The time in which we live is characterised by a set of seemingly intractable political arrangementsâa world order designed to foster âeconomic freedomâ and âeconomic growthââand an ever-deepening planetary crisis of ecological erosion and global heating, a crisis increasingly difficult to normalise in the consciousness of everyday life. The roots of our current condition might be traced to the crisis of American power of the early 1970s, a time when two bodies of knowledgeâecosystems ecology and the economics of the Chicago Schoolâwere transforming the institutions of the United States. The new authority accorded these incommensurable and politically charged sciences reflected the coterminous movement of environmentalism from the counter-culture to the conferences of the United Nations, and of neoliberalism from the radical fringes of right-wing economic thought to the commanding heights of governmental power.
As sources of the knowledge claims of counter-posed political cosmologies, ecology and economics, the estranged twin sciences of the oikos (both share this Greek root-word meaning âhouseholdâ or âestateâ) were engaged in the most millenarian of anticipations. Ecologists looked to the future and warned of a coming Apocalypse. Exponential industrialisation meant mounting destruction. Without dramatic social transformation, âbusiness as usualâ would culminate in an Earth so hopelessly polluted, depleted and over-heated that it could no longer sustain civilisation and abundant communities of multi-species life. At stake was nothing less than the regenerative capacity of the biosphere. Meanwhile, economists rallying to the banner of âfreedomâ foretold a new Heaven and a new Earth. The liberation of individuals and business from the dead hand of government intervention would unshackle âthe invisible handâ of the market, unleashing entrepreneurial techno-innovation and opening an infinite horizon of wealth creation, freeing humanity from the dismal scarcities and servitude of the past. The struggle between these divergent visions of post-natural futures continues into the present, exemplified most dramatically in the agonistic theatre of climate and energy policy. As an offering to the predicaments of our presentâwhich some would gather under the sign of the âAnthropoceneââthis book attempts to unearth a genealogy of the deep contradictions within and between ecology and economics, momentarily brought into sharp relief when they collided in the transformative moment of the 1970s.
There are many critical histories of economics available, less so of ecology. Yet the mutual history of the two disciplines, a topic rarely approached in the burgeoning (though too often unintegrated) literatures on neoliberalism and the climate crisis, is of crucial importance to the grave challenge of restructuring âthe economyâ before it destructures âthe ecosystemâ beyond all hope of timely regeneration. This task is complicated by the fact that despite their cosmopolitical opposition, the concepts of natural order and (re)production deployed in either discipline share common genealogical roots. This has been noticed by a range of scholars, although mostly with specialist concerns in mind. What remains under-recognised is the significant fact that neoclassical economics and systems ecology, the paradigmatic core disciplines of their respective fields of knowledge, both anchored their claims to the status of science in the energy physics developed by combustion engineers as the thermoindustrial revolution gathered momentum in the mid-nineteenth century. The claims to epistemic authority of both ecology and economics (and thus ultimately of environmentalists and neoliberals) can be traced to a foundational relation to the thermodynamic laws of energy and entropy, and in turn, to older concepts of equilibrium and natural law. However, these claims were made in different ways, at different times and for very different purposes. The ever present possibility for a reconciliation of the estranged twin sciences in the Earthly phenomena of heat and lifeâfor an ecological economics which answers the practical and ethical question of âhow are we to live?ââhas been perennially deferred. It is for us, for our children, and all other life to live the consequences.
Focussing on the history of particular conceptsâgrowth and equilibriumâas they appear in each discipline, this book demonstrates the extent of the unacknowledged mutual indebtedness between the two apparently disparate fields. It brings these ideas into focus via an excavation of their histories in political theology, natural history and physics, providing an itinerary of their migration into nineteenth-century âsocial physicsâ and the body of modern systems theories which emerged in the twentieth century. In doing so it addresses the following questions: how do we account for the uncritical commitment to infinite economic growth pursued by almost all nation-states, given the extensive empirical evidence that this is undermining the very habitability of the Earth? How does the constitution of economic knowledge lend itself to this path? How has the ecological world-view gone from a position of critical collision with economistsâ denial of science and nature to subordinate collusion with neoliberal âsolutionsâ, such as financial markets for carbon and âecosystem servicesâ, or techno-utopian geoengineering projects to make endangered ecosystems âresilientâ to planetary heating? I pursue such questions via an historical analysis of how economics and ecology came to be constituted as separate, stand-alone sciences, from the 1870s to the 1970s.
