Economics and environment: An impossible reconciliation?

Abstract

It should be noted that, until now, the relationship between economics and the environment has never figured 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) and the so-called dieselgate scandals, involving companies in the automobile sector not complying with regulatory environmental norms (which also began in 2015), among many other events, 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 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 a serious concern for the future of mankind. The aim of this paper is to trace the historical relationship between the environment and economics. In all reality, 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).