This is important, because ecology has many patterns of thinking.
You have population biology,
which is about the interactive interaction of predators and prey.
You have energetics, which is about energy flows through ecosystems.
You have food webs.
There's evolutionary ecology, which is really trying to combine
Evolutionary principles with ecological systems.
There's landscape ecology looking at ecosystems on a larger scale,
there's biogeochemical cycles that are usually applied at even larger scales.
So ecologists don't have a particular way of looking at ecosystems and
as they look at different problems and look at problems in different scales,
they kind of switch patterns of thinking.
But the patterns overlap and it's a much richer field.
And though ecologist would be very pleased if all their ways of thinking somehow
cohered, and there is one unified ecology, the fact is, we have many ecologies.
We also have many economics.
We have the neoclassical market model.
We have institutionalists who stress the underlying laws and regulations,
the levelists of the playing field.
There's Marxist economists who stress power in economic systems.
There's Austrians who look at the world with capital in particular.
There's multiple ways that economists work, but
economists themselves tend to be much more monistic.
They tend to say,
there's got to be one right way of understanding the economic system.
And so we have these conflicts between the different patterns of economic thinking.
And the economists don't speak to each other,
they don't go out in the field like ecologists and compare notes.
And ecological economics is trying to be this
rich conversation between the multiple patterns of understanding.
>> And also, they're trying to return people to a field ecology if you will.
As Thomas Bier used to say, there's no human economy without Earth's economy.
>> Exactly, no, this was basic from the beginning, that we definitely needed to
tie economics back into the environmental system and into the ecological system.
You cannot model the economy apart from nature.
>> Right, and that we're a subsystem, our economy, of nature's economy.