Economics, the Environment and Our Common Wealth

Economics, the Environment and Our Common Wealth
Author: James K. Boyce
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2013
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1782547673

If youre interested in the cutting-edge of the very best thinking on economics and the environment, its right here. Boyce has done a masterful job integrating issues of equity and ecological thinking into economics, and presenting deep and important ideas accessibly with the latest research to back them up. Not just recommended, but essential. Juliet Schor, Boston College, US and author of True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans are Creating a Time-rich, Ecologically-light, Small-scale, High-satisfaction Economy A colleague of mine puts it best: when thinking about the fundamentals of the economy and the environment, there is Pigou, Coase, and Boyce. Boyce adds to traditional economics the critical understanding that social power is a determinant of the extent and spatial scale of environmental degradation. In these essays, on subjects ranging from housing and credit markets to agriculture and globalization, Boyce mixes a data-driven picture of unequal environmental protection with a keen and useful discussion of the many forms of social power that can help right the scales. Eban Goodstein, Bard College, US This fascinating volume has at its heart a simple but powerful premise: that a clean and safe environment is not a commodity to be allocated on the basis of purchasing power, nor a privilege to be allocated through political power, but rather a basic human right. Building upon this premise, James K. Boyce explores the many ways in which economics can be refashioned into an instrument for advancing human well-being and environmental health. Comprising a decades worth of essays written since the publication of the authors pathbreaking book, The Political Economy of the Environment (2002), this volume discusses a number of diverse environmental issues through an economists lens. Topics covered include environmental justice, disaster response, globalization and the environment, industrial toxins and other pollutants, cap-and-dividend climate policies, and agricultural biodiversity. The first economics book to explore the idea that the environment belongs in equal measure to us all, this pioneering volume will hold great interest for students, professors and researchers of both economics and environmental studies.

What Matters?

What Matters?
Author: Wendell Berry
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2010-04-23
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1582436703

"The reasoned and insistent exhortations of a man with a cause who, rather than mellowing with age and wisdom, continues to grow in forcefulness and vision." —Booklist Over the years, Wendell Berry has sought to understand and confront the financial structure of modern society and the impact of developing late capitalism on American culture. There is perhaps no more demanding or important critique available to contemporary citizens than Berry's writings — just as there is no vocabulary more given to obfuscation than that of economics as practiced by professionals and academics. Berry has called upon us to return to the basics. He has traced how the clarity of our economic approach has eroded over time, as the financial asylum was overtaken by the inmates, and citizens were turned from consumers — entertained and distracted — to victims, threatened by a future of despair and disillusion. For this collection, Berry offers essays from the last twenty–five years, alongside new essays about the recent economic collapse, including “Money Versus Goods” and “Faustian Economics,” treatises of great alarm and courage. He offers advice and perspective as our society attempts to steer from its present chaos and recession to a future of hope and opportunity. With urgency and clarity, Berry asks us to look toward a true sustainable commonwealth, grounded in realistic Jeffersonian principles applied to our present day.

Common Wealth

Common Wealth
Author: Jeffrey Sachs
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2008
Genre: Economic policy
ISBN: 9781594201271

Assessment of the environmental degradation, rapid population growth, and extreme poverty that threaten global peace and prosperity, with practical solutions based on a new economic paradigm for our crowded planet.

Ecological Economics and Sustainable Development

Ecological Economics and Sustainable Development
Author: Herman E. Daly
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2007
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1847206948

This clear-thinking collection brings together 25 of Daly s essays, speeches, reviews and testimonials from the past decade. . . as a whole they provide a useful masterclass on the principles of ecological economics. Daly s vision, as well as his frustration with mainstream economists refusal to engage with his arguments, comes through loud and clear. New Scientist It s hard to imagine ecological economics without the numerous and profound contributions of Herman Daly. These papers reveal the consistency of his analysis and clarity of exposition that have made him one of the most influential economists of his generation. Because of Herman Daly we have a much better understanding of how economies relate to the environment, why so much is wrong with this relationship and what must be done to fix it. Peter Victor, York University, Canada This thrilling compilation outlines the origins of the young discipline of ecological economics by the intellectual leader of the movement, Herman Daly. He recounts how, as a member of the recently demoted environment department at the World Bank, he integrated ecology with economics during his six years in the bowels of the beast. Herman lucidly and compellingly combines common sense with profound understanding of both economics and ecology to arrive at sustainable solutions to the global problematique. Herman s rigorous yet compassionate solutions to climate change, peak oil, globalization vs. internationalization, poverty reduction, and the unsung concept of scale leading to uneconomic growth, are precisely what we need to prevent the current liquidation of our beautiful world. This book will galvanize you into the action we need so much. Robert Goodland, Environmental adviser, World Bank Group, 1978 2001 In this book, written in crystal clear style, Herman Daly reiterates the main points of his analysis and vision, he praises some teachers (John Ruskin, Frederick Soddy, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Kenneth Boulding), he fearlessly attacks some adversaries in the World Bank and MIT, and he offers some advice to the government of his own country, to the Russian Duma, and especially to OPEC that, if followed, would change the world very much for the better. Finally, on a different line of thought, he interrogates conservation biologists on their reasons for wanting to keep biodiversity since, as biologists, they claim that evolution has no particular purpose. Why not let the Sixth Great Extinction run its course? In other words, science cannot provide an ethics of conservation, which Herman Daly finds in religion more than in democratization deliberations. Joan Martinez-Alier, Universitat Autonòma de Barcelona, Spain Ecological Economics and Sustainable Development comprises a carefully chosen selection of some 25 articles, speeches, congressional testimonies, reviews, and critiques from the last ten years of Herman Daly s ever-illuminating work. This book seeks to identify the blind spots and errors in standard growth economics, alongside the corrections that ecological economics offers to better guide us toward a sustainable economy one with deeper biophysical and ethical roots. Under the general heading of sustainability and ecological economics, many specific topics are here brought into relation with each other. These include: limits to growth; full-world versus empty-world economics; uneconomic growth; definitions of sustainability; peak oil; steady-state economics; allocation versus distribution versus scale issues; non-enclosure of rival goods and enclosure of non-rival goods; production functions and the laws of thermodynamics; OPEC and Kyoto; involuntary resettlement and development; resource versus value-added taxation; globalization versus internationalization; immigration; climate change; and the philosophical presuppositions of policy, including the policies suggested in connection with the topics above. This fascinating work will appeal to scholars and academics of ecol

