Let me use mathematics as the art form to make payments on my mortgage once. The work of ecological economics it to channel technological overshoot away from critically impacting the viability of those biotic functions necessary to provide a quality existence for humans minimally, for all species optimally. To do this we need a lever, one with sufficient strength to divert technologically dominated economics away from biotically sensitive areas. This is a necessity until a superior economic paradigm happens along that can value life sufficiently to make an axiom superfluous. Soil here infers biotic sustainability.
Life is present in lesser quantity than non-living matter.
The technological innovations, especially of the industrial age, were of sufficient value to legitimize this abiotic economy. In the 1500s through the 1800s life, or wilderness as it was considered, was still dominant. Life was abundant, something to be dominated, we were inferior, our technologies, until the industrial age, were also inferior. Life, at least to the ruling worldview, was superfluous. Ecology, the science, has taught us that our artificial valuation of an abiotic existence is severely compromising the biosphere's capacity for providing us with ecosystem services.