The course is meant to provide a longue durée and contextual history of how economists have
approached, and sometime modelled “nature” and “the environment” in their work. It
emphasizes big shifts in which aspects of nature became of interests in given periods of time
for societies at large, various species of scientists and economists in particular, which tool they
developed to solve issues raised by nature (since it was mostly modeled as a constraint or issue),
and how these tools were applied, discussed and challenged.
It covers the late XIXth century to XXIth century, aka the period in which economists thought
of themselves as a distinct community of scientist and profession. It nevertheless includes
economists’, other scientists’ and other idea brokers’ understanding of the long-term history of
local and global environments. It is centered on economists, the models and tools they
produced, but brings in both mainstream and heterodox perspectives, pushbacks from other
sciences, natural, life and social, and from civil societies through the debates it covers.
It seeks to handle the current political and emotional load surrounding environmental debates,
the fragmentation of analyses, diagnoses and proposed solutions, as well as the complex social,
historical, legal, cultural and institutional web in which economics is embedded – and which
students without a humanities background may not be fully aware of - all at once, through
opening and closing each lecture with a discussion of what I believe is a crucial fiction work
recently published: The Ministry for the Future, an anticipation book published in the Fall of
2020 by acclaimed science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, which narrates a fictitious,
but realistic (or at least based on actual past and future debates and proposals) account of how
the world managed to solve the climate crisis characteristic of its Anthropocene age.
- Profesor: Cherrier Béatrice