SYSTEMIC CRISES IN HIERARCHICAL ECOLOGICAL ECONOMIES

Human beings are both the slaves and the masters of the ecosystems in which they live. This paper examines the interrelationship between economic decision-making hierarchies and ecological hierarchies. Conditions under which discontinuous changes can occur are presented both for top-down and bottom-up causes. Appropriate institutional arrangements for minimizing ecological disruption are analyzed and depend on the nature of the relationship between the economic and ecological hierarchies. In some cases this will involve self-managed economic units operating at the appropriate level of the ecological hierarchy.