This paper briefly describes the relation between growth and environment in the history of economic theory (from Physiocrats to neo-classical economists) and situates this relation as a theme in the development of the environmental economics literature. It then compares two paradigms of the economics of the environment (environmental economics broadly defined versus ecological economics) and the resulting approaches of weak and strong sustainability. It confronts these two paradigms about growth and the Environmental Kuznets Curve and undertakes an empirical analysis of that curve and the resulting presence or absence of decoupling for carbon dioxide in Belgium and in various other countries, so as to draw contemporary conclusions about the growth and environment relation.
