ABSTRACT
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1906-94) was one of the first economists to investigate rigorously the interplay between economic activity and natural environment in the light of thermodynamics. His achievements made him a perennial candidate for the Nobel prize in economics and the father of a new and rapidly growing school of economic thought, ecological economics. According to Georgescu-Roegen, nature consists only of what can be perceived; beyond, there are only hypothesized abstractions. His ideas about the relation between nature and human perception of nature led to a particular epistemology concerned mainly with valid analytical representations of relations among facts. For Georgescu-Roegen, any worthwhile economic theory must be a logically ordered description of how reality functions.
