About the Namesake and Fund
The Eric Zencey Prize in Ecological Economics was created by his family and friends to memorialize a pioneering scholar and establish his legacy for generations to come. We are pleased to announce that the initial goal of raising $100,000 for the Zencey Prize endowment has been met!
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. 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.
Eric and his family are enormously grateful for the level of support people have shown for this project. Since the prize is set up to be awarded from the income from a permanent endowment, we are still actively seeking additional contributions to the endowment. The larger the endowment, the larger the prize can be, and the larger the prize, the more influential it will be in calling attention to the need for finite planet thinking.
So if you haven’t given yet, don’t be dissuaded by the fact that we’ve met the target. Your additional support will increase the likelihood that the Zencey Prize will meet its ultimate goal: to get common sense, finite-planet, limits-to-growth ideas into the public conversation.
Additional information
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.
Eric Zencey Prize in Ecological Economics
A biennial prize for the best book or long-form journalism advancing public understanding of Ecological Economics, honoring pioneering scholar Eric Zencey.