Environmental Management: Principles and practice

The ‘greening’ of economics
Many of the attempts at a concise definition of economics mention ‘resources’,
‘the Earth’, ‘the environment’, e.g. ‘economics is essentially the stewardship
of resources’ (Hanson, 1977); or ‘economics offers a framework within which
to analyse the problems which we face in making choices about the
environment in which we live’ (Hodge, 1995:3); or ‘economics is concerned
with the allocation, distribution and use of environmental resources’
(Perman et al., 1996:24). It is thus puzzling why, before the last decade,
there was little contact between economics and environmental studies.

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ECONOMICS
77
The failure to weave environmental sensitivity into economics has been flagged as a
cause of many of the world’s problems. Given the difficulties involved in effectively
valuing nature, and in dealing with human use of the environment and resources,
such criticisms are perhaps unfair. Nevertheless, before the 1980s few economists
recognized the Earth was finite, and most encouraged expansion.
In 1798 Thomas Malthus published his first essay: its warnings about limits
were largely ignored until after the 1940s, when it became clear that open frontiers
(i.e. further vacant land for development) were closing, and pollution disasters
warned of the need for environmental sensitivity. One of the first to publish on
resource and conservation economics was Ciracy-Wantrup (1952). Fourteen years
later Boulding (1966) inspired many with his writings on the economics of
Spaceship Earth which acknowledged that the world was finite and vulnerable.
Further impetus to ‘greening’ was given by the publications of Meadows et al.
(1972) and Schumacher (1973). By the late 1970s a little greening of economics
was apparent (Krutilla and Fisher, 1975; Hanson, 1977; Kneese, 1977; Cooper,
1981). Green economics is essentially concerned with the consequences of the
drive to amass wealth (Ekins, 1992a; Buarque, 1993).
Work on theoretical and practical environmental economics expanded after
the mid-1980s (Lowe and Lewis, 1980). Since the 1970s considerable effort has
gone into seeking alternatives to reliance upon market controls (Redclift, 1992). A