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               Ecology in the Mirror of Economics 
 
                      Philip E. Mirowski 
                   University of Notre Dame 
 
I would like to start with some comments by Richard Levins, reported in 
(Callebaut, 1993, pp.262-3): 
 
"The gene as the fundamental unit of the individual organism is paralleled 
to some extent in the search for the fundamental unit of ecological 
systems...ecologists have come up with the notion of energy...The notion of 
energy as the fundamental thing to look at as the universal medium of 
exchange is clearly brought into biology by analogy with economic 
exchange... 
There was a hope... that we could ignore all the complexity of interacting 
species, the heterogeneity of populations, the complexities of competition 
and symbiosis, of mutation and predation, and reduce everything to a single 
medium if ecological exchange, which was designated as 'energy'." 
 
        I am very taken with this narrative, but am surprized that no one 
to my knowledge has seriously followed up on the implications of this 
insight. (Does anyone know otherwise?) For instance, Kingsland (1985), 
Hagen (1992), and Worster (1994) all acknowledge to a greater or lesser 
extent the impact that economics has had on the history of ecology; but 
they uniformly let the observation pass, as though the implications would 
be too obvious (or too distressing?) to explore further. There may be the 
following explanations of this blind spot: 
        * Historians of economics have done such a lousy job 
        of providing something beyond a naive Whig narrative 
        for outsiders to access. 
        * Levins' comments are discounted as being those of a 
        'Marxist'. 
        * The sources of inspiration of scientific models are 
        treated as irrelevant, perhaps under the old context 
        of discovery/ context of justification distinction. 
        * Biologists have gone through this before with the 
        Malthus-Darwin connection, and find such contextualizations 
        boring. 
        * Counter-histories of ecological concerns such as 
        that by Martinez-Alier (1987) also misrepresent the 
        cultural imperatives driving disciplinary discourse 
        in economics. 
 
        Whatever the reason, I will argue that the ecology/economics 
historical connection should be accorded much more attention, since it is 
of paramount significance for understanding the quandry in which the 
discipline of ecology finds itself. Some implications of this historical 
narrative may be: 
        * The disparity between the public perceptions of the 
        content and the actual scientific practices of ecology 
        is closely paralleled by that in economics. Hence 
        continued research support is predicated upon strong 
        boundary conditions to keep the layman out. 
        * The belief that ecological concerns are intrinsically 
        opposed to economic considerations is confounded by 
        the fact of this shared discourse. 
        * Both ecology and economics have an interest in 
        positing a pristine Nature external to social relations, 
        but their shared theoretical orientations belie such 
        claims. When this is pointed out, some historians tend 
        to start blaming the problem on postmodernism or other 
        despised trends, as does Worster in his (1995). This 
        indictment is seriously misplaced. 
        * The historical connection may help explain why the 
        sub-field of 'environmental economics' seems so 
        irrelevant and unpromising to many scientists and 
        most ecologists. From this perspective, it can be 
        regarded as a closed monologue, a later version of 
        economics talking to its earlier incarnation. 
 
SOME STRIKING HISTORICAL PARALLELS 
 
***Preliminary apology: I am only working from secondary sources in the 
history of ecology.*** 
 
"[T]o a great extent, ecology today has become 'bioeconomics': a cognate, 
or perhaps even subordinate, division of economics." (Worster, 1994, p.292) 
 
