In the 1990s, the concept of the ecosystem became central to the conceptual framework of a new, sustainability-driven field of inquiry: industrial ecology. The field’s ambition was to translate core concepts from the ecological sciences—such as metabolism, symbiosis, and, above all, the ecosystem—into the realm of industry. The underlying question was whether industrial systems could be restructured to imitate natural ones in order to reduce material and energy throughput and improve recycling rates. Industrial ecology subsequently developed into a successful endeavour, with its own journals, degree programs, and conferences, and it helped inform the increasingly popular policy agenda of the circular economy.
Yet the adoption of this new set of metaphors was not without controversy. Can the language of one field really be translated into another? Do industrial ecosystems genuinely have something in common with biological ecosystems, or are they merely loose metaphors? What, in fact, is a metaphor, and what role does it play in the circulation of ideas, as opposed to models or analogies?
These questions were the subject of dozens of academic papers published in the 1990s and early 2000s in leading journals in the field of industrial ecology. Some authors argued that the metaphor was flawed from the outset; others claimed that it was limited but nonetheless inspiring; still others maintained that it was flawed only because industrial ecologists failed to fully embrace the conclusions of the ecological sciences. Engineers and economists confronted biologists directly, resulting in sharply diverging views on how, or whether, the language of ecology could be translated into the framework of industrial ecology.
This talk revisits this recent yet largely overlooked debate that proved crucial to the development of sustainability science, and examines its intellectual and conceptual consequences.