economics the economy is seen as a self-sufficient system where prices for consumer goods and services and prices for the services of production factors, are formed. This preanalytic stand is reflected in the category of ‘externalities.’ Ecological economists (Norgaard, 1990) have disputed the view expressed in the 1960s by Barnett, Krutilla and many other resource economists that, since natural resources are cheap, they must be abundant. Markets are myopic, they discount the future; they cannot see future uncertain scarcities of sources or sinks. Ecological economists sympathize with attempts at ‘internalizing’ externalities into the price system, and they readily concur with proposals to correct prices by taxes such as ‘natural capital depletion taxes’ or taxes on pollution. But they deny that there exists a set of ‘ecologically correct prices.’

In summary, ecological economics is a new trans-disciplinary field which develops or introduces topics and methods such as:

(a) new indicators and indices of (un)sustainability of the economy;

(b) the application of ecological notions of carrying capacity and resilience to human ecosystems;

(c) the valuation of environmental services in money terms, but also discussion on the incommensurability of values and the application of multicriteria evaluation methods;

(d) risk assessment, uncertainty, complexity, and ‘postnormal’ science;

(e) integrated environmental assessment, including the building of scenarios, dynamic modeling, participatory methods of decision making;

(f ) ecological macroeconomics, the measurement of ‘natural capital,’ the debate between ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ notions of sustainability;

(g) relations between ecological and feminist economics;

(h) ecological distribution conflicts;

(i) relations between the allocation of property rights and resource management, and old and new communal institutions for environmental management;

( j) international trade and the environment, the ‘ecological debt’;

(k) environmental causes and consequences of technological change, relations between ecological economics and evolutionary economics;

(l) theories of consumption (needs, satisfactors) as they relate to environmental impacts;

(m) the ‘dematerialization’ debate; relations with industrial ecology;

(n) applications in business administration; and

(o) instruments of environmental policy, often centered on the ‘precautionary principle’ (or on ‘safe minimum standards,’ as developed by Ciriacy-Wantrup).

Only some of these points can be developed in the remaining space, doing some injustice by this choice to other work by ecological economists.

3. Disputes On Value Standards

The Greek distinction (as in Aristotle’s Politica) between oikonomia (the art of material provisioning of the household) and chrematistics (the study of the formation of market prices, in order to make money) seems irrelevant today. In our world, material provisioning appears to be achieved mostly through market exchanges, and there is a fusion of chrematistics with oikonomia. However, many caring activities in families and in society and many of the services of nature (Waring 1988), remain outside the market. In ecological economics, the word ‘economics’ is used in a sense closer to oikonomia than to chrematistics. Ecological economics is not committed to a unique type of value expressed in a single numeraire (defined as the present value, in money terms, of costs and benefits, including, of course, monetarized externalities and environmental amenities).

The issue is not whether it is only the market place that can determine value, for economists have long debated other means of valuation; our concern is with the assumption that in any dialogue, all valuations or ‘numeraires’ should be reducible to a single one-dimension standard (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1994, 198).

Ecological economics encompasses money valuation, together with physical appraisals of the environmental impacts of the human economy measured in their own physical ‘numeraires.’

Nature provides resources for the production of commodities as well as environmental amenities. As shown by Gretchen Daily, R. de Groot, and others, more importantly, nature gives free, essential life-support services. These include the cycling of nutrients, the water cycle, soil formation, climate regulation, the conservation and evolution of biodiversity, concentration of minerals, the dispersal or assimilation of pollutants, diverse forms of useful energy, etc. Attempts have been made to assign money values to the annual flows of some environmental services, to compare them to GNP in monetary units of account. For instance, the cycling of nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorous) in some natural systems may be given a plausible money value by comparison with the costs of alternative human-made technologies. Could this same methodology (i.e., the cost of alternative technology) be applied consistently to the valuation of biodiversity in a kind of science fiction framework?

For biodiversity, money valuation has taken a completely different tack, namely the small sums exchanged in some ‘bioprospecting’ contracts, or fictitious, subjective money values in terms of ‘willingness to pay’ for conservation projects. One such is the so-called Contingent Valuation method favored by environmental economists (though not by most ecological economists). But how can we count the service that nature provides us by concentrating minerals which we disperse? (‘Exergy’ costs have been calculated by industrial ecologists, but the technology for creating mineral deposits does not exist). The figures obtained for the money values of environmental services provided free by nature are therefore inappropriate, although useful, in stimulating the debate on how to take nature into account.

