ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book draws attention to the relations between a society's economic activity, as traditionally defined, and the physical world which provides the stage for the larger drama. It focuses on the connections between human society and the rest of the universe that are attributable to economic activity. The book shows that the existing economic models can be extended, both theoretically and empirically, so that the quality and quantity of these material flows become determined by the economic activity of society. In all production processes, at the micro and the macro level, the quantity of waste products must be sufficient to satisfy the physical law of the conservation of mass. The book concludes with a short discussion of the desirability of a suitably modified British input-ouput model for analysing economic and environmental interactions.
