The Economy of the Earth: Philosophy, Law, and the Environment

Description

Mark Sagoff draws on the last twenty years of debate over the foundations of environmentalism in this comprehensive revision of The Economy of the Earth. Posing questions pertinent to consumption, cost-benefit analysis, the normative implications of neo-Darwinism, the role of the natural in national history, and the centrality of the concept of place in environmental ethics, he analyses social policy in relation to the environment, pollution, the workplace, and public safely and health. Sagoff distinguishes ethical from economic questions and explains which kinds of concepts, arguments, and processes are appropriate to each. He offers a critique 'preference' and 'willingness to pay' as measures of value in environmental economics and defends political, cultural, aesthetic, and ethical reasons to protect the natural environment.

Mark Sagoff is Interim Director and Senior Research Scholar at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. The author of Price, Principle and the Environment (2004), he has published widely in journals of law, philosophy, and the environment. Dr Sagoff was named a Pew Scholar in Conservation and the Environment in 1991 and was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 1998. He is also a fellow of the Hastings Center and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"The second edition incorporates the increasing engagement of mainstream and evangelical religious communities with environmental protection into his argument for a democratic environmentalism not constrained by either economics or science. Sagoff's carefully reasoned and wide ranging arguments will infuriate economists, ecologists and elite environmentalists equally, but the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of environmentalism." -Dan Tarlock, Chicago-Kent College of Law "The Economy of the Earth presents a masterful synthesis of Mark Sagoff's seminal contributions to the theory of environmental policy analysis. Sagoff argues that good policy design requires accommodation between strongly held, incommensurable moral values. Yet the techniques of policy analysis rest on strong and sometimes naive ethical assumptions. Sagoff shows how careful philosophical reasoning can reform the practice of policy analysis to better serve the democratic process. This provocative book deserves a central place in the environmental studies literature." -Richard B. Howarth, Dartmouth College "The first edition of The Economy of the Earth staked out a position that many felt but few had said: the most important reasons for protecting nature are moral and aesthetic, not economic and instrumental. In the second edition, massively revised and updated, Sagoff preaches the same sermon but even more clearly and eloquently. The second edition of The Economy of the Earth is as vital to debates about environmental policy as the first edition was in its time." -Dale Jamieson, Director of Environmental Studies, New York University