Green transition: new ingredients for old recipes

Abstract

The theme of the so-called green transition, if approached with a vision that goes beyond the simple adoption of green technologies, involves an epistemological dimension which has its roots in the interconnections between economy (man) and ecology (nature). This leads to the difficulty of offering an exhaustive reading of the topic, because of the diversity of approaches to refer win satisfying the growing need to find solutions to long-term human development.

In such a framework, this contribution proposes an interpretation of the relationships between economy and environment that takes into account the transdisciplinary nature of the concept of sustainability.

This paper opens with a brief review of the evolution of economic doctrine up to neoclassical thought, whose limits in describing the relationships between the economy and the environmental and social dimensions are highlighted. These considerations represent the basis for discussing the anthropocentric moral roots underlying orthodox economics and proposing a different paradigm which, moving from an ecocentric vision, is able to explicitly consider the environmental implications of the economic process and provide an unambiguous definition of sustainability.