Abstract:
Increasingly it is realized that the health of human economies depends on maintaining a healthy reciprocal relationship within the wider biophysical milieu. Economists along with social and physical scientists of many disciplines, have worked since the 1970s to develop tools for empirical and theoretical analysis to aid this process of adjustment. This thesis is at the same time a study of this evolution of the discipline of ecological economics, and a contribution to the task of defining key directions of change. Primarily it is a study in economic methodology and of the historical process of evolution of ideas, but it is intended also to have some policy-relevant conclusions.
Part I centres around the question of the physical interdependencies of human economies with their biophysical milieu. Thermodynamic concepts and input-output modeling are used to highlight the complexity of these interdependencies and the inherent limits to control. Part II analyses the problem of environmental externality in market-dominated societies. Externality, in the view of general disequilibrium developed, is seen as synonymous with a process of social conflict and of economic and environmental change. Part III looks at the impetus that recognition of these features of time-indeterminacy, codependency, and conflict give for an ethic of reciprocity in the resolution of environmental issues. This notion of a gift-sense extended within a society, between societies, and through time to the future, concords closely with the widely expressed concern for inter-and infra-generational equity.