Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics

Book Description

Valuing the Earth collects more than twenty classic and recent essays that broaden economic thinking by setting the economy in its proper ecological and ethical context. They vividly demonstrate that, contrary to current macroeconomic preoccupations, continued growth on a planet of finite resources cannot be physically or economically sustained and is morally undesirable.

Among the issues addressed are population growth, resource use, pollution, theology (east and west), energy, and economic growth. Their common theme is the notion, popular with classical economists from Malthus to Mill, that an economic stationary state is more healthful to life on earth than unlimited growth. A number of essays in the first edition have become classics and have been retained for this edition, which adds six new essays.

Herman E. Daly is Senior Economist at the World Bank. Kenneth N. Townsend is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at Hampden-Sydney College.

Contributors: Kenneth E. Boulding. John Cobb. Herman E. Daly. Anne H. Ehrlich. Paul R. Ehrlich. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. Garrett Hardin. John P. Holdren. M. King Hubbert. C. S. Lewis. E. F. Schumacher. Gerald Alonzo Smith. T. H. Tietenberg. Kenneth N. Townsend.

Customer Reviews:

A Treasure Chest--The Originals Plus the Current Masters.......2004-01-02

This is one of three books that I bought for review with the intent of selecting one for broad pro-bono distribution. Although I chose "For the Common Good" and I recommend "Ecological Economics" as the one book to buy if you buy only one (see my reviews of those books at their own pages), this book is a treasure chest of original and current thinking that should certainly be in your hands if you can afford all three books. As another reviewer has noted, it finally re-publishes some of the hard to get original thinkers from the steady-state economics era of the 1970's. However, it does so with an ample leavening of 1990's authorship, and hence could reasonably be regarded as a first-class "readings" complement to the text book ("Ecological Economics").

There is a chart on page 20 of this book that is quite extraordinary. Titled "The ends-means spectrum", it brilliantly runs down from the top: Religion and Ethics as guidelines to ultimate and intermediate ends of humanity; to the middle Political Economy as a means of managing the factors of production to specific political ends; to the bottom: Technics and Physics as the "ultimate" foundation or "ground truth" of flow-entropy-matter-energy that must constrain political and religious ends.

This book, in which Kenneth N. Townsend is the second contributing editor-author, blends practical, political, economic, and theological writings, over several decades, in a most pleasing manner. E. F. Schumacher's "Buddhist Economics" jumped out at me, reminding me that our predominantly Protestant corporate capitalist ethos is very far removed from the realities that guide and repress billions around the Earth, all of whom have fewer options than we do. With that thought in mind, I strongly recommend William Greider's "The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy" as a very current complement to any of the books that Dr. Daly has helped bring into the marketplace of ideas.

Long-awaited essay collection for the ecological economist.......1998-02-03

For the advanced student of the discipline of ecological economics this essay-collection provides a handfull of the most influential classics of the field, of which many has been hard to come by for years. The essays by Garrett Hardin, Herman Daly, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and Paul and Anne Ehrlich are among the most frequently cited essays of the field - and for good reasons.

VTE is an example of scholarship that is rare in its field........1997-04-29

As a citizen who is concerned about the health of the environment, I was enlightened by the essays in the first section of this book. The authors leave little room for doubt that the Earth can sustain a finite population, and for a finite length of time. Without any of the hysterical rhetoric which so often characterizes the political debate on this topic, these scholars demonstrate the fact that our existence on this, the eastern shore of Eden, is ephemeral. As a student of economics, I was impressed by the lucid exploration of free-enterprise, steady-states, and market forces in the third section. This section is home to some of the best essays in the book: T. H. Tietenberg's exposition of free-market solutions to the pollution problem as well as Ken Townsend's expert discussion of the ecological problems facing the nations of the former communist world are as important as they are timely. But, the most important respect in which I was struck by this book was as a human being. It is in the second section that Daly and Townsend--with the help of such friends as C. S. Lewis and E. F. Schumacher--address the important issue of morality. Are humans obligated to preserve something off this planet for future generations? How much consumption should we engage in? Does our economic system promote an ungodly destruction of the world in which we live. The reader should not come to this volume without a willingness to challenge his own deeply held notions about the state of the environment or the economy's role in creating that state. Neither should a reader open this book if he is searching for easy solutions to our environmental problems. Those readers with the courage to think, however, will not be dissatisfied.

Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics. (book reviews): An article from: Journal of Economic Issues

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Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics. (book reviews): An article from: Journal of Economic Issues
James A. Swaney
Manufacturer: Association for Evolutionary Economics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
ASIN: B000921FQ2
Release Date: 2005-07-28

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Journal of Economic Issues, published by Association for Evolutionary Economics on March 1, 1994. The length of the article is 1438 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics. (book reviews)
Author: James A. Swaney
Publication: Journal of Economic Issues (Refereed)
Date: March 1, 1994
Publisher: Association for Evolutionary Economics
Volume: v28 Issue: n1 Page: p271(4)

Article Type: Book Review

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Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics. (book reviews): An article from: World Watch

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Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics. (book reviews): An article from: World Watch
Alan Thein Durning
Manufacturer: Worldwatch Institute
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
ASIN: B00092T5C8
Release Date: 2005-07-28

Book Description

This digital document is an article from World Watch, published by Worldwatch Institute on July 1, 1993. The length of the article is 1011 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics. (book reviews)
Author: Alan Thein Durning
Publication: World Watch (Magazine/Journal)
Date: July 1, 1993
Publisher: Worldwatch Institute
Volume: v6 Issue: n4 Page: p39(2)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics

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Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics
Herman E. Daly
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OQBTYQ

Customer Reviews:

Recycled out-of-date guidebook.......2002-08-26

I was very disappointed with this book and I supposed I should have known better - Insight Guides tend to recycle the same information and photos from the 80's all the time in so called "new editions". ... . The book's first edition comes from 1982 and besides updating a few passages, there is nothing new in here. The tips for where to go can be found in the Malaysian Tourism Board's website and the photos there would be MUCH newer! Save your money and spend on a Rough Guide or Lonely Planet instead!

Insight Pocket Guide Kuala Lumpur (Insight Pocket Guides)

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Insight Pocket Guide Kuala Lumpur (Insight Pocket Guides)
Insight Guides
Manufacturer: Apa Productions
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Malaysia & Brunei | Asia | Travel | Subjects | Books

Southeast | Asia | Travel | Subjects | Books

Insight Pocket Guide | Guidebook Series | Travel | Subjects | Books

General | Travel | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0887298915

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Kuala Lumpur Insight Pocket Guide
*
Manufacturer: APA INSIGHT GUIDES (
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000K7XXCK

Customer Reviews:

Not just for children.......2005-06-15

This is a nicely organized and well written book about many Bushmen groups of southern Africa. This large book has 48 pages organized into 7 chapters, a glossary, recommendations for further reading and information, and an index. About half the book is photographs, maps and illustrations related to the text. There are also text boxes with cultural anecdotes---about games they play, how they make arrows for hunting, myths and social rules. The click sounds in the languages spoken by Bushmen are fascinating to children, and they are described in several text boxes that list some Bushmen words and and how to pronounce them. I've been to the Kalahari and have read a lot about !Kung Bushmen, and this book describes and illustrates the same things I find interesting about them.

There are a lot of different groups of people in southern Africa, all called Bushmen, and this book describes them without being confusing. There is specific information in the book about the !Kung, the !Xo, the Hai//om, the G/wi, the Nharo an the /Xam, but don't worry if you can't keep all of this straight: each section of the book is self contained, so you can jump around and read what you like. Neighbors of Bushmen, like the Tswana, Herero, Kgalagari and Afrikaners, are included. The history of their interactions with Bushmen is emphasized.

