Intro to Ecological Economics

Vocabulary flashcards covering the introductory concepts, historical systems, and theoretical differences between environmental and ecological economics as presented in Lecture 1.

Economic Surplus

Production above and beyond what is needed for the subsistence of the producers and the replacement of inputs to production.

Hunter-gatherer societies

Societies characterized by a very flat social structure and no economic surplus.

Feudalism

A sophisticated class structure where peasants perform the work and landlords collect the economic surplus.

Capitalism

A system where social structures match the needs of new technology to produce a much larger economic surplus.

Ecology

A branch of biology defined as the study of the abundance and distribution of organisms as well as the complex interrelations within an ecosystem.

Ernst Heinrich Haeckel

The scientist who introduced the word öcologie in 1866 and described ecology as the study of the economy of nature.

Ecosystem

A community of living organisms in conjunction with the nonliving components of their environment, interacting as a system.

Biotic Factors

Living components of an ecosystem, including bacteria, archaea, fungi, animals, plants, and protists.

Abiotic Factors

Nonliving components of an ecosystem, such as air, salinity, soil, temperature, light, water, minerals, $pH$, and humidity.

Provisioning Ecosystem Service

A benefit provided by the ecosystem, such as soil fertility resulting from the interaction between soil and bacteria.

Ecosystem Ecology

The study of the structure and function of ecosystems, pioneered by E. P. Odum in 1953.

Environment

The physical, chemical, and biotic factors that act upon an organism and determine its form and survival.

Three Pillars of Sustainable Development

The intersecting domains of Society, Nature, and Economy.

Environmental Economics

A branch of microeconomics that focuses on finding correct prices for the optimum allocation of resources and monetizing nature.

Internalisation of external cost

The economic process of including pollution or environmental impacts in the product's price, also known as getting the prices right.

Polluter Pays Principle

The idea that the party responsible for pollution should pay for mitigation through taxes, fees, or emission quotas.

Externalities

Negative or positive effects on third parties not included in the exchange, such as environmental contamination during production where prices do not reflect environmental costs.

Ecological Economics

An interdisciplinary science that recognizes biophysical limits and views the human economy as embedded within the larger Earth ecosystem.

Kenneth Ewart Boulding

The scholar who officially proposed the concept of ecological economics in the late 1960s in the paper A Science – Ecological Economics.

Ecological Economic System

A system where ecosystems and the economic system interact and impose mutual constraints on one another.