History of Environmental Economic Thought

Description

I can't say that I didn't learn anything from this book, but much of it is shallow, outdated or off-point. The most enlightening sections for me were the discussions of early socialists and of the American Conservation Movement (though an academic review, available online, complains about the omission of Richard T. Ely). There was also an extensive and interesting critique of Coase's Theorem, and it was nice to see J.K. Galbraith discussed at some length.

The author seems unsure of his audience level. The book is very sparse on citations for huge swaths, including the discussions of ancient history (where the one citation, @7, is not in the bibliography) and Marxism, among other topics. The result is a superficial and unverifiable narrative filled with questionable categories such as, in discussion of Mercantilism, "The third and most important group who desired a rise in the power of the Crown were the merchants..." (@9) - what Crown? which merchants? It would be nice if Kula were to mention what country or countries he's talking about, but he doesn't. Such a 1960s middle school textbook approach to writing history is totally out of place in a serious scholarly work written in 1998. On the other hand, while the book includes a glossary, you're assumed to understand "dead rents" and the difference between a "rent" and a "royalty". (The entry for "Free market economy", by the way, says simply "See Capitalism," where the term is never mentioned.)

Another problem is the interpolation of long passages, or even entire chapters, of irrelevant material. Though nominally a book about history of ideas, Kula drags in a lot of empirical data, such as on Marxism's environmental impact in Russia and China (again, mostly without citation; @ 59ff), and the entirety of Chapter 8, in which he considers statistics on resource scarcity. Chapter 11 is a superficial look at religious and other non-economic ways of thinking about the environment; but Kula fails to connect these to economic considerations, or show how economists have been influenced by these issues. Once again, no support is cited for many colorful assertions, e.g., that the Buddhist custom of cremation created wood shortages in China and "similar problems" in Japan (@175).

While the chapter on sustainable development does cite some 1990s vintage papers, one gets the feeling that most of the research for this book was completed more than 10 years before the book's publication. Few chapters contain cites later than 1990, and the 1970s weigh heavily. Kenneth Boulding's 1966 paper on "Spaceship Earth" and the Club of Rome get a great deal of attention. (Kula twice states, by the way, that Boulding was influenced by pictures of the whole earth from space (@ 129 & 200), but the first such photo was taken at least a year later, in November 1967.) Garrett Hardin's influential "Tragedy of the Commons" essay is nowhere mentioned, Robert Solow is briefly mentioned but never discussed, Herman Daly is in the bibliography but not discussed, and cost-benefit analysis is mentioned only in passing, in the context of sustainability.

Most important, the book lacks synthesis. The individual chapters rattle through various writers' views (occasionally with a critique of a particular writer); the summary chapter is merely a précis of the foregoing ones, without any attempt to put ideas into a larger context. Why have resource depletion models continued to dominate environmental economics for so long? What's the rhetorical impact of referring to pollution as an "externality"? Is there a thread uniting the past few centuries' proponents of technological whiggism, who claim that sooner or later we will solve all environmental problems with technology? Those kinds of questions aren't addressed, nor is the material in this book very helpful in illuminating them.

This is my first encounter with the "Routledge Studies in the History of Economics". I hope this book is an anomaly, because otherwise it doesn't auger well for the quality of its companions. And apropos of Routledge, one last point: This book was transferred to digital printing in 2006. You might think that this would make it easier to correct typos and outright errors (such as a reference to the rise of whale oil as an energy source in the "ninth [sic] century," @78); that benefit, at least, might compensate for the fuzzy print quality that soon wearies the eyes. But no such luck.