1. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
   Overview Essay
   Jonathan M. Harris

1. Historical Roots for Ecological Economics – Biophysical Versus Allocative Approaches
   Paul P. Christensen
2. The Teleological View of Wealth: A Historical Perspective
   Gerald Alonzo Smiths
3. The Convergence of Neo-Ricardian and Embiodied Energy Theories of Value and Price
   D.H. Judsons
4. Energy and Energetics in Economic Theory: A Review Essay
   Philip Mirowskis
5. Introduction to Ecological Economics: Energy, Environment and Society
   Juan Martinex-Alier with with Klaus Schlüpmanns
6. The History of the Future
   Juan Martinez-Alier with Klaus Schlüpmanns
7. Biophysical and Marxist Economics: Learning From Each Other
   Robert Kaufmanns
8. Biophysical Economics: Historical Perspective and Current Research Trends
   Cutler J. Cleveland
9. World Environmental History and Economic Development
   J.F. Richards
10. The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis
    Lynn White, Jr.
11. The Case That the World Has Reached Limits
    Robert Goodland
12. One Part Wisdom: The Great Debate
    Paul Harrison
13. Environmental Significance of Development Theory
    F.E. Trainer

1. DEFINITION, SCOPE AND INTER-DISCPLINARY ISSUES
   Overview Essay
   Jonathan M. Harris

1. Toward an Ecological Economics
   Robert Costanza and Herman E. Daly
2. Foundations of an Ecological Economics
   David Pearce
3. The Case for Methodological Pluralism
   Richard B. Norgaard
4. Economics and Ecology: A Comparison of Experimental Methodologies and Philosophies
   Jason F. Shogren and Clifford Nowell
5. Interdiscplinary Research Between Economists and Physical Scientists: Retrospect and Prospect
   Malte Faber and John L.R. Proops
6. Rethinking Ecological and Economic Education: A Gestalt Shift
   Mary E. Clark
7. Industrial Ecology: Reflections on a Colloquium
   Jesse H. Ausubel
8. Sustainable Development: A Co-Evolutionary View
   Richard B. Norgaard
9. Sustainable Development: A Critical Review
   Sharachchandra M. Lélé
10. Recovering the Real Meaning of Sustainablity
    Vandana Shiva
11. The Difficulty in Defining Sustainability
    Michael A. Toman
12. Sustainable Development: What Is to Be Done?
    Johan Holmberg and Richard Sandbrook
13. The Concept of Sustainability: Origins, Extensions, and Usefulness for Policy
    John A. Dixon and Louise A. Fallon

III. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS AND TECHNIQUES
Overview Essay
Jonathan M. Harris

1. On the Ideological Foundations of Environmental Policy
   Daniel A. Underwood and Paul G. King
2. Towards an Ecological Economics of Sustainability
   Mick Common and Charles Perrings
3. Alternative Approaches to Economic-Environmental Interactions
   Edward B. Barbier
4. Introduction to the Steady-State Economy
   Herman E. Daly
5. Allocation, Distribution, and Scale: Towards an Economics that is Efficient, Just, and Sustainable
   Herman E. Daly
6. The Economic Growth Debate: What Some Economists Have Learned But Many Have Not
   Herman E. Daly
7. The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth
   Kenneth E. Boulding
8. Steady-State Economies and the Command Economic
   Kenneth N. Townsend
9. Allocation, Distribution and Scale as Determinants of Environmental Degradation: Case Studies of Haiti, El Salvador and Costa Rica
   George Foy and Herman Daly
10. On Economics as a Life Science
    Herman E. Daly
11. The Entropy Law and the Economic Process in Retrospect
    Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
12. Thermodynamic and Economic Concepts as Related to Resource-Use Policies
    H.S. Burness, R.G. Cummings, Glenn Morris and Inja Paik
13. Thermodynamic and Economic Concepts as Related to Resource-Use Policies: Comment and Reply
    Herman E. Daly (Comment) and H.S. Burness and R.G. Cummings (Reply)
14. Economics, Ethics, and the Environment
    Richard B. Norgaard and Richard B. Howarth
15. Neoclassical and Institutional Approaches to Development and the Environment
    Peter Söderbaum
16. Economics as Mechanics and the Demise of Biological Diversity
    Richard B. Norgaard
17. Reserved Rationality and the Precautionary Principle: Technological Change, Time and Uncertainty in Environmental Decision Making
    Charles Perrings
18. Conservation Reconsidered
    John V. Krutilla
19. The Human Firm in the Natural Environment: A Socio-Economic Analysis of Its Behavior
    John F. Tomer

