An Introduction to Ecological Economics. - Review - book reviews

Ecology, Dec, 1998 by Richard B. Howarth

In addition to the need to conserve natural resources and environmental quality, the authors argue that sustainability entails the maintenance of aggregate human well-being as measured through green accounting. Citing the theoretical literature on natural resources and economic growth, the authors claim that an economy will be sustainable if net national product, measured as gross output minus the monetary value of resource depletion and environmental degradation, is constant or increasing over time. The discussion does not, however, explicitly note that this theoretical result holds only under specialized conditions: It assumes a world of constant population and technologies with no international trade in which all sources of market failure have been corrected so that prevailing prices reflect the true costs and benefits of resource allocation.

The book points to the importance of economic efficiency - the pursuit of outcomes that enhance the well-being of at least some people while leaving no one else worse off as a foundational goal of social choices and an important dimension of ecological economics. The implementation of this criterion through cost-benefit analysis is not discussed in detail, though treatments of this subject are readily available in textbooks on environmental economics and policy analysis. The concept of efficiency is most thoroughly explored in the book's extensive, and quite interesting, discussion of policies, institutions, and instruments to achieve a sustainable society. This portion of the book examines cost-effective policy tools such as environmental taxes, the creation and extension of property rights, and conservation easements in the management of problems ranging from habitat preservation to greenhouse gas emissions abatement. There is an ample emphasis on real-world examples that should prove useful to both students and practitioners.

Finally, the book calls attention to the importance of achieving distributional fairness in economic and environmental planning but avoids the trap of reducing this objective to technocratic terms. Fairness, the authors point out, is properly understood in terms of ethical and political values. As such, analysts should appropriately identify the distributional consequences of alternative policies or resource management regimes while leaving the resolution of moral conflicts to the workings of deliberative democracy. The problem of fairness, then, both expands the scope of economic analysis and undercuts claims that economics offers unique criteria for "optimal" resource allocation.

It is perhaps this perspective on the heterogeneity of values and the necessity of interdisciplinary engagement that best distinguishes ecological economics as an emerging field of inquiry and practice. The authors are to be commended for their important contributions to this field even if their work leaves room for future elaboration and enrichment.

RICHARD B. HOWARTH

Dartmouth College Environmental Studies Program Hanover, New Hampshire 03755