The sentence structures and vocabulary of the book are appropriate for young elementary school students, but the many new and strange names of people and places were overwhelming for my 9-year-old son to take in all at once. But this is a wonderful book about Africa for children, one of the few I've seen that actually reads like it was written for them. Yet, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it for anyone, any age, wanting a straightforward description of Bushmen.

Nobody's perfect: the photo on page 31 is of Herero, not Bushmen.

Book Description

''An important addition to your library.'' --- American Scientist

Advances in Morphometrics.(Brief Article): An article from: American Scientist

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Advances in Morphometrics.(Brief Article): An article from: American Scientist

Manufacturer: Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

General | Science | Subjects | Books

Science & Technology | Subjects | e-Docs | Formats | Books

Advances in Morphometrics (Nato Science Series: A:)

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Advances in Morphometrics (Nato Science Series: A:)
Leslie F. Marcus Marco Corti Anna Loy Gavin J. P. Naylor Dennis E. Slice
Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OSKXF0

Book Description

This book presents, as a single package, three semingly contradictory and often competitive approaches to deal with ever present uncertainty in science and engineering. The book describes, as a unique view, probabilistic, fuzzy sets based and antioptimization based approaches, in order to remedy the present "tower ob Babel” situation, in which researchers in competing fields do not communicate. Integrative approach will attract scientists and engineers alike and provide a strong impetus towards integrative, hybrid approaches.

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Proust (the revenge)

Continuing down the road.

The Best Work of "Fiction" I've Ever Read

French or Irish

Remembrance of Things Past: Volume II - The Guermantes Way & Cities of the Plain (Vintage)
Marcel Proust
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Proust, Marcel | ( P ) | Authors, A-Z | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove (Vintage)

The Cambridge Companion to Proust (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

A Simple Story (Oxford World's Classics)

Ulysses Ulysses

How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel

ASIN: 0394711831
Release Date: 1982-08-27

Amazon.com

Before his death in 1922, Marcel Proust accomplished the monumental feat of recording Remembrance of Things Past, a fifteen-volume literary history, much of which was based upon his own adventures and minute observations. The Guermantes Way is an installation in this collection and recounts, among other things, his childhood in Combray and the relevance of grasping the importance of particular events and people from his past in his development as a writer. Although autobiographical, Proust employs suspense and the observation of minutiae to illustrate our own subjective existence.

Book Description

Including THE GUERMANTES WAY and CITIES OF THE PLAIN.

Customer Reviews:

Proust (the revenge).......2006-02-15

Where as Joyce's Masterpice takes place in one day proust's Masterpiece Swans Way is only the begining. In the first Part Swans way we have the world of le boheim Part 2 or Guermantes way Opens the world of the bougios. A world of the rich in which image is everything...sex, obssesion, grandmothers...ect ect.. If you are reading this then you are familar with the obsesive beatuty that is proust's writing. Equally great however, personally there is a satifaction after Swans way,(first time with Proust's writing)that make the first volume my favorite.

Continuing down the road........2005-12-29

Volume I of this Vintage series was a little bit overwhelming as a reading experience. Proust is dense, difficult and the diction takes quite a bit of getting used to. It was a relief for me that the reading experience got much easier by the time that I reached this volume. Nothing is going to leaven Remembrance or make it less dense, but if you make it as far as The Guermantes Way then you are bound to have come to some peace with the language.

The Guermantes Way and Cities of the Plain are full of both broad humor and deep sorrow. The treatment of the death of the Grandmother, particularly the way that she slowly retreats in dreams, is one of the most real and affecting sequences of its kind that I can remember in fiction. On the other hand, the comedy of manners at the society parties plays out like a kind of Belle Epoque Sex & the City. Proust skewers the foibles and fables of the relationships of the rich, and often left me chuckling to myself as I read.

The farther I go, the more I find these books to be one of the most memorable reading experiences of my life. Nothing in these books makes me lessen the recommendation that I read after reading Volume I. In fact, I find that my admiration is only increasing as I read.

