Abstract
Ecological crisis was announced in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, an apocalyptic rupture to the progressive narratives of industrial millennium. The announcement of a coming ‘age of ecology’ at time when burgeoning US oil demand had placed energy security on the national agenda and far-reaching environmental legislation was under negotiation opened up an existential space where conventional accounts of ‘growth’ and equilibrium were contested and renegotiated, as policy planners were confronted with an ecology movement calling for an end to economic growth and a redemptive politics capable of maintaining the ‘ecological equilibrium’ of the Earth. This chapter opens the question of the history of the rise of the concept of the ‘ecosystem’ as the central scientific object of ecology, focussing on ecology’s brief promise to supersede conventional economics as a general bioeconomics of life on Earth.
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Notes
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Walker, J. (2020). The Age of Ecology. In: More Heat than Life: The Tangled Roots of Ecology, Energy, and Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3936-7_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3936-7_8
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