ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the ecological-economic critique of mainstream economics and makes the case that social complexity is a function of energy throughput. Social order, at any scale from the household through to the global economy, is understood as a low-entropy regime sustained only by the continual export of entropic disorder into the higher-scale system of the biosphere. From this perspective, sustainability involves the balance between the propensity of the anthroposphere to generate entropic disorder and the capacity of the biosphere to absorb pollution, ecosystem disturbance, and species loss without irreparable damage to its regenerative capacities.