I want to raise the ante here, and suggest that the parallels between the 
histories of economics and ecology over the last century or so are much 
closer than anyone has noticed or commented upon. The place to start is the 
frame-tale of the rise to dominance of the neoclassical orthodoxy in 
economics, defeating first the German Historicist and American 
Institutionalist movements, and then itself exiling the British Marshallian 
variant in favor of a more scientistic version in America in the 1930s-50s. 
The key is to understand neoclassicism as initially an outgrowth of the 
European-wide "energetics" movement of the later 19th century. The standard 
mathematical portrayal of individual "utility" was lifted fairly directly 
from classical mechanics (Mirowski, 1989) as an attempt to unify physics, 
psychology and economics. Personal utility was portrayed as a field of 
potential energy emanating from the individual, whereas purchasing power 
was less openly equated with kinetic energy; constrained optimization was 
reinterpreted as individual striving to satisfy desires. Energetics as a 
cultural movement (representatives: Ostwald, Helm, Solvay) went into rapid 
decline at the turn of the century; but neoclassical economics managed to 
disengage itself from any taint of energetics, largely through the efforts 
of the British school of Alfred Marshall. This orthodoxy of the "laws of 
supply and demand" was in turn rejected when leadership passed from Britain 
to America in the 1930s, in favor of a more concertedly mathematical 
version of neoclassicism, which was phrased in a more uncompromisingly 
individualist idiom, even while forging an accomodation with Keynesian 
macroeconomics. The 'stabilization' of the neoclassical orthodoxy by the 
1950s masked some contrary trends, however. One was the attempt to revive 
the earlier 'Marshallian' orthodoxy under the rubric of the 'Chicago 
school' of Milton Friedman. Another was the incursion of various 
'cybernetic' themes which initially seemed subsumed by the orthodoxy-- 
operations research, linear programming, game theory-- but were either 
rejected or repressed in the standard curriculum. In the 1980s the 
neoclassical orthodoxy ran into verious problems, and over the course of 
the decade managed to shift the center of gravity of the core orthodoxy 
from the static constrained optimization of utility towards the Nash 
equilibrium in game theory (Rizvi, 1994). 
        Perhaps the most important themes for our present purposes in this 
history are the following structural regularities: the long-term 
relationship to energetics; the trend from a 'soft' rejection of wholism 
and organicism towards a more concerted methodological individualism; the 
movement from a diachronic to synchronic analysis; the heuristic role of 
physics in providing both the primary metaphors and the mathematical 
formalisms over time; the relative disengagement of empirical workers 
within the discipline from the strictures of the core theory and the 
failure to uncover any quantitative 'constants'; the hardcore insistence 
upon the equilibrium concept (usually constrained optimization) by the 
mid-20th century and some backpedalling from that commitment by the end of 
the century; progressive blurring of any distinction between Nature and 
Society; the withdrawal into arcane technical virtuousity in order to 
assert the possibility of escape from the highly-charged political 
character of the incompletely constituted subject-matter; but 
simultaneously a history of individual and institutional accomodations to 
state funding and demands to shape the research agenda; and increased 
reliance upon computer simulations and information-processing metaphors as 
we approach the present. Perhaps the most striking phenomenon to the 
historian is the incongruous combination of assertions of arcane scientific 
methodologies with the simultaneous lament that the field had "not quite 
yet" achieved a stabilized body of concensual knowledge. 
        All of these regularities, it appears, might equally characterize 
the history of ecology just as aptly as the history of orthodox economics. 
Thus, when historians take note of some common language, such as 
'competition' or 'consumption' or 'budgets' (Worster, 1994, p.293), they 
have merely glimpsed the tip of the iceberg. Energy was not simply "the key 
that opened the gate to the economic approach" (Worster, 1994, p.311); it 
just paved over a footpath with a four-lane highway. I think it 
particularly important to heed recent historians who insist that changing 
notions of natural selection track simultaneous changes in notions of 
physical dynamics (Depew & Weber, 1995); economists have similarly glanced 
enviously at changing conceptions of dynamics, and have been notorious in 
their attempts to co-opt various notions of selection and evolution for 
their own purposes over the course of the century (Hodgson, 1994). But to 
drive the parallels home, it seems that similarities extend even to 
individual representative figures in the respective disciplines. Some 
candidates for comparison are listed below. 
 
Frederick Clements -- Karl Marx, Knapp 
Historical climax community -- Historicist stage theories 
 
Arthur Tansley -- Alfred Marshall 
'ecosystem' ironic as a movement away from wholism and organicism 
 
Thompson/ Volterra -- American Keynesians 
cycle theories of populations -- business cycle theories 
 
Eugene Odum -- Wassily Leontief 
material cycles, energy flows -- input/output analysis 
 
E.O.Wilson -- Milton Friedman 
Marshallian representative agents -- ditto 
Sociobiology -- evolution as optimum 
 
Robert MacArthur -- Paul Samuelson 
island biogeography mathematized -- representative agent math 
operationist rhetoric -- ditto for revealed preference 
co-opting stochastic math -- randomness tamed 
 
Richard Lewontin -- John Roemer 
wholist in orthodox idiom -- Marxist in orthodox idiom 
 
John Maynard Smith --- Reinhard Selten 
evolutionary stable strategies -- Nash equilibria 
 
Chris Langton -- Ken Binmore 
artificial life -- artificial agents 
 
REFERENCES 
 
Callebaut, Werner, ed. 1993. "Taking the Naturalistic Turn." Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press. 
 
Depew, David & Weber, Bruce. 1995. "Darwinism Evolving." Cambridge: MIT Press. 
 
Hagen, Joel. 1992. "The Entangled Bank." New Brunswick: Rutgers University 
Press. 
 
Kingsland, Sharon. 1985. "Modeling Nature." Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press. 
Levins, Richard & Lewontin, Richard. 1985. "The Dialectical Biologist." 
Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 
 
Martinez-Alier, Juan. 1987. "Ecological Economics." New York: Basil Blackwell. 
 
Mirowski, Philip. 1989. "More Heat than Light." New York: Cambridge 
University Press. 
Mirowski, Philip. forthcoming 1996. "Machine Dreams: Economic Agent as 
Cyborg" in History of Political Economy. Supplement to Volume 28. 
 
Rizvi, Abu. 1994. "Game Theory to the Rescue?" Contributions to Political 
Economy, (13):1-28. 
 
Smith, John Maynard. 1982. "Evolution and the Theory of Games." Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press. 
 
Soule, M. & Lease, G. eds. 1995. "Reinventing Nature?" Washington: Island 
Press. 
 
Taylor, Peter. 1988. "Technocratic optimism, H.T.Odum and the Partial 
Transformation of the Ecological Metaphor" Journal of the History of 
Biology, (21):213-244. 
 
Worster, Donald. 1994. "Nature's Economy." 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge 
University Press. 
 
Worster, Donald. 1995. "Nature and the Disorder of History," in M.Soule & 
G.Lease, eds. "Reinventing Nature?" Washington: Island Press. 
 
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