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Ecological economists drew from thermodynamic theory to supplement the ecological view that nature represents a constrained and constraining adaptive evolutionary system. In 1971, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, a Romanian economist, published The Entropy Law and the Economic Process which argued, “The Law of Entropy is the taproot of economic scarcity.”17 Herman Daly, an early proponent of ecological economics and the leading theoretician of what he called steady-state economics, built on the idea that a growing economy must eventually wear out the energy potential (i.e., the organization and integration) of the natural systems in which it is embedded. Optimism based on the “philosopher’s stone of technology,” he wrote, requires “suspensions of the laws of thermodynamics.”18 In 1992, two prominent ecological economists argued that standard models of economic growth are problematic because “they ignore the fact that the human economy is an integral part of a materially closed evolutionary system.”19

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Ecological economics also drew on theoretical methods and ideas that emerged at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee after World War II. Starting in the 1950s, the Atomic Energy Commission employed scores of ecologists — about 80 by 1970 — in dozens of projects that eventually grew into a Big Science approach to computer-based modeling of what were then known as biomes. From 1968 to 1974, various agencies funded the International Biological Program (IBP); the federal government provided nearly $60 million.20 The IBP produced little of intellectual interest but created a large class of project managers, many of whom remain active today at governmental agencies funding big think ecosystem research.

Surrounded by physicists at Oak Ridge, ecologists adopted computer modeling and other conceptual methods that distinguish mathematical from less theoretical, and thus “softer,” sciences. The most influential ecologist of the period, G. E. Hutchinson, insisted that theory was essential to science, declaring, “If we had no theory, there would be nothing to modify, and we should get nowhere.”21

Hutchinson, along with his colleagues, posited what he called “formal analogies” to explain ecosystem structure and function in terms of equations drawn from many sciences, including statistical mechanics, logistic population growth curves, spectral analysis, circuitry, stoichiometry, thermodynamics, cybernetics, and chaos theory. This was make-work for mathematicians. Anyone with some mathematics and a metaphor — typically borrowed from some other science — could model the ecosystem.22

Ecologists of the period assumed “that ecosystems function in accordance to some overarching rules that control structure and/or function,”23 without checking that assumption against evidence.24 Princeton ecologist Simon Levin wrote, “One must recognize the powerful adaptive and self-organizing forces that shape ecosystems.”25 These forces were modeled in silico (on computers) rather than observed al fresco (in the great outdoors). As ecology became a formal science, it mistook models for empirical evidence. “In studying the logical consequences of assumptions, the theoretician is discovering, not inventing,” Levin wrote. “To the theoretician, models are a part of the real world.”26

Theory-based mathematical speculation about ecosystem structure and function appealed to the academic and scientific community of the time. The more abstract and mathematical the theory, the more respect it commanded and the higher, albeit narrower, the threshold it set for professional success. Mathematicians enjoyed prominent academic careers without having to engage in empirical research or gain tenure in a department of mathematics.27 In 1974, the late Leigh Van Valen, a formidable University of Chicago evolutionary biologist, concluded that mathematical ecologists had formed a “clique” and a “new orthodoxy” that considered gathering facts a “waste of time.”28

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Liberated from the need to test their theories empirically, ecosystem ecologists