Conventional economics is often criticized for failing to reflect adequately the value of clean air and water, species diversity, and social and generational equity. By excluding biophysical and social systems from their analyses, many conventional economists overlook problems of the increasing scale of human impacts and the inequitable distribution of resources. Ecological Economics is an introductory-level textbook for an emerging paradigm that addresses this flaw in much economic thought. The book defines a revolutionary "transdiscipline" that incorporates insights from the biological, physical, and social sciences, and it offers a pedagogically complete examination of this exciting new field. It provides students with a foundation in traditional neoclassical economic thought, but places that foundation within a new interdisciplinary framework that embraces the linkages among economic growth, environmental degradation, and social inequity. Introducing the three core issues that are the focus of the new transdiscipline -- scale, distribution, and efficiency -- the book is guided by the fundamental question, often assumed but rarely spoken in traditional texts: What is really important to us? After explaining the key roles played by the earth's biotic and abiotic resources in sustaining life, the text is then organized around the main fields in traditional economics: microeconomics, macroeconomics, and international economics. The book also takes an additional step of considering the policy implications of this line of thinking. Ecological Economics includes numerous features that make it accessible to a wide range of students: more than thirty text boxes that highlight issues of special importance to students lists of key terms that help students organize the main points in each chapter concise definitions of new terms that are highlighted in the text for easy reference study questions that encourage student exploration beyond the text glossary and list of further readings An accompanying workbook presents an innovative, applied problem-based learning approach to teaching economics. While many books have been written on ecological economics, and several textbooks describe basic concepts of the field, this is the only stand-alone textbook that offers a complete explanation of both theory and practice. It will serve an important role in educating a new generation of economists and is an invaluable new text for undergraduate and graduate courses in ecological economics, environmental economics, development economics, human ecology, environmental studies, sustainability science, and community development.

Marine pollution causes significant damage to fisheries and other economically productive uses of the ocean. The value of that damage can be quantified by economists, but the meanings of those valuations and how they are derived are often obscure to noneconomists.Economic Losses from Marine Pollution brings a fuller understanding of the variety and extent of marine losses and how they are assessed to scientists, lawyers, and environmentalists by systematically identifying and classifying marine losses and relating them to models and methods of economic valuation. The authors use a step-by-step approach to show how economists have used these methods and how they approach the problem of assessing economic damage.The book begins by describing the importance of economic valuation of marine damages, the history of concern over marine pollution, and the development of economic methodologies to assess damage from it. Following that, the book: considers types of marine pollution and their effects on organisms, ecosystems, and humans, and the corresponding economic effects of those biological impacts introduces the economic principles and methods needed to understand and to assess economic damages expresses losses from water quality impairments in terms of economic value introduces the basic economic techniques that have been developed and used to measure changes in economic value discusses how to apply those economic techniques, and presents a variety of practical examples explores limitations and problems that can arise in such applied work.Economic Losses from Marine Pollution includes all of the relevant economic theory together with specific examples of how that theory has been and can be applied. It offers environmental professionals with little or no background in economics the basic economic tools needed to understand economic valuations of environmental damage, and represents a unique handbook for environmental and marine scientists, lawyers, economists, policy professionals, and anyone interested in issues of marine water quality.

As the twenty-first century faces a crisis of democracy and sustainability, this book attempts to bring academics and alternative globalisation activists into conversation.

Through studies of global neoliberalism, ecological debt, climate change, and the ongoing devaluation of reproductive and subsistence labour, these uncompromising essays by internationally distinguished women thinkers expose the limits of current scholarship in political economy, ecological economics, and sustainability science.

The book introduces groundbreaking theoretical concepts for talking about humanity-nature links and will be a challenging read for activists and for students of political economy, environmental ethics, global studies, sociology, women's studies, and critical geography.

Increasingly sophisticated technology and an ever-expand-ing base of knowledge have not been enough to allow humans to halt the worldwide progression of environmental degradation. Extensive fieldwork in both Africa and the United States convinced Allan Savory that neither the forces of nature nor commonly blamed culprits -- overpopulation, poor farming practices, lack of financial support -- were causing the decline of once-healthy ecosystems. He also noted that once land has become degraded, leaving it alone seldom helps revitalize it. Savory eventually came to realize that on the most fundamental level, environmental problems are caused by human management decisions, and only through wholesale changes in the way decisions are made can functioning ecosystems be restored. In response to that startling discovery, Savory began to develop a revolutionary new approach to decision-making and management. Known initially as Holistic Resource Management, and now as simply Holistic Management, it considers humans, their economies, and the environment as inseparable. It includes a common-sense decision-making framework that requires no specialized knowledge or elaborate technology to utilize, and is applicable in any environment or management situation. At the heart of the approach lies a simple testing process that enables people to make decisions that simultaneously consider economic, social, and environmental realities, both short- and long-term.Holistic Management is a newly revised and updated edition of Holistic Resource Management (Island Press, 1988), which was the first book-length treatment of Savory's decision-making framework and how it could be applied. A decade of trial-and-error implementation has strengthened and clarified the book's ideas, and has expanded the scope of the process to include all manner of decisions and management situations, not just those that relate to land and resource management.Holistic Management has been practiced by thousands of people around the world to profitably restore and promote the health of their land through practices that mimic nature, and by many others who have sought a more rewarding personal or family life. This book is an essential handbook for anyone involved with land management and stewardship -- ranchers, farmers, resource managers, and others -- and a valuable guide for all those seeking to make better decisions within their organizations or in any aspect of their personal lives.

In Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future, Candace Fujikane contends that the practice of mapping abundance is a radical act in the face of settler capital's fear of an abundance that feeds. Cartographies of capital enable the seizure of abundant lands by enclosing "wastelands" claimed to be underdeveloped. By contrast, Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) cartographies map the continuities of abundant worlds. Vital to restoration movements is the art of kilo, intergenerational observation of elemental forms encoded in storied histories, chants, and songs. As a participant in these movements, Fujikane maps the ecological lessons of these elemental forms: reptilian deities who protect the waterways, sharks who swim into the mountains, the navigator Māui who fishes up the islands, the deities of snow and mists on Mauna Kea. The laws of these elements are now being violated by toxic waste dumping, leaking military jet fuel tanks, and astronomical-industrial complexes. As Kānaka Maoli and their allies stand as land and water protectors, Fujikane calls for a profound attunement to the elemental forms in order to transform climate events into renewed possibilities for planetary abundance.