ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 pays homage to a number of pioneering economists who first identified that the economy was running into planetary boundaries and causing environmental crisis. Kenneth Boulding identified the need for economics to recognize planetary limits with his idea of switching the mindset of the cowboy for that of the spaceman. The Club of Rome took this idea forward by providing data to support it, sometimes controversially. Paul Ehrlich identified the environmental problems caused by relentless population growth and argued that this, as well as more extravagant lifestyles, would cause environmental catastrophe. E. F. Schumacher took issue with the ever-increasing scale of production systems and argued for localized production ‘human scale technology’. Howard Odum explored the links between flows of money and goods in society and the flows of energy in ecosystems. Murray Bookchin drew attention to the negative environmental impacts of industrialized societies, and proposed small-scale anarchist communes as a socially and environmentally preferable system of social organization. Hazel Henderson argued that the market system and the ‘flat-earth economics’ of the neoclassical economists ignored the vital contribution of the environment and women’s unpaid labour.