1. ENERGY AND RESOURCE FLOW ANALYSIS
   Overview Essay
   Jonathan M. Harris

1. The Entropy Law and the Economic Problem
   Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
2. Selections from “Energy and Economic Myths”
   Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
3. Consumption, Production and Technological Progress: A Unified Entropic Approach
   Tran Huu Dung
4. Is the Entropy Law Relevant to the Economics of Natural Resource Scarcity?
   Jeffrey T. Young
5. Is the Entropy Law Relevant to the Economics of Natural Resource Scarcity? Comment
   Kenneth N. Townsend
6. Is the Entropy Law Relevant to the Economics of Natural Resource Scarcity? – Yes, of Course It Is!
   Herman E. Daly
7. Recycling, Thermodynamics and Environmental Thrift
   R. Stephen Berry
8. Thermodynamics and Economics
   Robert U. Ayres and Indira Nair
9. Energy Costs: A Review of Methods
   P.F. Chapman
10. Energy and Money
    Howard and Elizabeth Odum
11. Embodied Energy and Economic Valuation
    Robert Costanza
12. Energy and the US Economy: A Biophysical Perspective
    Cutler J. Cleveland, Robert Costanza, Charles A.S. Hall and Robert Kaufmann
13. Natural Resource Scarcity and Economic Growth Revisited: Economic and Biophysical Perspectives
    Cutler J. Cleveland
14. The Biophysical Systems World View
    John Peet
15. Energy, Labor, and the Conserver Society
    Bruce Hannon
16. Industrial Metabolism
    Robert U. Ayres
17. Industrial Input-Output Analysis: Implications for Industrial Ecology
    Faye Duchin
18. Implementing Industrial Ecology
    T.E. Graedel, B.R. Allenby and P.B. Linhart

1. ACCOUNTING AND EVALUATION
   Overview Essay
   Jonathan M. Harris

1. Three Dilemmas of Environmental Accounting
   Richard B. Norgaard
2. Environmental and Resource Accounting: An Overview
   Salah El Serafy and Ernst Lutz
3. Correcting National Income for Environmental Losses: A Practical Solution for a Theoretical Dilemma
   Roefie Hueting
4. GNP and Market Prices: Wrong Signals for Sustainable Economic Success That Mask Environmental Destruction
   Jan Tinbergen and Roefie Hueting
5. A Survey of Resource and Environmental Accounting in Industrialized Countries
   Henry Peskin and Ernst Lutz
6. Toward an Exact Human Ecology
   Malcolm Slesser
7. Energy Analysis and Economic Valuation
   Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
8. Integrated Environmental-Economic Accounting, Natural Resource Accounts, and Natural Resource Management in Africa
   Glenn-Marie Lange and Faye Duchin
9. Development, the Environment, and the Social Rate of Discount
   Anil Markandya and David W. Pearce
10. Economic Indicators of Resource Scarcity: A Critical Essay
    Richard B. Norgaard
11. Valuing Environmental Damage
    Per-Olov Johansson
12. Some Problems with Environmental Economics
    Mark Sagoff
13. The Worth of a Songbird: Ecological Economics as a Post-Normal Science
    Silvio O. Funtowicz and Jerome R. Ravetz

1. INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC RELATIONS, DEVELOPMENT AND THE ENVIRONMENT
   Overview Essay
   Rajaram Krishnan

1. Ten Reasons Why Northern Income Growth Is Not the Solution to Southern Poverty
   Robert Goodland and Herman E. Daly
2. Intenational Assistance – A Problem Posing as a Solution
   David C. Korten
3. The Case for Free Trade
   Jagdish Bhagwati
4. The Perils of Free Trade
   Herman E. Daly
5. Trading Off the Future: Making World Trade Environmentally Sustainable
   Paul Ekins
6. Development, Poverty and the Growth of the Green Movement in India
   Jayanta Bandyopadhyay and Vandana Shiva
7. Third World Development and Population
   Martin W. Lewis
8. Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique
   Ramachandra Guha
9. Environmental Change and Violent Conflict
   Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, Jeffrey H. Boutwell and George W. Rathjens
10. Introduction – Global Commons: Site of Peril, Source of Hope
    Neva R. Goodwin

VII. ETHICAL AND INSTITUTIONAL ISSUES IN ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS
Overview Essay
Neva Goodwin

1. Intergenerational Justice as Opportunity
   Talbot Page
2. Introduction: The Ethics of Sustainable Development
   J. Ronald Engel
3. The Age of Plenty: A Christian View
   E.F. Schumacher
4. The Search for an Environmental Ethic
   J. Baird Callicott
5. Should Trees Have Standing? – Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects
   Christopher D. Stone
6. Legal Rights for Nature: The Wrong Answer to the Right(s) Question
   P.S. Elder
7. Intergenerational Justice in Energy Policy
   Brian Barry
8. Sustainable Rural Development in Latin America: Building from the Bottom-Up
   Miguel A. Altieri and Omar Masera
9. Global Institutions and Ecological Crisis
   Jonathan M. Harris

How can we define ecological economics? Is it a sub-field of economics, an interdisciplinary area, or a discipline in its own right? As the field has developed, it has shown aspects of all three categorizations. After exploring the expanding literature of ecological economics, the researchers for this volume have leaned toward the third proposition: a new field of study is being defined which is independent of the standard economic paradigm.

This is an ambitious claim, and the reader will have to make his or her own judgment as to how well it is supported here. After surveying hundreds of books and articles, however, the editors of this volume feel that a strong case exists for the emergence of ecological economics as a new field of research and study. Not that the discipline lacks historical roots – but it is only within the past decade that it has emerged from marginality to play a significant role in shaping serious thought about glob al economic and environmental issues.