The Laws of Nature and the Powers of the Machine
The nineteenth-century triumph of machine technology over nature, and of scientific materialism over theology, had its parallel in political economy, which sought to overcome its history as a moral discourse on wealth and poverty and become a science of statecraft in accordance with natural laws it detected operating in the market economy. Whilst concepts of ânatural lawâ are deeply rooted in the Western tradition, in the nineteenth century the quest to elaborate them scientifically was profoundly realised in the development of the modern physics of energyâthermodynamicsâa science which arose in tandem with the fateful development of the coal-fired steam engine, and which remains foundational to the corpus of scientific materialism.
Now ubiquitous in everyday life, heat engines convert the ancient solar energy stored chemically in hydrocarbon fuels and released as heat during combustion into mechanical force, or âworkâ.1 Histories of thermodynamics begin by acknowledging the young French engineer Sadi Carnotâs Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, and on Machines fitted to develop that Power (1825), a brilliant analysis of the efficiency limits of steam engines in converting the heat of coal combustion into mechanical work. Carnot observed that the machines never gave as good as they got: only some of the heat was converted via the working fluid into the motive force of the driving mechanism. The majority of the heat was inevitably dissipated, flowing into the cooler parts and environment of the engine. Moreover, it was precisely this dissipative flow of heat across a thermal gradient, which in the absence of fresh shovelfuls of coal would grind to a halt as the motor approached thermal equilibrium with its environment, that was the sole source of motive power. Carnotâs insights were developed and synthesized with other experimental findings between the 1840s and 1860s by scientists including Julius Mayer, James Joule, William Rankine, Hermann von Helmholtz, James Clerk Maxwell, Rudolf Clausius, and Josiah Willard Gibbs. These inquiries demonstrated that light, heat, mechanical force, chemical affinity, magnetism, electricity, and the atomic structure of matter are all manifestations of a universal phenomenon we now call âenergyâ. Formalised in 1847, the law of the conservation of energy (from energeia, a Greek term approximating âworkâ) states that the quantity of energy of a closed system is constant: energy can neither be created nor destroyed in all the transformations we observe, only converted from one form to another.
Revealing a universal invariance underlying all known physical and chemical phenomena, the elaboration of the 1st law of thermodynamics led to a profound confidence in the timeless order and rationality of nature, vindicating the new thermoindustrial society and its scientific achievements. By contrast, the formalisation in 1865 of the 2nd law of thermodynamicsâthe entropy law (from the Greek entropia, meaning âturning towardâ, or âtransformationâ)âimplied an irreversible historical trajectory of disorder, depletion, waste, and chaos. Just as we always observe firewood burning to ashes, and never the reverse, the 2nd law states that the entropy of a closed system will always increase, where entropy is a measure of the disorder, dissipation, or unavailability of energy to âdo workâ. As it exfoliated into wider scientific and social discourse in the late nineteenth century, the spectre of entropy complicated the optimistic confidence in Progress with fin-de-siecle pessimism, declinist fatigue and visions of the heat death of the universe. Accounting for all phenomena involving heat, motion and work, and imposing irreversibility and rigorous limits upon all the transformations of state and material organisation observed in machines, organisms, and inanimate matter from the atomic to the cosmological scale, the laws of thermodynamics are central to the claim of scientific materialism to have identified universal principles at the foundation of all matter and material transformation. Among the most confirmed findings of modern science, contemporary physicists regard them as nothing less than âthe constitution of the u...