| Chapter 1: | Ecological Economics as a Transdisciplinary Approach to Sustainability |
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systems, which regard human beings as the sole agents of moral consideration, is now being increasingly questioned. Human society is part of the environment, and we should view our social and economic behaviours as a subset of nature. The fact is that the capacity of the environment to assimilate pollution from human production and consumption activity is the ultimate limit to economic growth. Nature's economy is primary, and the social and market economies of human beings are parasitic. Social and economic development should be dependent upon nature's constraints (Buchdahl & Raper, 1998).
A Critique of Neoclassical and Environmental Economics
Lost Wisdom of Classical Economics
Historically, the disregard of the biophysical implications of production by economists was not the rule. Much of the writings of the eighteenth-century classical economists such as Adam Smith (1937), Thomas Malthus (1798/1963), David Ricardo (1891), and Karl Marx (1859/1973) were more concerned with natural resource issues and humans’ dependence on and interactions with nature than were those of the contemporary neoclassical economists (Costanza & Daly, 1987). However, this concern largely disappeared from economics until the resurgence of environmental awareness in the 1960s and the increasing acknowledgment of possible resource scarcity in the early 1970s (Carson, 1962; Meadows et al., 1972). Historically, economics, politics, and ethics were regarded as parts of an indivisible whole. As can be seen in the evolution of modern economics, however, the importance of ethical and political perspectives has weakened substantially (Sen, 1987). The positivist view—that it is possible to carry out value-free science—has resulted in the progressive separation of economics from ethics (Tacconi, 1997). The problem of modern economics is that it has lost its roots in the Greek word oikonomia, the management of the household for the wider good, and has instead absorbed chrematistics, the maximisation of short-run gains (Hayward, 1995).