Ethics and Economics: from the conservation problem to the sustainability debate

This paper discusses briefly how economic thinking on the conservation problem has developed during the twentieth century, culminating finally in the sustainability debate. Specifically, its aim is to emphasize the relevance of Lewis Gray’s contribution. In “The economic possibilities of conservation” (1913), he reinterpreted from an economic point of view the idea of conservation which the American Conservation Movement had popularized, linking intergenerational equity with non-renewable resource extraction rate. In this way, Gray’s article anticipated two significant problems currently debated in environmental economics: the ethical justification for discounting and the problem of intergenerational equity as the basis of the sustainability debate.