If you can, try tackling Volume II as quickly as possible after finishing Volume I. It really helps a lot to treat Remembrance as a single book, rather than a series. It also avoids time re-learning the feeling of the Proust prose.

The Best Work of "Fiction" I've Ever Read.......2004-06-19

Moncrieff/Kilmartin's translation is still the best. Proust's life-work is the most psychologically acute novel ever written, and a perfect match between form and content. His form is the memoir, conceived as a piece of music, with themes and variations, codas and recapitulations. The content is a list of evolving concerns, from love (in all its forms) to aesthetic creation and appreciation, as well as a sort of living autopsy of the aristocracy of his time. His motives were manifold, but it seems Proust primarily wanted to get in the final word on those people he knew throughout his life, and show he both understood them (better than they themselves) and that they had little inkling of his amazing inner life. For all his encounters with and criticisms of snobs and poseurs throughout the work, and his tendency to fully absorb himself in his experiences, Marcel the narrator risks coming off as a snob himself; but quite the opposite, he denigrates himself constantly with reference to his own writing abilities, up into the very last section of "Time Regained" when the structural idea for the novel we have just read comes to him. He's disappointed many times by his own experiences, when they are is measured and conditioned by the background of his keen aesthetic imagination. His salvation is both the Idea for the novel, and a theory of time/identity which has been "calling out" to him with his famous episodes of "involuntary memory" (the most famous of which is the tea-dipped madeleine). As one reads on, there are times when it seems Proust has suspended all action and narrative in favor of impressions which resonate against one another. It may seem gratuitous or self-indulgent, but he is "performing" his theory at the same time he's telling you about it. They each have a purpose, and it seems he's trying to enact a philosophical theory of identity and experience: as if we the subject are nodes of activity that blend memory and present conscious experience.

"Remembrance of Things Past" can be a difficult work to read, but it is so very much worth it. One needs no guide to read this work; it's not as allusive as "Ulysses" nor esoteric like "Gravity's Rainbow". Proust's style is very reader-friendly (albeit he spins very long sentences). He respects the reader, and wants her to understand exactly where he's coming from, for this novel is like the map Borges once described in one of his "Ficciones": it's a representation so large and subtle and complex that it is as big as what it depicts.

If Proust were alive today, he'd probably be kibbitzing with Hollywood stars or the world's billionaire elites...And not much of this book would change!

French or Irish.......2001-11-29

It really is between joyce and proust....

Remembrance of Things Past (Complete in 2 Vols.): Swann's Way, Within A Budding Grove, Guermantes Way, Cities of the Plain, The Captive, The Sweet Cheat Gone, The Past Recaptured

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Remembrance of Things Past (Complete in 2 Vols.): Swann's Way, Within A Budding Grove, Guermantes Way, Cities of the Plain, The Captive, The Sweet Cheat Gone, The Past Recaptured
Marcel Proust
Manufacturer: Random House
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000J30AWQ

Remembrance of Things Past, 2 vols. Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way, Cities of the Plain, The Captive, The Sweet Cheat Gone, The Past Recaptured

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Remembrance of Things Past, 2 vols. Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way, Cities of the Plain, The Captive, The Sweet Cheat Gone, The Past Recaptured
Marcel;Moncrieff, C. K. Scott(translator) Proust
Manufacturer: Random House
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000NCRQIY

Remembrance of Things Past: Swann's Way; Within a Budding Grove; the Guermantes Way; Cities of the Plain; the Captive; the Sweet Cheat Gone; the Past Recaptured (volumes 1&2)

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Remembrance of Things Past: Swann's Way; Within a Budding Grove; the Guermantes Way; Cities of the Plain; the Captive; the Sweet Cheat Gone; the Past Recaptured (volumes 1&2)
Marcel Proust C.K. Scott Moncrieff Frederick A. Blossom
Manufacturer: Random House
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000MMX0LW

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