A field of study that treats the economy as a subsystem of the finite biosphere, so that the scale of the economy’s material throughput has limits. Its founders include Herman Daly and Robert Costanza.
Extended definition
Ecological economics starts from the physical fact that every economy draws energy and materials from the biosphere and returns wastes to it. It asks how large an economy can grow before that throughput degrades the systems it depends on, and how a steady-state economy could hold its scale within those limits.
The field drew on Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s work on the thermodynamics of economic processes and took organized form in the late 1980s, with its own journal, Ecological Economics, from 1989. Herman Daly and Robert Costanza are among its founders.
Contrast with adjacent terms
- Environmental economics applies the methods of mainstream economics to environmental problems, for example by pricing pollution into markets, and treats the environment as one sector among others. Ecological economics treats the economy as the part and the biosphere as the whole.
- Bioregional economics designs economies for particular places within the carrying capacity of their landscapes. Ecological economics supplies much of its general theory of scale and limits.
Related terms
Sources
- Costanza, R. (ed.) (1991). Ecological Economics: The Science and Management of Sustainability. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Daly, H. E. and Farley, J. (2004). Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Provenance
Stub entry created 27 September 2026 in the Quartz Sanitation run, to give a page to links from the Herman Daly page that pointed at no page. Written from general reference knowledge of the field and the works cited under Sources. First-pass entry: sections require enrichment from the underlying project documents.