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

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, Dec 3, 2007 - Philosophy
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.

From inside the book

Selected pages

Contents

9780521867559c01_p123
1
9780521867559c02_p2445
24
9780521867559c03_p4666
46
9780521867559c04_p6786
67
9780521867559c05_p87109
87
9780521867559c06_p110136
110
9780521867559c07_p137156
137
9780521867559c08_p157174
157
9780521867559c09_p175193
175
9780521867559c10_p194208
194
9780521867559end_p209258
209
9780521867559ind_p259266
259
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 179 - ... eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
Page 187 - ... the inference, we think, is inevitable ; that the watch must have had a maker ; that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer ; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.
Page 138 - Standing on the bare ground — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.
Page 181 - The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God - a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that - and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.
Page 150 - I here apply to America may indeed be addressed to almost all our contemporaries. Variety is disappearing from the human race ; the same ways of acting, thinking, and feeling are to be met with all over the world.
Page 138 - Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.
Page 125 - ... every flowery waste or natural pasture plowed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man's use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedge-row or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture.

About the author (2007)

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.

Bibliographic information