Ecological economics rests on a foundation of ‘weak comparability of values’ (O’Neill 1993). For example, let us assume that a new large garbage dump must be built near a city, and one of three possible locations, A, B, C, will be sacrificed to this use. In our example, the three different locations are compared under three different types of value: value as habitat, value as landscape, and economic value. Location A is a most valuable, publicly owned wetland (valuable as habitat or ecosystem because of its richness of species) but a monotonous landscape, much visited by bird watchers and schools (and, as such, of some economic value according to the ‘travel cost method’). Location C produces much rent as industrial and urban land, and therefore ranks first in economic value, but ranks only third as an ecosystem or habitat, and comes second as landscape (because of its historical qualities). Location B is an old agricultural area of beautiful derelict orchards and ancient manor houses, which ranks first as landscape, but ranks only third as rent-producing, and second as ecosystem or habitat. Which location should be sacrificed and how is the issue to be decided? Should and could all values be reduced to a supervalue, so as to achieve strong comparability, and even strong commensurability (cardinal measurement)? In the example, the economic values (in actual or fictitious markets) of all three locations have been taken into account, but there is no super-value (economic or otherwise, such as, for instance, net energy production, by which the wetland would presumably come out on top). Certainly, the present rankings could be reconsidered. Thus, the landscape value of A could be upgraded and its economic value (like that of B) could be increased by Contingent Valuation. Also, giving more weight to some criteria than to others, or ‘veto thresholds’ for some criteria such as the ‘endangered species’ provision in American legislation, or the introduction of more locations or more criteria, would help us to reach a decision. The point of the exercise is merely to show the meaning of ‘weak comparability of values.’ The decision-making process need not be irrational (by lottery, for instance).

In contrast to such a multicriteria approach (Munda 1995), in cost–benefit analysis the projects to be evaluated are all valued in the same numeraire.

In microeconomics there is strong comparability of values, and indeed strong commensurability when externalities are internalized into the price system. One example is in the definition of a Pigovian tax as the economic value of the externality at optimum pollution level. In macroeconomics, El Serafy’s practical proposals to ‘green’ the GNP (in Costanza 1991)—the results of which will depend on the chosen rate of interest—do not go beyond strong commensurability in money terms.

According to El Serafy, not all receipts from the sale of exhaustible resources (‘natural capital’) should be included in GNP. Only one part should be included, ‘true’ income, and the rest should be counted as ‘decapitalization’ or the ‘user cost’ of such ‘natural capital’ which should be invested at compound interest over the period until the resource is exhausted, so as to allow the country to live at the same standard of living even when running out of the resources. This proposal, based on the definition of ‘income’ by Hicks, and related to Hotelling’s rule in resource microeconomics, is based on a notion of ‘weak’ sustainability only. ‘Weak’ sustainability allows the substitution of manufactured capital for so-called ‘natural capital’—implying, therefore, a common unit of measurement, i.e., money value—while ‘strong’ sustainability refers to the maintenance of physical natural resources and services. This distinction was introduced by David Pearce and Kerry Turner, c. 1990.

The so-called ‘Environmental Kuznets Curve,’ an inverted U-curve, relates income and some environmental impacts (Bruyn and de Opschoor 1997). In urban situations, as incomes grow, sulfur dioxide emissions first increase and then decrease, while carbon dioxide emissions increase with incomes. If something improves and something deteriorates, one reaction from the conventional economist might be to put weights or prices on such effects, in pursuit of the commensurability of values. However, the uncertainty and complexity of such situations (sulfur dioxide may counteract the greenhouse effect, for instance), and the fact that the price of externalities would depend on the outcome of social conflict, implies that the economist’s accounts would be convincing only for the believers of the same school.

The pattern of use of environmental resources and services and the burdens of pollution depends on changing social structures and on power and income distribution. This leads to the field of political ecology originating in geography and anthropology, and which we define as the study of ‘ecological distribution conflicts.’ Economic growth leads to increased environmental impact and to increased conflicts (often outside the market sphere). Hence, for instance, the growth of the Environmental Justice movement in the United States. Examples abound of the failure of the price system to indicate such environmental impact, or (to use K. W. Kapp’s idea), examples abound of cost–shifting successes. Thus, attempts at using cost–benefit analysis of the increased greenhouse effect (as in reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) are not convincing because of the arbitrariness of the discount rate (Azar and Sterner 1996, see below), and also because many items are not easily measured in physical terms, much less easily valued in money terms.

