Economics and environment: An impossible reconciliation?

Abstract

It should be noted that the relationship between economics and the environment has never previously featured as one of mankind’s primary or principal concerns. It presently does. The recent worldwide student mobilization for climate action, the Climate Change Congress in Paris (December 2015) or the dieselgate related to the scandals involving companies in the automobile sector not complying with regulatory environmental norms (which started also in 2015), among many other issues, provide evidence that this relationship is presently of central concern to questions regarding the future of mankind.

Nevertheless, we should remind ourselves of the fact that, despite being a recurrent theme in the media, the environment continued to be a treated by economists as a subsidiary issue until, in relatively recent times, the effects of the global environmental crisis grew to proportions that meant it became of serious concern to the future of mankind.

The aim of this paper is to trace the historical relationship between the environment and economics. In fact, the focus is more modest: we aim to illustrate the principal traces of the presence of the environment in economic science in an attempt to exhibit a path which might lead to the reconciliation of the one (the environment) with the other (economics).