Green Economics: setting the scene. Aims, context, and philosophical underpinning of the distinctive new solutions offered by Green Economics

Green Economics positions economics within a very long term, earth- wide, holistic context of reality as a part of nature and incorporates and celebrates "difference," diversity , equity and inclusiveness within its concepts of society and community. All the economic processes and systems are designed to work as part of and within the limits of nature rather than to conquer or steward it. Its definition is that economics simply manages the provision for needs, returning to the "Oikonomia " of Xenophon. More specifically, its aims are to provide for the needs of mutual very long term survivability and sustainability for the planet, nature and all of its people as beneficiaries and such its context and scope are innovations. Its philosophy is to manage economics for nature as usual, rather than to manage the environment for business as usual. The paper introduces the new Green Economics discipline and reviews its shape and philosophical underpinning. By combining economics with knowledge from the natural sciences, we argue that Green Economics can incorporate a much wider, more practical, multidisciplinary range of knowledge than other schools of economics. It can therefore also provide a significant impetus to the complete reform and modernisation of standard economic conventions and ideas. In this way it brings to economics a very long-term perspective, the full range of human history and pre-history as well as earth history, while strictly adhering to objectivity, sound qualitative and quantitative analysis and a consideration of the widest possible range of values, including survivability, sustainability, a sense of community, a comprehensive appreciation of social and environmental justice between people, and with non human species, the planet and the biosphere. The paper suggests how Green Economics can offer unique insights into four of the key areas ("eco", intellectual, political and moral) of today's significant and mounting problems and highlights how its novel insights provide new solutions. The development of this new branch of Economics is justified in this text by reviewing the main contradictions, deficiencies, assumptions, conventions, and inherent normative concepts to be found in dominant neo-classical economic thinking which have accumulated over the past two centuries. The learning from alternative feminist, environmental and related economic disciplines is seminial and these ideas are cited, contrasted and assessed for their contribution to the ideas of this newly emerging academic discipline. The paper outlines the basic concepts of Green Economics and its philosophical principles. It traces influences its development and roots from the enlightenment, post modernism, limits to growth and the search for sustainability, and eco-feminism. The paper then introduces some of the main features of its distinct methodology and the new analytical elements of Green Economics.