A History of Ecological Economic Thought - Poster

International audience

إنجليزي. This poster creatively showcases the results of a 3-year research into the history of ecological economics in the very long run, which has borne fruit with the publication of a monograph, 'A History of Ecological Economic Thought', in 2023 (Routledge). Prior to this publication, the literature had well examined the modern roots of ecological economics (e.g. Røpke 2004; Spash 2021) but except Joan Martinez Alier’s 1987 seminal book focusing on the history of energetics, very few contributions had explored the centuries-old roots of the field, i.e. the history of the substantial links between economic and natural-science knowledge, at times when sustainability, sometimes defined differently than today, was already under discussion. Alongside the well-known but hardly iconoclastic contributions of the Physiocrats, of the Classics and of early thinkers of resource scarcity and externalities (e.g. Jevons, Pigou, Hotelling), many authors – economists, naturalists and social theorists – actually did examine the relations between economic and natural dynamics in a inspiring way, 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, Viennese late enlightenment, and American land economics, deserved to be rehabilitated to establish new landmarks in the history of ecological economics, and to find new sources of inspiration for 21st-century research agendas. The poster is composed of three parts: the upper part shows what “ecological economic thought” is; the central part provides a graphic and creative presentation of the various episodes covered by the book with portraits of (male and female) economists and ecologists who contributed to this history; the lower part highlights cross-cutting lessons for today’s research in ecological economics, post-growth, and degrowth studies, and future lines of research. The poster, and the book (https://www.routledge.com/9781032310749), are particularly suited for use in classrooms.