Prof. Jim Wilen gave a lecture on the history of resource economics as a field and how it has changed over time, along with people’s relationship to their environment. Early thinking presented a dreary view, with scholars like David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus predicting that land and food would be critical factors limiting growth and development. These predictions were largely made obsolete by industrialization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which greatly increased the productivity of agriculture. However, this development brought about its own set of concerns regarding the exhaustibility of key industrial inputs like coal and oil. These concerns lead to the development of dynamic modeling approaches to understand how markets and other institutions might allocate these scarce resources over time, which remain a core part of the discipline to this day. Finally, the growing recognition of non-market values associated with the environment lead to a synthesis of environmental and resource economics starting in the 1970s. Resources for the Future was particularly influential in this regard, developing methods to estimate non-market values associated with recreational opportunities and pristine environments. Resource economics remains an exciting field, with increasing computational power sparking improvements in statistical and dynamic modeling techniques and associated advances in both empirical work and theory.