ABSTRACT
At the 2007 Conference of the European Society for Ecological Economics, Professor Malte Faber’s keynote speech was entitled ‘How to be an ecological economist’. In that lecture (Faber 2008), Professor Faber, himself originally an ‘ordinary’ economist, reflected upon a career’s worth of experiences with the personal and professional challenges that arise as one reaches beyond the reductive boundaries of an individual academic discipline in an effort to conduct ecological economics research. In keeping with the discussion that Faber and others of his and the preceding generation (see also Boulding 1991; Max-Neef 2005; Røpke 1999, 2002, 2004; Walker and Holling, Chapter 10 of this book) have opened up, our aim in this chapter is to explore what is required of both the scholars and the institutions involved in conducting research that is concerned with interactions between economic and ecological systems – work that requires one to stand across the two disciplines of ecology and economics, often with very little institutional support underneath.
