Toward an Ecological Economics

Abstract

Conventional economic analysis is inadequate to the challenges posed by ecological economics. It is not denied that conventional economics contains much that is necessary and important to ecology. The contention is only that conventional economic analysis cannot foot the whole bill and must therefore be supplemented with an economics of a different scope and method. The concern is, in short, the adjustment at the margin of the allocation of the human capital resources of the economics profession.

The ecological perspective is quite different. Its philosophic root is the secular idea that man … is wholly and ineluctably embedded in the tissue of natural process. The interconnections are delicate, infinitely complex, never to be severed.

L. Marx, 1974.

Reprinted with permission from the International Journal of Social Economics (1983).