The journal Ecological Economics has as long article on the history of…ecological economics, which it invented. I started through the article a bit skeptical, and became absorbed. They are now trying to figure out how behavioral economics fits in. There is a ton of interesting stuff here, and I am not sure I can even begin to summarize it.

The basic tenet in Ecological Economics (EE) is eloquently stated in the seminal paper by (Røpke, 2004, p. 296): “the human economy is embedded in nature, and economic processes are also always natural processes”. The field gained formal recognition with the founding of the International Society for Ecological Economics in 1988, followed by the launch of the journal Ecological Economics in 1989 and the first international conference in 1990 (Røpke, 2004). It emerged after several unsuccessful attempts to make environmental economics more grounded in physical reality and less constrained by its rigid methodological assumptions. In response to this rigidity, the scholars who founded the EE society and journal opted for openness: any opinion or method could in principle be considered, debated and possibly dismissed only ex post. This stance reflects EE’s commitment to methodological pluralism (Norgaard, 1989), rooted in the belief that no single approach can adequately capture the full complexity of socio-ecological challenges.

That’s the beginning. It goes on like that for a long time. Note that “environmental economics”, which essentially extends the logic of traditional economics to properly deal with external costs and benefits, is not good enough according to the founders of ecological economics. Essentially, we need to acknowledge that the human economy is embedded in the natural world, not the other way around. Behavioral economics extends traditional economics to account for how real individuals (humans, firms) reach conclusions and make decisions, which falls short of pure rationality. The ecological economics crowd says this focus on individual decisions was the breakthrough that allowed behavioral economics to break through into the field of traditional economics. But this is also not good enough because our decisions and actions as a society are more than just the sum of decisions and actions by all the individual actors. That’s my take-home summary, but the article puts it much better backed by evidence and academic studies. Worth a read.