The field of “environmental economics,” as distinct from ecological economics, already exists in mainstream economics. However, that mainstream approach is felt by many theorists and practitioners to be inadequate to deal with the contemporary crises of environment/human interactions. The “environmental” area within the existing discipline of economics is too constrained by its requirement of market valuation to respond adequately to the complexities of issues such as global warming, species loss, ecosystem degradation, inter-generational equity, and non-human values. Ecological economics, by contrast, starts from a recognition of the biophysical realities underlying the operations of the economic system. Economic issues are then viewed in this context, rather than attempting to monetary price valuation to all aspects of the environment.

The issues which ecological economics brings to the fore are especially important in a long-term perspective and on a planetary scale. Much of human economic activity has been directed toward stretching ecological , and institutional issues round out t he volume. Several hundred articles and books were surveyed in the search for those which would best represent the field. Our selection principle has favored those articles which we believe best express a key concept or argument. Rather than reprinting full articles, we have chosen to summarize articles or book chapters. In this way, the reader will get the benefit of the essential content of an article – which would not emerge from a shorter abstract – but a faspecies. The inexorable buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has no immediate effect on economic activity, but eventually threatens the climatic stability of the entire planet.

Such issues are by now well known, but often fail to register on the monetary scale of standard economic analysis. Attempts to reflect these ecological developments in economic cost terms inevitably fail to capture the full scope of the problems. For some time, however, writers in the ecological economics tradition have warned of just such problems, basing their analysis on such concepts as energy flows and ecological system stability. The steady drumbeat of news on growing global ecological problems signal’s a need to treat the field of ecological economics much more seriously than it has been treated hitherto by most economists.

The reason why this paradigm shift is particularly important now has to do with the issue of scale, a concept much emphasized by ecological economists. In standard economic analysis, there are no inherent barriers to the scale of the macroeconomy. This vision of unlimited growth is in fundamental conflict with the ecological perspective, which sees scale and carrying capacity limits as central to the analysis of any biophysical process. It is precisely this issue which undergirds almost all of our current environmental problems. The human race has doubled in numbers in less than forty years, and may well double again in the next forty. Economic activity has at least quadruped over the same period, and according to World Bank forecasts will nearly quadruple again by 2030.[1] Whether we are thinking of the loss of open space in the United States, water limits in India, over-harvesting of fisheries worldwide, or the enormous potential coal use of China in the coming decades, environmental problems are driven by the pressures of growth. Scale issues can be ignored up to a point, as they are in mainstream macroeconomics, but we are now well past that point.

If we accept the case for a more careful consideration of ecological economics, what do we find? this is the question which motivated our research for this volume. The organization of the volume is intended to present the full scope of the field, starting with its historical roots and the definition of the field. We then move to general and specific theoretical concepts, then to energy and resource flow analysis and national income accounting techniques. Applications to North-South/international relations and to social, ethical, and institution issues round out the volume. Several hundred articles and books were surveyed in the search for those which would best represent the field. Our selection principle has favored those articles which we believe best express a key concept or argument. Rather than reprinting full articles, we have chosen to summarize articles or book chapters. In this way, the reader will get the benefit of the essential content of the article — which would not emerge from shorter abstracts –but a far larger number of authors can be included than would be possible if the full text was reproduced. In every case, the authors have reviewed the summaries to check that their work is adequately and clearly presented. These summaries, however, are in no way meant to substitute for the original articles. We strongly recommend that readers seek out the full texts in their areas of interest.

The overview essays at the head of each section attempt to synthesize the diverse selections to give a sense of the nature of the field. Despite the varied views and theoretical perspectives represented, we feel that a certain Gestalt emerges, a sense of a viable field of analysis with its own parameters and techniques. There is certainly some overlap with standard economics as well as with ecological, political, historical, and ethical analysis. But we feel, and have some confidence that the reader will also feel, this emergence of a new and essential discipline.

Such a far-reaching enterprise has necessarily involved the contributions of many people. Rajaram Krishnan, an economist specializing in agricultural and labor issues in development, has coordinated the selection and preparation of summaries, as well as providing a summary essay for Part VI. Jonathan Harris, who has published work on the economics of agriculture, trade, and global institutions, has written most of the overview essays that introduce the parts of the book. Neva R. Goodwin , the originator of the project and author of Social Economics: An Alternative Theory, has contributed the section VII overview. The research team for this volume included Andrew Morrison, Daniel Von Moltke, Daniele Guidi and Kevin Gallagher. For tireless editing work we are indebted to Carolyn Logan. Associates of the Global Development and Environment Institute including Jeffrey Zabel and Elliott Morss contributed to the shaping of volume in its early stages. The final responsibility for the selection and content rests with the three editors. We hope that we have done justice to the field of ecological economics, and perhaps helped to define this emerging discipline.

Most of the funding for the research and writing of this volume was provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, as part of a grant to the Program for the Study of Sustainable Change and Development. Tufts University administrative staff have provided essential support throughout. We are very grateful for the active support of these institutions, without which the project would not have been possible.