James Robertson, who has died aged 95, was a writer and thinker at the centre of a growing movement around a green and people-centred economics. An associate of radical writers such as EF Schumacher (Small is Beautiful, 1973), Ivan Illich (Tools for Conviviality, 1973) and Hazel Henderson (The Politics of the Solar Age, 1981), he wrote 14 books over four decades that were central to a body of thinking characterised as “new economics”.
A contemporary term for these thinkers was that they were “futurists”, charting how changes in economy, society and technology would shape life to come. For James, this was to be a new economic order, an enabling force that would conserve nature. He recognised that the ability of the Earth’s resources to sustain economic life – and even our survival as a species – was at stake. However, rather than separate environmental from social concerns, he saw them as an integrated challenge, open to creative renewal.