Moreover, the very pattern of prices in the economy would be different to start with, without the free access to carbon sinks. Should restrictions then be imposed on the ‘ecological footprint’ of rich economies or on the ‘human appropriation of net primary production’ (see below)? If equal property rights on carbon sinks are bestowed on everybody, there might still be a tendency for the price of carbon emissions to be low, according to the principle ‘the poor sell cheap.’ Everybody, except slaves, is the owner of her or his own body and health; however, poor people sell their health cheaply when working for a wage in mines or plantations. The free use of sinks has been modeled in a neo-Ricardian framework by C. Perrings, Martin O’Connor, and others, showing how the pattern of prices in the economy would be different, assuming different outcomes for ecological distribution conflicts.

Some remarks are still needed on the discount rate. Economists explain discounting of the future by subjective ‘time-preference,’ or because economic growth per capita caused by today’s investments will make the marginal utility of consumption lower for our descendants than it is for us today. If discounting arises from the productivity of capital, and if such ‘productivity’ is a mixture of true increases in production and a lot of environmental destruction, then the discount factor should be the per capita rate of sustainable economic growth, minus the destruction of environmental resources and services. Now, in order to determine the present economic value of destruction caused by economic growth (such as loss of biodiversity, the filling up of carbon sinks, the production of radioactive waste and so on), we must not only put money figures on it (as discussed above), we need also a discount rate. Which is appropriate?

4. Environmental Indexes Of (Un)Sustainability

Because of the shortcomings of money valuation, ecological economists favor physical indicators and indexes in order to judge the overall impact of the human economy on the environment. Therefore, we here leave aside monetary corrections to GNP, such as those of El Serafy (see above), or Hueting. These calculate the economic costs of adjusting the economy to socially negotiated norms or standards of pollution and resource extraction, in a ‘cost-effectiveness’ approach (meaning the analysis of the cheapest instrument in money terms in order to adjust the economy to such physical norms or standards). We also leave aside Cobb’s and Daly’s ambitious Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) (Daly and Cobb 1994), first calculated for the United States, which has inspired work in many countries, and whose end result is a figure in money terms strongly commensurable with GNP though often showing quite a different trend.

The main physical indexes of (un)sustainability discussed at present are as follows:

4.1 HANPP

HANPP (the human appropriation of net primary production) has been proposed by Vitousek et al. (1986). The net primary production (NPP) is the amount of energy that the primary producers, the plants, make available to the rest of living species, the heterotrophs. Of this NPP, humankind ‘coopts’ around 40 percent in terrestrial ecosystems. It is assumed that the higher the HANPP, the less biomass is available for ‘wild’ biodiversity. The proportion of NPP appropriated by humans is increasing because of population growth, and also because of increasing demands on land per person for urbanization, for growing foodstuffs, and for growing timber (‘plantations are not forests’ is a slogan of environmental activists in the tropics).

4.2 Ecospace

Ecospace and ecological footprints. Which is the environmental load of the economy, in terms of space? H.T. Odum posed this question, and later authors developed some answers. Rather than asking what maximum population a particular region or country can support sustainably, the question becomes: how large an area of productive land is needed (as source and sink) in order to sustain a given population indefinitely, at its current standard of living and with current technologies? Computations, not only for cities or metropolitan regions (whose ecological footprint is hundreds of times larger than their own boundaries) but for whole countries, show that some densely populated European countries (assuming per capita eco-footprints of 3 ha.) or Japan or Korea (with per capita eco-footprints of 2 ha.) occupy eco-spaces ten times larger than their own territories. This is the ‘appropriated carrying capacity,’ from which an ‘ecological debt’ arises. (For details, Wackernagel and Rees 1996.)

4.3 EROI

The term EROI, which stands for ‘energy return on (energy) input,’ also originates in H.T. Odum’s work. Is there a trend towards an increasing energy-cost of obtaining energy (Hall et al. 1986)? The idea of looking at the basic economics of human society as a flow of energy is well known to ecological anthropologists (through Roy Rappaport’s Pigs for the Ancestors and similar work). It goes back to Podolinski in 1880. Engels in 1882 exchanged correspondence with Marx on this topic. He denied the relevance of energy accounting for Marxian economics. Clearly, for an economy to be sustainable, the energy productivity of human work (i.e., how much energy is made available per day, by one day of human work) must be higher (or equal, if everybody is working) than the efficiency of the transformation of the energy intake into human work.

