Just as new branches of industry spring up to absorb the wastes of other industries, so new fields of study develop out of established disciplines. In this first part of the book the basic themes of industrial ecology are laid out, together with reviews of these issues from the perspectives of economic history, anthropology, sociology, and development studies. Each of these disciplines has traditionally approached the human dimensions of global change quite differently—asking different questions and using different analytical approaches. It is too much to suppose that we can, in one book, do full justice to each of these streams of research, or resolve the mutual incomprehension and suspicion that exist among them. It is sufficient to show, as these five chapters show, that each separate stream perceives a need to extend its own horizons.

But industrial ecology must be more than an agglomeration of established disciplines. There is an urgent need for a multidisciplinary approach to global change which is itself able to recast the questions to be answered. Industrial ecology has one advantage over other attempts to bridge the disciplines: it has a persuasive metaphor at its heart. The argument that much can be gained by viewing industrial systems, like biological ecosystems, as consumers, digesters, and excreters of energy and materials was first articulated by Frosch and Gallopoulos (1989). In “Industrial Ecology: Definition and Implementation,” Graedel develops the biological metaphor in opening a discussion of the definition of industrial ecology.