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Ecological economists also wanted to distinguish their scientific professionalism from the neo-Malthusian alarmism of the previous decade. The Club of Rome’s 1972 best seller, The Limits to Growth, was associated in many reviews with dire projections: for example, that the world would run out of minerals, such as silver, tungsten, and mercury, within 40 years.8 In 1970, Paul Ehrlich, the neo-Malthusian author of The Population Bomb, predicted that global food shortages would cause four billion people to starve to death between 1980 and 1989 — 65 million of them in the United States.9 Further warnings poured forth in the Global 2000 Report (1980) and in annual State of the World reports by Lester Brown and the Worldwatch Institute.

Neo-Malthusians argued that the world would not be able to grow enough food to keep up with population, but this assertion was simply wrong. In fact, world food production more than doubled between 1960 and 2000, and per capita food production during that period also increased.10 In 1981, economist Amartya Sen, who later won the Nobel Prize for his research, published a book that flatly and effectively contradicted the idea that famines occur because not enough food is produced. Sen showed that oppression, injustice, and destitution — breakdowns in distribution, not shortages in production — cause famines. With such “misleading variables as food output per unit of population, the Malthusian approach profoundly misspecifies the problems facing the poor in the world,” Sen wrote, noting that as per capita food production increased, the world was lulled into a false optimism that famines would decrease. “It is often overlooked that what may be called ‘Malthusian optimism’ has actually killed millions of people.”11

Ecological economists distinguished themselves from neo-Malthusian catastrophists by switching the emphasis from resources to systems. The concern was no longer centered on running out of food, minerals, or energy. Instead, ecological economists drew attention to what they identified as ecological thresholds. The problem lay in overloading systems and causing them to collapse. Costanza and colleagues wrote, “There may be close substitutes for conventional natural resources, such as timber and coal, but not for natural ecological systems.”12

Ecological economists described ecosystems as evolutionary systems: “complex, adaptive systems… characterized by historical dependency, complex dynamics, and multiple basins of attraction.”13 These communities or systems were assumed to evolve and, as a result, achieve an “adaptive” or a “dynamic equilibrium” that could be modeled mathematically. E.P. Odum, whose Fundamentals of Ecology was for decades the leading textbook in the field, pictured the natural world as a great chain or a “levels-of-organization-hierarchy” ascending from smaller to larger, more inclusive systems (e.g., from genes, cells, organs, organisms, populations, communities, to ecosystems). In an influential paper published in Science in 1969, Odum described the natural world as “an orderly process of community development” that is “directed toward achieving as large and diverse an organic structure as is possible within the limits set by the available energy input and the prevailing physical conditions of existence.”14

In their 1967 Theory of Island Biogeography, Robert MacArthur of Princeton University and E. O. Wilson of Harvard presented a similar view of evolution as an orderly progression of natural communities toward a saturation of species. According to this theory, ecosystems exist in a state of equilibrium in which the colonization by a new species is balanced by the extinction of a resident one.15 Paul Ehrlich later updated the great chain metaphor to that of an airplane. “A dozen rivets, or a dozen species, might never be missed,” he wrote with his wife Anne Ehrlich. “On the other hand, a thirteenth rivet popped from a wing flap, or the extinction of a key species involved in the cycling of nitrogen, could lead to