© 1994 by The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology
The Process of Loss: Exploring the Interactions Between Economic and Ecological Systems1
Energy and Resources Program, Room 100 Building T-4 University of California at Berkeley 94720
SYNOPSIS. Though only a few naturalists have read much economic theory, current understandings of how biological diversity is being lost are largely framed by the models developed by economists over the past two centuries. There is more than a touch of irony here. While conservation biologists are challenging the course of economic development, their perception of the process of biodiversity loss is driven by historic patterns of economic reasoning that have become a part of popular consciousness. To be sure, the early economic models were designed to address the development of agriculture and the use of land. But agriculture is the most dependent on biodiversity. At the same time, the geographic expansion of agricultural activities and the choice of agricultural technologies have been the key driving force of biodiversity loss. Laterm economic models addressed the limits of markets to provide guiding signals for human interaction with the complexities of ecosystems. Even the way we frame how we should respond to the greatest long-term threat to biodiversity, the likelihood of climate change, is rooted in the economics of more than half a century ago.
This article elaborates these economic framings of the interaction of economic systems with the environment and discusses their policy implications. One of the major problems is that even existing economic understandings of the processes of biodiversity loss are only accepted within a part of the economics profession because these understandings conflict with political ideologies held by most American economists. Thus processes of biodiversity loss are maintained, not for a lack of knowledge, but for a desire among people to maintain simple views of biological systems. Even the patterns of reasoning held by economists who do ponder biological systems, however, are inadequate. The paper concludes with suggestions of additional ways of modeling the interactions between human activity and biological systems which may provide further insight into how we might better maintain biological diversity.