The energy productivity of a coal miner (wrote Podolinski) was much larger than that which a primitive agriculturalist could obtain, but this energy surplus from fossil fuels was transitory. Max Weber in 1909 had criticised Wilhelm Ostwald’s interpretation of economic history in terms of (a) an increased use of energy, (b) an increased efficiency in the use of energy, because economic decisions on new industrial processes or new products were based on prices, entre preneurs did not pay attention to energy accounts per se. (No environmental auditing of firms was yet required.) Max Weber (whose book review against Ostwald was much praised by Hayek in later years), did not question energy prices from the environmental point of view as we would today.

In the early 1970s there were a number of studies on energy flow in agriculture, of which the best known were those of David Pimentel showing a decrease in energy efficiency in maize cultivation in the United Sate, because of the large energy input from outside agriculture itself. A new field was opened up by such studies on the efficiency in the use of energy, such as fuelwood, oil, and gas (Peet 1992), in different sectors of the economy, including the energy sector itself, taking also into account that increased energy efficiency might paradoxically lead to increased energy use, by reducing its cost (the Jevons effect). Such energy analysis has nothing to do, in principle, with the adoption of an ‘energy theory of value,’ or with the view that sources of energy are more problematic for sustainability than sinks for residues.

4.4 MIPs And DMR/TMR

The indicator of material input per unit service (MIPS) was developed at the Wuppertal Institute by Schmidt-Bleek. It adds up the materials used for production directly and indirectly (the ‘ecological rucksack,’) such as mineral ores, energy carriers like coal and oil, and all biomass (though not water, which is used in much larger amounts), including the whole ‘life-cycle’ down to the disposal or recycling phases.

This material input is measured in tons and it is compared with the services provided, sector by sector and, in principle, for the whole economy. For instance, to provide the service of one passenger per km, or to provide the service of living space of so many square metres, what amount of materials is involved, comparing different regions of the world, or historically. MIPS is useful as a measure of the material intensity of production but not as a measure of the toxicity of materials. The MIPS notion has been developed further in statistics published by the World Resources Institute in 1997 on the Direct Material Requirement and the Total Material Requirement (i.e., the aggregate tonnage, including in the TMR—the ‘ecological rucksacks’) coming into the economies of some countries such as the United States, Germany, The Netherlands, and Japan, both from domestic sources and from imports. This therefore tests the hypothesis of ‘dematerialization’ of production (Bunker 1996, Cleveland and Ruth 1998).

All the indexes mentioned here are measured in different units. How should a situation be judged in which, for instance, a synthetic indicator or index such as TMR improves while HANPP deteriorates, EROI decreases, and GNP grows? Commensurability would imply reducing such values to an encompassing supervalue but this is not necessary in order to reach reasonable judgments by a sort of macroeconomic multicriteria evaluation or integrated assessment (Faucheux and O’Connor 1998).

5. The ‘Dematerialization’ Of Consumption?

In economic theories of production and consumption, compensation and substitution reign supreme. Not so in ecological economics, where diverse standards of value are deployed ‘to take Nature into account’ (O’Connor and Spash 1999). In the ecological economics theory of consumption, some goods are more important and cannot be substituted by other goods (economists call this a ‘lexicographic’ order of preferences). Thus, no other good can substitute or compensate for the minimum amount of endosomatic energy necessary for human life. This does not imply a biological view of human needs; on the contrary, the human species exhibits enormous intraspecific socially caused differences in the use of exosomatic energy. To call either the endosomatic consumption of 1,500 or 2,000 kcal or the exosomatic use of 100,000 or 200,000 kcal per person/day a ‘socially constructed need, or want would leave aside the ecological explanations and/or implications of such a use of energy. Similarly, to call the daily endosomatic consumption of 1,500 or 2,000 kcal a ‘revealed preference’ would betray the conventional economist’s metaphysical viewpoint.

There is another approach which, as pointed out by John Gowdy, builds upon the ‘principle of irreducibility’ of needs. This idea was proclaimed by Georgescu-Roegen in the previous edition of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, article on ‘Utility’. According to Max-Neef (Ekins and Max-Neef 1992) all humans have the same needs, described as ‘subsistence,’ ‘affection,’ ‘protection,’ ‘understanding,’ ‘participation,’ ‘leisure,’ ‘creation,’ ‘identity,’ ‘freedom’; and there is no generalized principle of substitution among them. Such needs can be satisfied by a variety of ‘satisfactors.’

