This book traces the interacting histories of the disciplines of ecology and economics, from their common origin in the ancient Greek concept of oikonomia, through their distinct encounters with energy physics, to the current obstruction of neoliberal economics to responses to the ecological and climate crisis of the so-called Anthropocene. Reconstructing their constitution as separate sciences in the era of fossil-fuelled industrial capitalism, the book offers an explanation of how the ecological sciences have moved from a position of critical collision with mainstream economics in the 1970s, to one of collusion with the project of permanent growth, in and through the thermal crisis of the biosphere.

Makes a highly relevant contribution to knowledge on the mutual histories of ecology, economics and energy Illuminates contemporary aporias in the conduct of energy, climate and environmental policy Scrutinises the metaphorical affinities that both disciplines have derived from the 'hard sciences' in terms of the social values encoded therein Pays close attention to the historical evolution of disciplines and the constant hybridization between economic and environmental discourses

Autorentext

Jeremy Walker is Senior Lecturer in Social and Political Sciences and a member of the Climate Justice Research Centre at the University of Technology Sydney. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (University of New South Wales), a Bachelor of Communications (Social Inquiry, Hons, UTS) and a PhD (History and Philosophy of Science, UTS).

Inhalt

1. Neoliberalism, environmentalism and the crisis of the 1970s.- 2. Oikonomia: on metaphor, science, and natural order.- 3. On photosynthesis and pyrotechnics: life between fire and law.- 4. Industrial machines and the discovery of the economy.- 5. The market as moral law: Providence, starvation and liberal Empire.- 6. The fire machine: economics as a social physics of natural law.- 7. Economics as agnotology: unlimited growth and the limits of knowledge.- 8. The Age of Ecology.- 9. Oeconomy of nature: the balance of nature and the struggle for existence.- 10. Super-organism: American ecology and national development.- 11. Energy, ecology and the Great World Engine.- 12. Ecologist as cyborg: the military origins of the subversive science.- 13. Power and entropy: the limits of ecological economics.- 14. Genealogies of resilience: from conservation to disaster adaptation.