ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the adjustments to the world picture which discredited the finitude of the Earth and legitimized the idea of infinite economic growth during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It focuses on two disciplines, geology in the nineteenth century and economics in the twentieth, which played a crucial role in the redefinition of nature as well as of ideas regarding its influence on human societies, its capacity to reproduce itself, and the wealth it offered to industry. Geology, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, demonstrated the immensity of the age of the Earth and thus justified the shift from an organic to a mineral economy. The growth paradigm reflected the globalization of a switch from an organic economy to a fossil one, which also represented a loss of matter and energy efficiency on the part of the world economy.
