ABSTRACT
Ecological economics is sometimes described as a system of knowledge that tries to bring together the housekeeping of humans (economics) and the housekeeping of nature (ecology). As we have seen so far, this is not an easy task. Today it is no exaggeration to say that there is a large confl ict between these two. For tens of thousands of years the relation between human and nature’s housekeeping was unproblematic – at least from the point of view of nature’s housekeeping, because the human economy was an “infi nitesimally” small part of nature’s economy. Somewhere along the road, something took place that disturbed nature’s economy, fi rst locally and then regionally. What happened were the rise of agriculture and the implementation of monocultures; the biodiversity of the land declined. However, as these large-scale agricultural systems were tied to one place – as opposed to hunting or a slash-and-burn systems – they had to be sustainable, working as closed systems, with quite little input from the outside – except for energy from the sun. With the cultural change that came with agriculture also the fi rst economic science was born, that of bookkeeping – the essence of housekeeping.
