<running foot: Andrews, Building a Micro Foundation for Industrial Ecology> Building a Micro Foundation for Industrial Ecology

Industrial ecologists study phenomena at several distinct levels, and linking the resulting insights could advance the field. The disciplines of ecology and economics have each attempted, with partial success, to accomplish this by building a behavioral micro foundation, and industrial ecology should do the same. These fields all study evolving systems made up of autonomous individuals who operate in a largely self-interested manner, exhibit diverse behaviors, and self-organize many higher-level structures such as communities or sectors in a bottom-up fashion. Industrial ecologists should explicitly attempt to integrate empirical and normative views about agency, and more carefully distinguish between two types of agentsfirms and individual humans. The definition of industrial ecology has remained diffuse. Like "sustainable development" it has been a big tent capable of sheltering most of our fondest hopes and worst fears. Early definitions borrowed spottily from ecology and ecological economics, and folded in various longstanding tenets of pollution prevention. Broadly accepted elements of the "science of sustainability" (Allenby 1992) have had much more to do with good environmental management practice than with the ecology metaphor. The definition has evolved and tightened somewhat since Tibbs (1992), but its links to the ecology metaphor are still tenuous, as this journal's mission statement shows. Like its counterpart fields of human ecology, cultural ecology, political ecology, and social ecology, 1 it is in danger of becoming merely the study of links between "something" (in this case industry) and the natural environment. The disparate strands of research and practice could be better linked, and one way to do so is to build a micro foundation for the field that identifies actors and their motives. By micro foundation I mean a body of theory and evidence about the individuals—the smallest identifiable autonomous agents—in the industrial ecosystem. Individuals are elements of the system's larger structures or aggregations (such as firms, sectors, economies, advocacy groups, governments, and social movements); in a sense they are its building blocks and foundation. What counts for theory is quite varied among and even within fields of science, and although a micro approach will be familiar to some readers it may seem alien or inappropriate to others. Therefore I hope to justify this approach by 3 showing that it is directly useful for the industrial ecology community, whether or not it ultimately becomes the basis for integrating our various strands of research and practice. Why bother with this …