ABSTRACT
Ecological economics arose from the need to confront a challenge that humankind had not experienced before. We are now living in a world economy the destiny of which we all share. While producing prosperity on a scale never conceived of in earlier generations, we have been forced to admit that threats to the life-supporting ecological systems are accumulating at an unprecedented speed. The clash between the economic and the ecological systems has become an elementary fact, not only locally but globally. The need for an approach that can tackle this dilemma in a straightforward way is obvious.
