ABSTRACT
In the 1960s, social movements against racial inequality and the Vietnam War gained traction on a national scale in the United States. The activist generation spawned by these movements soon turned its attention to feminist and environmental issues as well. And the “green” movement quickly spread throughout the industrialized world, with environmentally oriented green parties appearing in many countries, while nonprofit organizations devoted to environmental preservation proliferated. In economics, environmental economics emerged as a distinct subdiscipline, focusing for the most part on using the techniques of conventional neoclassical economics to address environmental problems. Although environmental economics sometimes extended its reach to include broader questions concerning the relationship between human beings and the biosphere, these more unorthodox concerns became the primary focus of ecological economics.
