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Oeconomy of Nature: The Balance of Nature and the Struggle for Existence

In: More Heat than Life: The Tangled Roots of Ecology, Energy, and Economics

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  • Jeremy Walker

    (Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney)

Abstract

Prior to the discovery of deep geological time, natural history was inseparable from human history, bound up in the eschatological narratives of Creation and Apocalypse and theological accounts of natural order. The tangled roots of ecology in the antiquity of the ‘natural law tradition’ and its presumption of a ‘balance of nature’ pose the problem of the symmetry and incommensurability of the contemporary ‘twin sciences’ of ecology and economics. Coining the term ‘Öekologie’ in 1866, Haeckel defined it as ‘the study of all the complex relationships referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the struggle for existence’. In this chapter we consider the complex exchanges between political economy and the life sciences from the eighteenth-century ‘oeconomy of nature’ of Linnaeus and Hutton through to the nineteenth century thought of Malthus, Darwin, Wallace and Marx.

Suggested Citation

  • Jeremy Walker, 2020. "Oeconomy of Nature: The Balance of Nature and the Struggle for Existence," Springer Books, in: More Heat than Life: The Tangled Roots of Ecology, Energy, and Economics, edition 1, chapter 0, pages 193-215, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-981-15-3936-7_9
    DOI: 10.1007/978-981-15-3936-7_9
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