Conclusion
In recent decades, scientists have been warning people that they need to change their economic activities and lifestyles in order to avoid an impending ecological catastrophe in the foreseeable future.
During that time, many environmental movements, nongovernmental organizations, and national and international institutions were established with the intention of monitoring and protecting the environment. However, such efforts to protect and conserve the environment and natural resources are nothing new. In reality, theorists of the GHSE and their American students were already attempting to raise awareness about the importance of protecting the environment in the early 20th century, including from pollution, deforestation, the erosion of soil quality, the overexploitation of natural resources, and climate change. They were opposed to the notion of nature being controlled and dominated by man; instead, they called for harmony and balance so that the natural environment is disturbed as little as possible.Members of the New School advocated for the proper care and cautious use of natural resources on the basis that humanity could not indefinitely continue to excessively exploit them in order to satisfy the selfish wants and desires of the ideal man of classical economics. In fact, the New School believed that rivers, oceans, seas, mineral reserves, forests, and many other natural resources constituted essential parts of public wealth. As such, they should be placed under the control of the state rather than private investors. That is to say, the New School generally supported positive state action to protect the natural environment. They also believed that providing the population with an ethical education could contribute to protecting the natural environment and avoiding environmental catastrophes.
More than a century ago, members of the New School and the GHSE cultivated the core of environmental economics. They published books and articles that should have been highly valued and widely promoted by economists and anybody else that cared about the conservation of the natural environment.
At that time, Ely predicted that students of political economy ‘will see that this branch of their science, the economy of natural resources, so important and yet so much neglected, requires on their part a fuller and more careful consideration’ (Ely 1917, 23). Unfortunately, the noble efforts of the New School and the GHSE aimed at protecting the environment have been largely unsuccessful, because measures that effectively do so are often directly opposed to the methodological individualism and laissez-faire of classical, neoclassical, and neoliberal economics. That means the fundamental features of the variants of classical economics have been major obstacles to efforts aimed at protecting and conserving the natural environment. Sadly, the immense destruction unleashed upon the natural environment since the rise of neoliberalism is a testament to the fact that the New School was ultimately correct in its prophecy that the dominance of the laissez-faire doctrine and methodological individualism would always hinder conservation efforts.Note
1 Dictionary of Canadian Biography. ‘Bernhard Eduard Fernow.’ http://www. biographi.ca/en/bio/fernow_bernhard_eduard_15E.html.