Economics and the Environment: A History of Competing Views and Unexpected Paths

We are happy to invite you to the inaugural session of the AUP Seminar on the History of Political Economy. Antoine Missemer (CNRS, CIRED Paris) will give a talk based on his recently published book A History of Ecological Economic Thought (Routledge, 2023), co-authored with Marco Paulo Vianna Franco (Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research). 

The history of environmental economics, i.e. the history of the integration of environmental concerns (resource depletion, pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss) into the discipline of economics, is a priori quite well known. To name just a few milestones, it usually includes the Physiocrats, Jevons's coal question, Marshall's and Pigou's externalities, Hotelling's 1931 model, Coase's theorem, Hardin's tragedy of the commons, up to Nordhaus's DICE models. But this history of the economics-environment nexus is not the only one we can tell. From the Renaissance to the mid-20th century, many others -- economists, naturalists and social theorists -- examined the relations between economic and natural processes, formulating proposals that have largely been forgotten. These ideas -- including Linnaeus's economy of nature, Goethe's natural philosophy, French and British sanitary reformism, Russian and Soviet ecology, Popper-Lynkeus's dual theory or 1920s-30s American land economics -- deserve to be rehabilitated at a time when we seek for solutions to the 21st-century ecological crisis. By looking at other disciplines in the social and natural sciences, we see how the interconnections between the history of economics and environmental concerns are much richer (and more unexpected) than we usually think.