ABSTRACT
The relationship between ecology and economics has existed from the beginning. According to Mayr (1997, p. 207), the term ecology was coined in the 1860s by Haeckel, who defined the word as that corpus of knowledge concerning “the economy of nature.” Economic thought has been so thoroughly intertwined with the development of ecology that Worster (1994) entitled his intellectual history of the field of ecology as Nature's Economy. Several decades ago, Ehrlich and Holm (1962) pointed out the potential for merging ecological thought with the social science disciplines, including economics. The reason underlying their suggestions is straightforward. Albeit in different spheres of activity, economists and ecologists study the use of resources and the competition for those resources. For example, a chapter titled “Economics of Consumer Choice” (Mac Arthur, 1972) appeared not in an economics text, but in a book on ecology. These two disciplines sometimes employ similar theoretical constructs—a similarity often obscured by difference in labels. Although space limitations preclude extensive discussion of the parallels between economics, business and ecological thought, it can be pointed out for example, that the terms breadth and overlap in the ecological theory of the niche have their counterparts in portfolio analysis and in the concept of substitutable commodities.
