ABSTRACT
Donald Worster’s Nature> Economy, and Mark SagofF’s The Economy of the Earth present in their tides a way to formulate the relationship between economics and ecology. Economic theory, with its notions of equilibrium and the invisible hand, exhibits formal traits that have long been sought for our understanding of nature. Lacking faith in God’s intention as the source for order in nature, biologists have searched elsewhere. Ecology can be an attempt to bring forth feedback loops and principles of equilibria thought to be implicit in nature, much as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and other classical economists originally brought forth the principles of supply and demand that impose an unintended order on human afhtirs. The hope implicit in this picture of ecology is that just as economists have helped identify waste and patterns of self-defeating action, the ecologist as economist of the earth can do the same. Often economists themselves press forward, offering to extend the theoretical constructs they have developed as means to the understanding of human a&irs to the newly recognized problems of resource depletion and environmental quality.
