PREVIEW

Re-Thinking Green: Alternatives to Environmental Bureaucracy (Book/ Paperback)

Product Overview

Environmental quality has been a major public concern since the first Earth Day in 1970, yet the maze of environmental laws and regulations enacted since then has fostered huge government bureaucracies better known for waste and failure than for innovation and success.

In Re-Thinking Green: Alternatives to Environmental Bureaucracy, twenty-two economists, political scientists, and philosophers show how environmental quality can be enhanced more effectively by relying less on government agencies that are increasingly politicized and unaccountable and more on environmental entrepreneurship and the strict enforcement of private-property rights.

Many of our current environmental policies have been highly ineffective, costly, and harmful to our liberal legal and political traditions, argue the book’s editors, Robert Higgs and Carl P. Close, in chapter 1. Unless we are mindful of the incentives and constraints of the political process—and reform our public policies accordingly—the problem of government failure in environmental policy will continue, they explain.

Part 1: The Seeds of Environmental Bureaucracy
Part 2: Global Issues
Part 3: Endangered Species
Part 4: Entrepreneurship, Property Rights, and Land Use
Part 5: Urban Environments
Part 6: By-products of Environmental Bureaucracy
Part 7: Debating Market-Based Environmentalism
Part 8: Environmental Philosophy

Re-Thinking Green concludes with critiques of two philosophical doctrines that promote environmental bureaucracy. In chapter 21 philosopher Loren Lomasky defends the automobile against the charge that it fosters social alienation and explains eloquently how cars help individuals direct the course of their own lives.

Finally, “existence value” (the theoretical value attached to knowing that wildlife and wilderness exist somewhere in a pristine condition, unspoiled by man) is scrutinized by Robert H. Nelson in chapter 22. Nelson argues that despite its scientific veneer, this concept is highly problematic and is rooted in a fundamentalist environmental theology.

About the Author(s)