Instead of taking the economic services as given, as in MIPS (passenger per km, square metres of living space), we may ask why there is so much travel, why so much building of houses with new materials instead of the restoration of old ones, and so on. In the late 1990s research was undertaken on the following question: is there a trend to use ‘satisfactors’ that are increasingly intensive in energy and materials, in order to satisfy predominantly nonmaterial needs? (Jackson and Marks 1999). The expectation that an economy that has less industry will be less resource intensive is perhaps premature. Input–output analysis of household lifestyles (by Faye Duchin and other authors) shows the high material and energy requirements of the consumption patterns of many of those employed in the postindustrial sector.

6. Carrying Capacity And Neo-Malthusianism

Many ecological economists have emphasized the pressure of population on resources. Has humankind exceeded its carrying capacity? This is defined in ecology as the maximum population of a given species, such as frogs in a lake, which can be supported sustainably in a given territory without spoiling its resource base.

However, the large differences internal to the human species in the exosomatic use of energy and materials mean that the first question that arises is; a maximum population at what level of consumption? Second, human technologies change at a quick pace. Boserup’s thesis (1965) of endogenous technical change according to which preindustrial agricultural systems had changed in response to increases in population density, has long since turned the tables on the Malthusian argument. Third, the territories occupied by humans are not ‘given.’ Other species are pushed into corners or into oblivion (as the index HANPP implies). Internal to the human species, territoriality is politically constructed through State migration policies. Fourth, international trade, which is similar to horizontal transport in ecology, but which humans can consciously regulate, may imply ecologically unequal exchange, though if one territory lacks a very necessary item which is abundantly present in another territory, then Liebig’s law of the minimum would recommend exchange. Then the joint carrying capacity of all territories would be larger than the sum of the carrying capacities of all autarchic territories. This links up with the proposals of non-governmental organizations for fair and ecological trade.

Because of the shortcomings of ‘carrying capacity’ as an index of (un)sustainability for humans, the formula I = PAT has been proposed by Paul Ehrlich, where I is environmental impact, P is population, A is affluence per capita, and T stands for the environmental effects of technology. Efforts in the late 1990s were made to operationalize I = PAT. True, popultion remains one important variable. True also, neoMalthusian population policies in the twentieth century caused many forced sterilizations and large-scale female infanticide in some countries, and they threatened small surviving ethnic groups. However, in the late nineteenth century, another neo-Malthusian movement in Europe and America (as shown by Francis Ronsin and other authors) opposed Malthus’ view that poverty was due to overpopulation rather than social inequality, and fought successfully for limiting births by allowing women to exercise their reproductive rights, sometimes also appealing to ecological arguments of population pressure on resources. Human demography is self-conscious or reflective. Though it also follows Verhulst’s curve, it is different from the ecology of a population of frogs in a lake.

7. Final Remarks On Transdisciplinarity

Ecological economics, based on methodological pluralism (Norgaard 1989) must not follow the reductionist road. Instead it should adopt Otto Neurath’s image of the ‘orchestration of the sciences,’ acknowledging and trying to reconcile the contradictions arising between the different disciplines which deal with issues of ecological sustainability. Thus, how could a history of the industrialized agricultural economy be written taking into account both the viewpoints of conventional agricultural economics (technical progress, growth of productivity), and of agroecology (loss of biodiversity, decreased energy efficiency)? The image of the ‘orchestration of the sciences’ fits well with the ideas of coevolution and of emergent complexity; implying the study of the human dimensions of ecological change and therefore the study of human environmental perception. This means to introduce self-conscious human agency and reflective human interpretation in ecology. While ‘emergent complexity’ looks more to the unexpected future, ‘coevolution’ looks toward history.

Ecological economics as an ‘orchestration of the sciences’ takes into account the contradictions between the disciplines, it also takes into account the changing perceptions through history of the relations between humans and the environment, and it highlights the limits of the authoritative judgments of any particular expert in a particular discipline. This is not a technocratic or scientistic project. On the contrary, as explained by Funtowicz, Ravetz and other students of environmental risks, in many current problems of importance and urgency, where values are in dispute and uncertainties (not reducible to probabilistic risk) are high, we observe that ‘certified’ experts are often challenged by citizens from environmental groups. Examples of these are popular epidemiology activists inside the Environmental Justice movement in the United States, or debates on nuclear energy or on the labeling of new biotechnological foods, or arguments based on the practical knowledge of indigenous and peasant populations. This is postnormal science, leading toward participatory methods of conflict resolution and even toward discursive democracy, notions which are dear to ecological economists.

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