Sustainable Ecological Agriculture in China: Bridging the Gap Be ...

to distribution issues (Cropper & Oates, 1992). Although environmental economics study has incorporated environmental externality, it is essentially neoclassical in its construction (e.g., it upholds a belief in the standard conceptual structures—utility maximisation, profit maximisation, and substitutability in consumption and production). However, there are no real substitutes for many of the life-support functions of the natural world, and so there are limits to its neoclassical interpretation (Pearce, 1998). While environmental economics extended the boundaries of conventional neoclassical economics, ecological economics begins from different foundations and reflects a new way of thinking about the economy, the environment, and humanity's relationship to the natural world. The difference between the neoclassical and ecological economics approaches to environmental problems can be seen clearly by examining the definitions and concepts used in the ongoing debate over weak and strong sustainability (Gowdy, 2000). The steady state–oriented technological pessimism of ecological economics may be contrasted with the economic growth–oriented technological optimism of environmental economics (Turner et al., 1997). The former holds that technological innovation is less important than the capacity of ecological processes to adapt, and that policies should focus on technological and institutional measures to reduce the throughput of matter and energy from the environment into the economy and back out into the environment (a thermodynamic imperative) (Turner, 1999).

Ecological economics can be viewed as a reaction to—and a rejection or a modification of—certain of the assumptions that tend to characterise environmental economics (Turner et al., 1994).

Ecological economics goes beyond the perspective of environmental economics to view the economy and humanity as parts of an encompassing