ABSTRACT
Economics and the natural sciences tend to operate within quite different conceptions of the relationship between humans and the natural environment. The history of this divergence between intellectual traditions has been traced by Norgaard (1984, 1994), who notes that the classical economic models of Malthus and Ricardo, for which resource scarcity and its consequences are crucial, were successfully adapted by natural scientists such as Darwin and Wallace but ultimately abandoned by economists. The results of this parting of the ways were subsequently particularly well-illustrated by the differing responses to the publication of The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972). On the whole, natural scientists found this work convincing or, at least, methodologically well-founded. Among economists, however, only Daly (1973) was fully accepting of it (Norgaard 1984).
