Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
What differentiates environmental economists from ecological economists is the
underlying transdisciplinary and thermodynamic inspiration of the latter. Further-
more, the time horizon used by ecological economists is considerably larger.
Mainstream economists, meanwhile, do not consider ecological economists as
one of their own; but rather visualise them as a group of transdisciplinary re-
searchers (economists, ecologists, physicists, anthropologists, sociologists or political
scientists) committed to environmental issues and their socioeconomic consequences
(Ropke, 2004).
The inaugurating metaphor of the ecological economics movement, established
by Boulding (1966), is the concept of Earth as a “spaceship”, a place where humans
live and cannot escape. A spaceship which unfortunately contains a “cowboy-like
economy, associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behaviour,
which is characteristic of open societies”. Such societies use profligately non-
renewable resources instead of operating as if they were in a “spaceman economy”.
This economy involves the recycling of materials and the use of renewable energy,
where they are both key to survival.
Ecological economists believe that the economy must be embedded in the eco-
logical realm because economic activities are a subset of human actions and can-
not escape the physical and biological laws that permit planetary life. Converting
ecosystems and the depletion of natural resources into a human construct like money
cannot be sustained indefinitely since the environment has no substitutes.
Likewise, price, in most cases only reflects opportunity and speculation. It does
not reflect effort either from Man or Nature. In this respect, Naredo (1987) claims
that conventional economy is only concerned with what is directly useful to Man,
in that it is acquirable, valuable and produce-able. For this reason, most natural
resources, remain outside economic system analysis with price-fixing mechanisms,
rarely taking into account the concrete physical characteristics which make them
valuable.
Therefore the biogeophysical limits of the planet are the ones which should
bind Economics, not vice versa. Moreover, ecological economists conclude that if
many of the effects of interactions between human beings and the environment are
unknown or unpredictable, one needs to employ a precautionary principle in order
to avoid extravagances and biological collapse seeing as “conservation generates
information” (Jonas, 1984) whilst ignorance favours depredation. In this way, Pearce
and Atkinson (1993) essentially advocate an economy that avoids growth based on
natural capital exhaustion which in turn implies drastic resource e
ciency measures
and a lifestyle change.
The roots of the thermodynamic inspiration of ecological economists must
be sought in the topic entitled The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
by Georgescu-Roegen (1971)
3
. In fact, this permanently linked Economics and
3
Even if Thermodynamics has inspired many authors before Georgescu-Roegen, Martinez-Alier
(1987) cites authors like Patrick Geddes, Frederick Soddy, Serhii Podolinsky, Leopold Pfaundler
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