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 (Martinez-Alier 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 for ever. 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 economisst, 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 [1989]). 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], [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).

1. Origins

2. Scope

3. Disputes on Value Standards

4. Environmental Indexes of (Un)sustainability

5. The ‘Dematerialization’ of Consumption?

6. Carrying Capacity and Neo-Malthusianism

7. Final Remarks on Transdisciplinarity

References