Socio-Environmental Thinking and Ecological Economics: a New Perspective to Think About Society

Abstract

Ecological Economics represents an attempt to overcome the disciplinary narrowness of the traditional sciences dealing with society, the economy and nature. It adopts a transdisciplinary approach with an integrating view of ecological-economic problems, rejecting any dependence either on economics or ecology. The university possesses (unidimensional) disciplines; the real world has concrete (multidimensional) problems, as in the case of the socio-environmental ones. Disciplinary frontiers are arbitrary academic constructs. Ecological Economics directs its attention to that conflict. The conclusion cannot be otherwise: Ecological Economics does not constitute a branch of economics (nor is it of ecology). The enormity of the devastating impact of the human scale on the rest of the creation results from the fact that to grow means to use the environment: it involves environmental “opportunity costs”. However, the dominant view of economics (“conventional economics”, or the economic view of the economy) ignores completely the dimension of the resources of nature in its model. The most it does is to imagine the environment as an appendix of economic activity (as environmental economics, or the economic view of the environment, offers us). To Ecological Economics what matters is to imagine the economy as an open subsystem inside the ecosystem. In this perspective, the idea of wealth creation does not exist. What happens is a transformation (metabolism) of low-entropy into high-entropy matter and energy – as the inexorable laws of thermodynamics determine. This perspective represents the ecological view of the economy. In other words, it corresponds to the notion that there will be a maximum sustainable scale of the economic system in relation to nature. The question thus consists in finding the optimum scale of the economic macrosystem, which is nothing more than an open subsystem of the global, thermodynamically closed ecosystem. Nature limits cannot be surpassed by the economy, chiefly in terms of the observance of limitations resulting from the laws of thermodynamics. In the view of Ecological Economics, nature is the irreplaceable, single basic support of anything society can do. Such position corresponds to the rejection of the ruling paradigms that lead to a true worship of economic growth.