2004b) 'Visions and Scenarios: Heilbroner's Worldly Philosophy

with issues related to the environment over time, such that these issues became of prime importance in their frameworks. This workdeals directly with ecological and environmental issues; both authors also dealt with other issues that relate to the environmental challenge, such as technological change. But it is not only their work that explicitly addresses the environment or relates to environmental challenges that is relevant to the concerns of ecological economists. Heilbroner’s Worldly Philosophy and Lowe’s Political Economics offer insights that may prove useful in developing a methodology of ecological economics. Ecological economists have taken a pluralistic approach to methodology, but the common themes in this work regarding the importance and nature of vision; analysis (including structural analysis); scenarios; implementation; the necessity of working backwards; the role for imagination; rejecting the positive/normative dichotomy; and so on, all are issues that have been elaborated in Lowe’s work, and in ways that are relevant to ecological economics. The goal of the paper is actually quite modest: to make ecological economists aware of the work of the two authors, and get them interested enough to explore the possible contribution of these ideas to their methodological approach