1 An introduction to ecological
economics
1.1 What is ecological economics? 1 1.2 A brief history of the environment in economics 3 1.3 Science and ethics 6 1.4 Sustainability and sustainable development 8 1.5 The relationship between ecological and neoclassical economics 9 1.6 A guided tour 13 Keywords 15 Further Reading 16 Websites 17 Discussion Questions 17 The purpose of this short chapter is to introduce the subject matter and to explain the organisation of the book.
KEYWORDS
Anthropocentric (p. 9): centred on human beings. Brundtland Report (p. 9): Our Common Future (1987) put the idea of sustainable development on the political agenda. Classical economics (p. 3): the economic thinking of the first half of the nineteenth century. Ecology (p. 1): the study of the relations of animals and plants to their organic and inorganic environments. Ecological economics (p. 1): the study of the human economy as part of nature’s economy. Economics (p. 1): the study of how humans satisfy their needs and desires. Efficiency (p. 11): a situation where nobody can be made to feel better-off except by making somebody else feel worse-off. Environmental economics (p. 4): the specialisation within neoclassical economics that is concerned with the economy’s insertions into the natural environment. Equity (p. 11): the question of fairness. Ethics (p. 7): the study of the principles that ought to govern human conduct. Model (p. 12): a simplified version of the set of relationships which are thought to determine some phenomenon. Neoclassical economics (p. 3): the currently dominant school of economics. Natural resource economics (p. 4): the specialisation within neoclassical economics that is concerned with the economy’s extractions from the natural environment. Simulation (p. 15): numerical analysis of the properties of a model. Sustainability (p. 8): maintaining the capacity of the joint economy--environment system to continue to satisfy the needs and desires of humans for a long time into the future. Sustainable development (p. 9): economic growth that would meet the needs and aspirations of the present without compromising the ability to meet those of the future. Utilitarianism (p. 7): the school of ethics according to which the moral correctness of an action depends on the balance of pleasure and pain that it produces.
WEBSITES The address of the website of the International Society for Ecological Economics, ISEE, is http://www.ecoeco.org. It has links to a number of other relevant sites. One of the features of the ISEE site is the ongoing assembly of
an online encyclopedia of ecological economics, in which there is an entry on ‘The early history of ecological economics and ISEE’ written by Robert Costanza, one of the founders of ISEE.