Roads Not Taken

Abstract

This article revisits the often-overlooked European precursors to industrial ecology, focusing on two distinct but conceptually aligned traditions that emerged in Belgium and Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. It challenges the prevailing US-centered narrative that locates the field's origins in a 1989 Scientific American article by Frosch and Gallopoulos, arguing instead that a richer and more philosophically grounded intellectual history can be found in earlier European efforts. The Belgian tradition, led by ecologists Paul Duvigneaud and Gilles Billen, sought to apply the concept of the ecosystem to cities, regions, and national economies. Their work anticipated modern material flow analysis and treated urban and industrial systems as metabolic entities, extending scientific ecology into the social and industrial domains. Parallel to this, the German Starnberg/Darmstadt group developed the concept of Soziale Naturwissenschaft (Social Natural Science), rooted in Gernot Böhme's theory of “finalization” of science. This approach reframed ecology as a normative and philosophical endeavor that must incorporate socially constructed environments and industrial infrastructures into its scope. While these European traditions ultimately failed to coalesce into a lasting research program or institutional framework, their intellectual legacies continue to resonate in contemporary sustainability discourses. This paper argues that revisiting these “roads not taken” could provide industrial ecology with a more robust epistemological foundation and reorient the field toward a deeper environmental ethic. By integrating the Belgian methodological rigor with the German philosophical critique of technocratic modernity, a distinctively European variant of industrial ecology could emerge—one that prioritizes the reproduction of nature over the pursuit of circularity for its own sake. In light of ongoing ecological, political, and economic crises, the article calls for renewed attention to forgotten scientific ideas as potential guides for shaping more sustainable futures.