On April 30, 2022, during a graduation ceremony, eight engineering students from AgroParisTech – four men and four women – hit the headlines by proclaiming their refusal of “destructive jobs” promoted by their school. Destined for successful careers in the agro-industry, they had taken turns at the microphone to read, in a slightly trembling voice, a carefully written text in which they explained their rejection of a training pushing to carry out “a war on the living”. When leaving the conventional courses, they invited their comrades to follow them: “You can branch off now! »
When it comes to tackling the crisis of the extinction of species and the biosphere, economics is not helpless: it knows how to envisage the market failures at the origin of the “environmental externalities”, and she learned to assign a monetary value to the services performed by nature. However, the place of environmental issues in the most prestigious academic journals is notoriously marginal. The delay of the standard theory in seizing these stakes is not without effect on the governments to which it provides its expertise. This is why many voices have been raised over the past few years to criticize economists for contributing to the crisis of life… rather than to its resolution!
Faced with this situation, Harold Levrel and Antoine Missemer call for a bifurcation, this one of a theoretical nature. The first is a teacher at AgroParisTech, the second researcher at the CNRS. Their handiwork Economy facing nature is a pedagogical introduction to a still marginal field of research, “ecological economy”. From Thorstein Veblen to William Nordhaus, many thinkers contributed to laying the conceptual and methodological foundations.
Whether ecological accounting (i.e. material rather than monetary), organic farming, biodiversity « sauvage » or the rights that can be granted to rivers, mountains or other non-humans, the authors describe their development and current issues. But their overview also highlights a difficulty that is too complex to be tackled by economic tools alone, even ecological ones: how to move from a world in which nature is seen primarily as a commodity or a resource, to a world in which the economy is contained in nature?
Historical survey
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