Antoine Missemer, “A New History of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics”, Torino, April 11
Antoine Missemer
CNRS, CIRED Paris
A New History of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics
Spring seminars of the Doctoral Program in Global History of Empires, Università di Torino
(Campus Luigi Einaudi, room 3D440) and online on Thursday, April 11, at 4 pm.
Abstract: The conventional history of environmental economics, dealing with resource depletion, pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, is quite well known. From the Classics (Ricardo, Malthus) to Jevons’s coal question, Marshall’s and Pigou’s externalities, Hardin’s tradgedy of the commons and Nordhaus’s climate model, this (mainly Anglo-Saxon) history is, however, not the only one to tell. From the Renaissance to the mid-20th century, many others — economists, naturalists and social theorists — examined the relations between economic and natural dynamics, by formulating proposals that have largely been forgotten. Those ideas, including Linnaeus’s economy of nature, Goethe’s natural philosophy, French and British sanitary reformism, Russian and Soviet ecology, Austrian humanism and American land economics, deserve to be rehabilitated at a time when everyone is seeking for solutions to the 21st-century global ecological crisis. By looking at other disciplines in the social and natural sciences, and at other linguistic and cultural contexts than the English-speaking world, we realise that the history of economics relating to environmental concerns is much richer than we usually think.
Based on the recently published book A History of Ecological Economic Thought (London & New York: Routledge, 2022 [2023] — https://www.routledge.com/