ABSTRACT

Until the early 1960s, the economics discipline had largely ignored nature. This is true for mainstream neoclassical economics as well as for Post Keynesian, Marxist, institutionalist, and other heterodox schools of economic thought. Centuries ago, the physiocrats and classical political economists were concerned with the limitations of resources, in particular the pressure from a growing population on limited areas of arable land. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such concerns were more or less absent until texts such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) gave the first signal that humans were severely damaging the environment. Ten years later came The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972), initiating a discussion of how the limits to growth can be measured and how ‘hard’ these environmental limits are.