Sustainable ecological economies

A brief accounting is presented of the evolution of natural ecosystems and human cultures including industrialization and its ecologically-significant interactions with natural abiotic and biotic processes of the earth. These accounts show, among other things, that excess resource harvest rates and material releases into the natural environment have been ecological risks o f growing scope and scale throughout the history of political economies. Th e growing ecological risks of industrialization are attributed to dispariti es between the rates and directions of evolution in the ecological features of process and structure of corporate and political economies relative to the rates and directions of evolution in their cultural institutions of con trol. Many social and political organizations are now calling for adaptatio ns toward sustainable industrialization by promoting evolution in the cultu ral institutions of control through research, education, ethics, politics a nd government. What is required are on-line institutional processes for eff ectively translating emerging ecological risk assessments into economic inc entives for feasible adaptations throughout the systems. Institutionalizati on of such on-line adaptive processes requires broad moral-ethical enlighte nment and social-political commitment to make the emerging scientific, tech nological and economic dimensions productive (Faber et al., 1996). This pap er presents on-line strategies of ecological risk assessment and control wh ich are believed to be superior to alternatives that require a prior consen sus on economic valuations of natural resource stocks, natural processes an d environmental damages; and incentives have advantages over prescriptive r egulations. When viewed in their greater economic context, the proposed str ategies are formulated as coordinated institutions of on-line ecological an d fiscal control processes on what is here defined as the ecological econom ies of corporate and political economies. The objective of the proposed con trol strategies is to pursue trajectories of joint ecological and cultural evolution toward systems that are ecologically and culturally both satisfyi ng and sustainable. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.