ABSTRACT
Economics sits uneasily in the social sciences. Although its central themes analyse relationships between people (albeit in the form of consumers, firms and government), concern regarding actual people often only plays a small element in the final analysis. When they do appear, a basic assumption is that they act in a rational, personal benefit-driven manner. Moreover, the route followed by mainstream economics over the last century has been one of increasing reliance on the abstracting of issues into mathematical and statistical models. Consequently, those who wish to study the environment via the medium of economics are divided on the degree to which analysis is facilitated by conventional economics. In some aspects, such as the inclusion of environmental loss estimates within cost-benefit calculations, there have been highly useful contributions. However, such valuations are inevitably imprecise and could easily underestimate the inestimable.
