v
Foreword
Industrial ecology has come of age: it has its own journal, its own society and, in
this volume, a fi rst full retrospective – ‘taking stock’ of its fi rst quarter of a century
as a scientifi c fi eld. It is a remarkable achievement.
To speak of society as having an industrial ecology would barely have been
understood, as little as three decades ago. Early in the 1990s, I submitted an article
for a newspaper with the phrase industrial ecology in it, only to have the editor send
it back to me, corrected to industrial ‘economy’. At the time, we all knew exactly
what the industrial economy was (or thought we did), but clearly industrial ‘ecology’ could only be a typo. When I explained that it was not, the editor deemed it
best to remove the term, because ‘no one would understand it’. Two decades later
industrial ecology is a clearer concept than industrial economy. The former even has
its own Wikipedia entry; the latter, strangely, does not.
Language is a curious commodity. Its malleability appears sometimes to be
almost infi nite. Meanings change and mutate over time, as intellectual territory is
created and destroyed. We can respond to this linguistic contortionism in several
distinct ways: at least two of them are wrong.
One of the wrong ways is to suppose that the meanings embedded in terms are
not just fi xed but rightly so. We can spend a lot of time and energy defending the
territory that language creates: defi le my meanings at your peril; they are part of my
identity and protect my legitimacy in the world. This is a subtly disguised variant on
G. E. Moore’s (1903) naturalistic fallacy: what is, is what ought to be; and woe
betide offenders. The best way to avoid such an error is not to be too attached to the
precision of language.
Alternatively we can celebrate the loss of meaning in late, postmodern, advanced
consumer capitalism, where nothing is any longer sacred, and defi nition counts for
naught. Accepting this fl uidity of meaning, it is all too easy to allow ourselves to
fl oat above rigour and defi ne away contestation. In fact, a cynical variation on this
theme is to deliberately employ such tactics to create your own territory. Academics
throughout the ages have fallen foul of this. Let us put two unfamiliar words together
and build a career from it. Come on; it is easy: epigenetic precognition, categorical
Foreword
Industrial ecology has come of age: it has its own journal, its own society and, in
this volume, a fi rst full retrospective – ‘taking stock’ of its fi rst quarter of a century
as a scientifi c fi eld. It is a remarkable achievement.
To speak of society as having an industrial ecology would barely have been
understood, as little as three decades ago. Early in the 1990s, I submitted an article
for a newspaper with the phrase industrial ecology in it, only to have the editor send
it back to me, corrected to industrial ‘economy’. At the time, we all knew exactly
what the industrial economy was (or thought we did), but clearly industrial ‘ecology’ could only be a typo. When I explained that it was not, the editor deemed it
best to remove the term, because ‘no one would understand it’. Two decades later
industrial ecology is a clearer concept than industrial economy. The former even has
its own Wikipedia entry; the latter, strangely, does not.
Language is a curious commodity. Its malleability appears sometimes to be
almost infi nite. Meanings change and mutate over time, as intellectual territory is
created and destroyed. We can respond to this linguistic contortionism in several
distinct ways: at least two of them are wrong.
One of the wrong ways is to suppose that the meanings embedded in terms are
not just fi xed but rightly so. We can spend a lot of time and energy defending the
territory that language creates: defi le my meanings at your peril; they are part of my
identity and protect my legitimacy in the world. This is a subtly disguised variant on
G. E. Moore’s (1903) naturalistic fallacy: what is, is what ought to be; and woe
betide offenders. The best way to avoid such an error is not to be too attached to the
precision of language.
Alternatively we can celebrate the loss of meaning in late, postmodern, advanced
consumer capitalism, where nothing is any longer sacred, and defi nition counts for
naught. Accepting this fl uidity of meaning, it is all too easy to allow ourselves to
fl oat above rigour and defi ne away contestation. In fact, a cynical variation on this
theme is to deliberately employ such tactics to create your own territory. Academics
throughout the ages have fallen foul of this. Let us put two unfamiliar words together
and build a career from it. Come on; it is easy: epigenetic precognition, categorical