Ecological Economics: An Introduction

摘要

Until ecological economics came into its own in the 1990s, economists' understanding of the natural world rested on the twin pillars of natural resource economics and environmental economics. The remarkably rich development of these fields over the past several decades has, surprisingly, missed a crucial link - that between humans and their role in the larger ecosystem. Missing in conventional economic analysis is the ecological basis of all economic activity. It would be a mistake to think, as once did this reviewer, that the evolution of ecological economics heralded merely the establishment of the third 'pillar' - a new field of economics, which would incorporate the missing ecological constraints on economic behavior. It is hardly overstating the case to say that ecological economics takes on a much greater challenge, namely that of shifting the very ground on which sits 250 years worth of economic analysis, no less. Thanks to Robert Constanza, one of the founding fathers of ecological economics, we already have a standard by which to gauge progress towards this goal.