Economics Anonymous

The Economic Dynamics of Environmental Law (2004) by Syracuse College of Law professor and former NRDC lawyer, David Driesen, shreds the cliche of an economics/environment trade off and provides careful analysis of economic incentives, reforming administrative and legal processes and improving regulatory design. For those of us interested in how best to structure law and policy systems this book is a must read.

You Can't Eat GNP: Economics As If Ecology Mattered (2000) by Dr. Eric Davidson, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, is clearly written and remarkably lacking in the jargon and obscuring formulas of neoclassical economics texts. Davidson's analysis is easily accessible for the general reader and starts with a great comparison of the ecologist's view of a food pyramid with soil at the broad base and plants next with herbivores (e.g. cattle, sheep deer grasshoppers, humans etc. and carnivores (humans, wolves, lions, spiders etc) in a plateau shaped top layer.

The neoclassical economist's pyramid, on the other hand, is an inverted triangle with soil depicted as the small bottom layer, crops as the broader second layer, processed foods as the third, still broader layer, and marketed consumer products like bread as the broadest top layer. The difference in the two pyramids, of course, is that the width of the bands in the ecologist's pyramid are not determined by a judgment of which group of organisms is more 'valuable' but rather the bandwidth is calculated by the amount of energy (calories of food) or mass (weight of organisms and their chemical makeup) produced and consumed at each level. Each level of the neoclassical economist's pyramid is measured by the monetary value of the products produced and consumed at that level.

Davidson goes on to say that not many people will pay much for soil (hence the phrase 'dirt cheap') but people will pay more if a farmer 'improves' the land by clearing the forest, tilling the soil, and growing a crop on it -- gaining economic value. He notes that over a short period of time, however, the soil loses some of its native fertility and requires more input from the farmer and fertilizer etc. but is still considered more valuable by the economist because it is "improved." All of this begs the question of what happens to each pyramid when the soil is degraded or it disappears entirely as a fertile resource. Davidson argues that the two competing pyramid views can be reconciled and that new initiatives drawing ideas from ecological economics are finding ways to include the ecological values of resources like soils in the economic marketplace system.

Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in A Global Age (2000) by Michael Shuman, former director of the Institute for Policy Studies that gives practical examples of the benefits of locally based businesses in the context of globalization and multi-national corporations. going Local is particularly useful for its advice to tailor new local economic initiatives to local conditions while not trying to pretend that communities can completely isolate themselves from the current global economic context.

Other recently acquired books of interest in my library include a wonderful biography A Wilderness Within: The Life of Sigurd Olson (1997) by David Backes; Correction Lines: Essays on Land, Leopold and Conservation (2004) by Curt Meine; and Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial that Forged A Nation (2004) by Paul VanDevelder.

Sigurd Olson, for those unfamiliar with his name, was a leader of the American environmental movement from the 1930s through the early 1980s, a lyrical and persuasive author of nine books, political activist, and a charter member and eventual president of the Wilderness Society among other accomplishments. Backes's book is clear and comprehensive descriptive analysis of Olson's life and times.

Correction Lines is a great, crisply written and thought provoking collection of essays by one of the best analytical minds in the business, Dr. Curt Meine of the International Crane Foundation and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Author of the definitive biography of Aldo Leopold (1988), Curt is one of my favorite people in the business of thought provoking, effective locally and globally based environmental activism. In both the Introduction and the essay "Inherit the Grid" Curt talks about the sometimes bizarre, comical, and serious implications of the 'correction lines' used by territorial surveyors to correct for the curvature of the earth when laying out the box grid plats used to delineate land during the settlement of the Midwest and West during the late 1700s and throughout the 1800s. His keen eye examines the extreme turns correction lines induced upon road layouts in his home territory of Wisconsin and helps us all gain critically important insight and perspective from the exercise.

The mention of Coyote Warrior here is a teaser. Check back in a few days for much more information on the book and people connected with it, and for some related events in Portland Oregon, Washington D.C. and New York City that we will be announcing soon. In the meantime, order any or all of these books through the Powell's Bookstore links found in this blog and the Rivers Foundation will receive ten percent of each order as a donation from Powells.