In a long career as a writer, thinker, teacher, and public intellectual, Eric Zencey worked to bring Ecological Economics out of the academy and into use as an idea system for understanding the interrelated challenges - political, economic, social, environmental - facing our civilization. This Eric Zencey Prize for Ecological Economics honors that work and encourages others to join in continuing it.

The Zencey Prize will be awarded every other year to the best book or work of long-form journalism that illuminates current affairs while advancing public understanding of the principles and precepts of Ecological Economics—a school of economic thought that cautions us that the economy can’t grow forever, that there are limits to the amount of economic production our finite planet can support. The prize will be awarded through the University’s Gund Institute for Environment in collaboration with the United States Society for Ecological Economics.

The Zencey family and friends created a permanent endowment for the prize. With your help, this fund will continue to grow to ensure that work like Eric’s will continue to challenge what Eric called the “infinite planet assumptions” that underlie much of our political and economic thinking.

A little more about Ecological Economics

At its most basic, Ecological Economics is economics as if the planet were finite and we have to obey the laws of thermodynamics.  Standard economics proceeds on the assumption that we can have economic growth forever, which would be possible only if the planet were infinite or we could make something of value without using resources.

That second path would amount to a violation of the first law of thermodynamics, which tells us that “neither matter nor energy can be created nor destroyed, only transformed”--you can’t make something from nothing and you can’t make nothing from something.  Together with the second law (which tells us that we can’t recycle energy),  the first law tells us that there are limits to the amount of economic activity a finite planet can sustain.  Alone among disciplines with any claim to rigor and empirical validity, economics has completely ignored the science of thermodynamics. 

Ecological Economics sees that ignorance as the major source of our civilization’s ecological crisis and seeks to rectify it.