Cities of Fire and Smoke: Enlightenment Environmentalism
Oliver Cussen, 2 March 2023
Recognition of nature’s finitude served as a ‘conceptual a priori to economic thought’, if not undermining optimism then at least providing a note of caution in an age otherwise obsessed with perfectibility and progress. If even the most optimistic climate theorists were haunted by the prospect of degradation and, in extreme cases, apocalypse, it was because they lived in Adam Smith’s world, where the pursuit of prosperity was partly motivated by a ‘permanent anxiety’ about the limits of nature.
