study on The Limits to Growth published by the Club of Rome. The Meadows team modelled aggregate trends in the world economy and made the projection — not prediction — that by the mid to latter part of the 21st century, industrial production per capita, food supply per capita and world population would all reach a peak, and then rapidly decline in a vicious overshoot-and-collapse trajectory. Due to its dire pessimism, the study was scorned and dismissed by most mainstream economists at the time of its publication. However, well into the 21st century, several independent researchers have confirmed that world economic trends so far do indeed match up to the original 'standard run' projections made by the Meadows team, indicating that a global collapse may still loom large in the not too distant future. Taken together, these four works were seminal in bringing about the formation of ecological economics later on. Formation of ecological economics as an academic subdiscipline Although most of the theoretical and foundational work behind ecological economics was in place by the early 1970s, a long gestation period elapsed before this new academic subdiscipline in economics was properly named and institutionalized. Ecological economics was formally founded in 1988 as the culmination of a series of conferences and meetings through the 1980s, where key scholars interested in the ecology-economy interdependency were interacting with each other. The most important people involved in the establishment were Herman Daly and Robert Costanza from the US; AnnMari Jansson from Sweden; and Juan Martínez-Alier from Spain (Catalonia). Since 1989, the discipline has been organised in the International Society for Ecological Economics that publishes the journal of Ecological Economics. When the ecological economics subdiscipline was established, Herman Daly's 'preanalytic vision' of the economy was widely shared among the members who joined in: The human economy is an open subsystem of a finite and non-growing ecosystem (earth's natural environment), and any subsystem of a fixed nongrowing system must itself at some point also become nongrowing. Indeed, it has been argued that the subdiscipline itself was born out of frustration with the unwillingness of the established disciplines to accept this vision. However, ecological economics has since been overwhelmed by the influence and domination of neoclassical economics and its everlasting free market orthodoxy. This development has been deplored by activistic ecological economists as an 'incoherent', 'shallow' and overly 'pragmatic' slide. Herman Daly's concept of a steady-state economy