Environmental Law, Policy, and Economics

Environmental Law, Policy, and Economics
Author: Nicholas Askounes Ashford
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 1125
Release: 2008
Genre: Environmental law
ISBN: 0262012383

The past twenty-five years have seen a significant evolution in environmental policy, with new environmental legislation and substantive amendments to earlier laws, significant advances in environmental science, and changes in the treatment of science (and scientific uncertainty) by the courts. This book offers a detailed discussion of the important issues in environmental law, policy, and economics, tracing their development over the past few decades through an examination of environmental law cases and commentaries by leading scholars. The authors focus on pollution, addressing both pollution control and prevention, but also emphasize the evaluation, design, and use of the law to stimulate technical change and industrial transformation, arguing that there is a need to address broader issues of sustainable development. Environmental Law, Policy, and Economics,which grew out of courses taught by the authors at MIT, treats the traditional topics covered in most classes in environmental law and policy, including common law and administrative law concepts and the primary federal legislation. But it goes beyond these to address topics not often found in a single volume: the information-based obligations of industry, enforcement of environmental law, market-based and voluntary alternatives to traditional regulation, risk assessment, environmental economics, and technological innovation and diffusion. Countering arguments found in other texts that government should play a reduced role in environmental protection, this book argues that clear, stringent legal requirements--coupled with flexible means for meeting them--and meaningful stakeholder participation are necessary for bringing about environmental improvements and technologicial transformations.

Right Relationship

Right Relationship
Author: Peter G. Brown
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2009-01-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1576757625

Our current economic system is unsustainable. Its fundamental elements, unlimited growth, and endless wealth accumulation fly in the face of the fact that the Earth's resources are clearly finite. In this work, the authors offer a comprehensive new economic model.

Ecological Economics for the Anthropocene

Ecological Economics for the Anthropocene
Author: Peter G. Brown
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2015-09-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0231540426

Ecological Economics for the Anthropocene provides an urgently needed alternative to the long-dominant neoclassical economic paradigm of the free market, which has focused myopically—even fatally—on the boundless production and consumption of goods and services without heed to environmental consequences. The emerging paradigm for ecological economics championed in this new book recenters the field of economics on the fact of the Earth's limitations, requiring a total reconfiguration of the goals of the economy, how we understand the fundamentals of human prosperity, and, ultimately, how we assess humanity's place in the community of beings. Each essay in this volume contributes to an emerging, revolutionary agenda based on the tenets of ecological economics and advances new conceptions of justice, liberty, and the meaning of an ethical life in the era of the Anthropocene. Essays highlight the need to create alternative signals to balance one-dimensional market-price measurements in judging the relationships between the economy and the Earth's life-support systems. In a lively exchange, the authors question whether such ideas as "ecosystem health" and the environmental data that support them are robust enough to inform policy. Essays explain what a taking-it-slow or no-growth approach to economics looks like and explore how to generate the cultural and political will to implement this agenda. This collection represents one of the most sophisticated and realistic strategies for neutralizing the threat of our current economic order, envisioning an Earth-embedded society committed to the commonwealth of life and the security and true prosperity of human society.

Eco-nomics

Eco-nomics
Author: Richard Stroup
Publisher: Cato Institute
Total Pages: 112
Release: 2003
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781930865440

'Eco-nomics' explores the correlation between economics & the environment.

The Age of Sustainable Development

The Age of Sustainable Development
Author: Jeffrey D. Sachs
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 564
Release: 2015-03-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0231539002

Jeffrey D. Sachs is one of the world's most perceptive and original analysts of global development. In this major new work he presents a compelling and practical framework for how global citizens can use a holistic way forward to address the seemingly intractable worldwide problems of persistent extreme poverty, environmental degradation, and political-economic injustice: sustainable development. Sachs offers readers, students, activists, environmentalists, and policy makers the tools, metrics, and practical pathways they need to achieve Sustainable Development Goals. Far more than a rhetorical exercise, this book is designed to inform, inspire, and spur action. Based on Sachs's twelve years as director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, his thirteen years advising the United Nations secretary-general on the Millennium Development Goals, and his recent presentation of these ideas in a popular online course, The Age of Sustainable Development is a landmark publication and clarion call for all who care about our planet and global justice.