Ecological Economics

3 units

This course is designed to give students an appropriate graduate-level understanding of the fundamental assumptions, the conceptual novelties, and the distinctive tools of analysis that comprise the emerging discipline of ecological economics, and to explore the role this new paradigm is playing in the movement toward a sustainable society. Standard economics--the neoclassical model--sees the economy as the whole that contains all other values; nature has value because some people will pay to experience it or to enjoy its services. Ecological Economics reverses that relationship by acknowledging the environment, not the economy, as the containing whole. This it does through its grounding in the laws of energy--the laws that model the behavior of both natural and built systems. (While matter can be recycled, energy can't. No machine can take its own exhaust outputs as fresh inputs; no animal can survive by eating its own excrement.) Fulfills Urban Issues elective requirement. Fulfills MUD Track elective requirement.