Power and Entropy: The Limits of Ecological Economics

This chapter considers coterminous works of the ecologist H.T. Odum and the economist Georgescu-Roegen, both published in 1971. Deeply critical of standard utopias of infinite growth, both were to inspire the field of ‘ecological economics’, although neither writer engaged the literature of the opposite ‘sister science’ of his home discipline. Unlike purist professional ecologists who disdained the ‘cult’ of political ecology, Odum emerged as a scientific voice within the nascent environmental movement with his idiosyncratic and prophetic attempt to expound an energy-based ecosystems analysis of the planetary ‘system of man and nature’. Economic value is accounted directly to energy flows, uniting ecology with physics in one direction and subsuming the social sciences in the other. Claiming ecology as a master science for the total quality management of social interaction with the Earth, Odum’s systems ecology became synonymous with the critique of the fossil-fuelled growth paradigm. For his part, Georgescu-Roegen mounted a formidable internalist critique of economists’ ignorance of the entropy law, proposing a rigorous solar-thermal bioeconomics which nevertheless resisted all attempts to scientise value theory. Crucially, however, neither were at that point as well informed on the science of global heating as the executives of the American Petroleum Institute.