Some issues in agrarian and ecological economics, in memory of Georgescu-Roegen

Ecological critics of economics have argued for over one hundred years that economists should study the flow of energy and materials in the economy. The services nature offers to the human economy cannot be adequately valued in the accounting system of neoclassical environmental and resource economics. Today's ecological economics does not only critizice; it also tries to provide physical indicators in order to judge whether the economy is ecologically sustainable. Beyond its decisive role in strengthening such ecological economics, Georgescu-Roegen's work currently still holds sway in two additional fields: consumption theory (as analysed by Gowdy, 1993); and agrarian economics. Are there relations between such fields of study and ecological economics? In this article, I shall first focus on the agrarian question, and then on intra-and inter-generational ecological distribution.