Early environmental economics

Agnar Sandmo has posted "The Early History of Environmental Economics", an article surveying the thought of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economists on environmental issues, long before Arthur Pigou's famous work on taxing externalities and the late twentieth century blossoming of the field. Thomas Malthus is here, but so are many others whose writing on environmental issues is less well known, including the Marquis de Condorcet, John Stuart Mill, and Alfred Marshall, along with Edwin Chadwick, whom I had not thought of as an economist.

Some examples. Mill, the classical liberal, is quoted as writing the following regarding the proper role of government:

John Stuart Mill

Is there not the earth itself, its forests and waters, and all other natural riches, above and below the surface? These are the inheritance of the human race, and there must be regulations for the common enjoyment of it. What rights, and under what conditions, a person shall be allowed to exercise over any portion of this common inheritance cannot be left undecided. No function of government is less optional than the regulation of these things, or more completely involved in the idea of civilized society.

Marshall anticipated later fascination with the "fisherman's problem" in the late nineteenth century: