Economists and others have long believed that by balancing the costs of such public goods as air quality and wilderness areas against their benefits, informed policy choices can be made. But the problem of putting a dollar value on cleaner air or water and other goods not sold in the marketplace has been a major stumbling block. Mitchell and Carson, for reasons presented in this book, argue that at this time the contingent valuation (CV) method offers the most promising approach for determ...

'One of the world's most prominent radical scientists', Vandana Shiva demolishes the myths propagated by corporate globalisation in its pursuit of profit and power, revealing the devastating environmental impact of corporate capitalism.Shiva argues that consumerism lubricates the war against the earth and that corporate control violates all ethical and ecological limits. She takes the reader on a journey through the world's devastated eco-landscape, one of genetic engineering, indu...

An award-winning environmental activist and social entrepreneur exposes the link between our financial and environmental crisesFor decades, politicians and business leaders alike told the American public that today's challenge was growing the economy, and that environmental protection could be left to future generations. Now in the wake of billions of dollars in costs associated with coastal devastation from Hurricane Sandy, rampant wildfires across the West, and groundwater contami...

A collection of stimulating essays exploring the wide-ranging debates surrounding the relationship between business and society in 21st century Ireland.Wide-ranging, diverse and thought-provoking contributions from leading business researchers, economists, sociologists and political scientists from Ireland and abroad probe five central themes: the making and unmaking of the Celtic Tiger; governance, regulation and justice; partnership and participation; the nature of Irish borders ...

Each of the four essays reprinted here was written for a specific occasion and together comprise only the smallest selection from a larger corpus questioning commodity and energy-intensive economies. The essays are presented thematically instead of chronologically to offer a better view of the sweep of Illich's argument. In the first two, "War against Subsistence" and "Shadow Work," Illich reveals both the ruins on which the economy is built and the blindness of economics which cannot but ...

“The Limits to Growth” (Meadows, 1972) generated unprecedented controversy with its predictions of the eventual collapse of the world's economies. First hailed as a great advance in science, “The Limits to Growth” was subsequently rejected and demonized. However, with many national economies now at risk and global peak oil apparently a reality, the methods, scenarios, and predictions of “The Limits to Growth” are in great need of reappraisal. In The Li...

Drawing on their extensive knowledge of the oil industry, Roberto F. Aguilera and Marian Radetzki provide an in-depth examination of the price of the world's most important commodity. They argue that although oil has experienced an extraordinary price increase over the past few decades, we have now reached a turning point where scarcity, uncertain supply and high prices will be replaced by abundance, undisturbed availability and suppressed price levels. They look at the potential of new gl...

In ancient Greece and Rome an ambiguous relationship developed between man and nature, and this decisively determined the manner in which they treated the environment. On the one hand, nature was conceived as a space characterized and inhabited by divine powers, which deserved appropriate respect. On the other, a rationalist view emerged, according to which humans were to subdue nature using their technologies and to dispose of its resources. This book systematically describes the ways in ...

Brazil is considered one of the world’s most important environmental powers. With a continental territory containing almost 70 per cent of the Amazon rainforest, along with a rich biodiversity and huge amount of natural resources, its geopolitical role in environmental decisions is crucial to ongoing global negotiations surrounding climate change.Development policies based on extraction and exportation of raw materials by the mining and agribusiness sectors threaten the global envi...

A nuanced look at how nature has been culturally constructed in South and Southeast Asia, Nature in the Global South is a major contribution to understandings of the politics and ideologies of environmentalism and development in a postcolonial epoch. Among the many significant paradigms for understanding both the preservation and use of nature in these regions are biological classification, state forest management, tropical ecology, imperial water control, public health, and commu...

In modern society, we tend to have faith in technology. But is our concept of ‘technology’ itself a cultural illusion? This book challenges the idea that humanity as a whole is united in a common development toward increasingly efficient technologies. Instead it argues that modern technology implies a kind of global ‘zero-sum game’ involving uneven resource flows, which make it possible for wealthier parts of global society to save time and space at the expense of humans and environments i...

This report has been prepared by the London Environmental Economics Centre (LEEC). LEEC is a joint venture, established in 1988, by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and the department of Economics of University College London (UCL). Popularly known as The Pearce Report, this book is a report prepared for the Department of the Environment. It demonstrates the ways in which elements in our environment at present under threat from many forms of pollution can ...