Industrial Ecology and Input-Output Economics: A Brief History

It has been only a few hundred years since human society escaped from a constant cycle of ebb and flow of population changes. Famines and epidemics were mingled with preindustrial European and Asian history, repeatedly setting the human population of the region several decades to hundreds years back (Braudel 1979). It was industrialization, together with the green revolution, that enabled humans to manipulate the untamed nature, setting the humankind free from the famines and epidemics that kept its population at a much lower level throughout its history. The burst of human population in recent centuries, however, is not only a consequence of industrialization but in a sense also a cause of industrialization. Fulfilling the needs by the unprecedented number of people required intensification and efficiency in industrial and agricultural production, which in turn helped generate more economic surplus enabling consuming even more. The human kind seemed to have won an autonomy, of which the prosperity somehow self-catalyzes and works independently from the means that the nature provides.

Ironically, however, humans became more dependent upon the natural environment both as a source of natural resources and as a sink of wastes and pollution. Despite the remarkable technological developments, population growth and improvements in welfare demanded an unprecedented amount of natural resources withdrawal from and wastes and pollutants disposal to the nature. Global crude oil extraction, iron ore mining, and underground water withdrawal, to name a few, are at their highest to satisfy the needs of the ever wealthier and populous human-kind. Around 26 billion barrels of crude oil are extracted every year (EIA 2008), enough to fill over five Olympic-size stadiums every day (Suh 2004a). Per capita copper use until 1900 is estimated to be below 1 kg/year, which has become around 15 kg/year by 2000 (Gordon et al. 2006). The U.S. total materials use is estimated to be less 200 million metric tons at the dawn of the twentieth century, and it reached nearly 3,000 million metric tons by 1995 (Gardner and Sampat 1998).