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

and synthesis across a broad range of disciplines and approaches (Costanza et al., 2001). Worldwide problems (e.g., the population explosion, food and energy shortages, natural resource degradation, and environmental pollution) have sounded an alarm, calling into question the long-term sustainability of current ecological, economic, and social developments. The publication of Silent Spring marked the beginning of a new era of the global green movement to save the ecological environment for the survival and development of humankind (Carson, 1962). Subsequently, intensive academic debates on the relationships between socioeconomic development and ecological-environmental conservation have arisen. As a new field of inquiry, ecological economics promotes an alternative approach for dealing with the dynamic interactions between economic systems and the whole network of biophysical and social systems. This field has developed rapidly since the 1980s. Ecological Economics, the transdisciplinary journal of the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE), is one of the most widely cited sources in the economics profession (Hodgson & Rothman, 1999). The main objective of ecological economics is to fill the void between the largely mutually exclusive territories of economics and ecology (Costanza, 1998). At the threshold of major development, a number of unexploited or underexploited methodologies and theoretical perspectives in the field of ecological economics need to be explicitly examined.

Ecosystems and Economic Subsystems:
The Loss of Harmony

From Empty-World Economy to Full-World Economy

The current rates of population growth and the demand for natural resources have increased the interconnectedness of ecological and economic systems in time and space. ‘Ecology and economy are becoming ever more interwoven—locally, regionally, nationally, and globally—into a seamless net of causes and effects’ (WCED, 1987, p. 5).