ABSTRACT
How is the economy of life to be conceived? In the following sections we introduce a terminology that allows us to grasp the structure of economic relationships within biocoenoses. Starting from the fact that, since its emergence, life on Earth has not been interrupted for even a moment, we refer in the following to biocoenoses as ‘immortal’. With this we do not imply that such entireties cannot terminate or be destroyed – they remain transitory. But their transience is of a principally different kind than the mortality of individual living things. An individual possesses a certain ‘natural lifespan’, one which is derived from its inner constitution, and can be fallen short of, but not randomly exceeded. Thus it is possible to predict with near certainty a boundary that the individual life of an organism cannot exceed. In contrast, the demise of a biocoenosis cannot be predicted. In general we know of no ‘natural’ lifespan, one which corresponds to their inner structure and sets a temporal boundary. Using the characteristic of ‘immortality’, we wish to draw attention to the following difference between living things and biocoenoses: living things must die, biocoenoses need not expire (even though they can). The entire biocoenosis of the Earth, however, has already lasted some billion years. What holds for biocoenoses also holds in principle for species. They are not mortal, they cannot die, but they can, in the event of all their individual members dying, ‘die out’. The immortality of a biocoenosis or a species is, however, an abstraction, because the concrete biocoenosis with its species exists only through the life and death of its individual living things. The foundations of life of a biocoenosis are the embodiment of the foundations of life of all living creatures belonging to it: how then are these to be described? In the following we operate with three essential terminological pairs. First we will define the pairs: ‘stock’ and ‘flow’, as well as ‘store’ and ‘extraction’. In a further step we will introduce the particularly important pair ‘funds’ and ‘service’.1
