A new baby is on the way and this little girl, who was used to being the only child with all the attention, worries what will happen to life as she knows it. While her parents seem glad, she feels kind of sad and says to herself, “What will this do to me and our family of just us three?”At first, when her brother Cameron is born, she doesn’t want him to stay and keeps asking when he will go away. She wasn’t ready to share her toys or her parents. Over time, she realizes that having ...

Economic Theory for Environmentalists is a much-needed and heralded new book that examines the implications of neoclassical economic theory and how it relates to the environment and environmental activity. It addresses the ongoing conflict between market forces and environmental integrity and explains how neoclassical economic theory views the relationship between economic activity and the natural world. Each chapter outlines the concepts of economic theory and the relevance of its environ...

Citizens expect their governments to lead on sustainability. But from largely disappointing international conferences like Rio II to the U.S.’s failure to pass meaningful climate legislation, governments’ progress has been lackluster. That’s not to say leadership is absent; it just often comes from the bottom up rather than the top down. Action—on climate, species loss, inequity, and other sustainability crises—is being driven by local, people’s, women’s, and grassroots movements around th...

For roughly 99% of their existence on earth, Homo sapiens lived in small bands of semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, finding everything they needed to survive and thrive in the biological richness that surrounded them. Most if not all of the problems that threaten our own technologically advanced society -- from depletion of natural capital to the ever-present possibility of global annihilation -- would be inconceivable to these traditional, immediate-return societies. In fact, hunter...

S.J. thinks he’s very lucky when he finds a toy dump truck in a sandbox. The next day, he finds a boat at the pool! In both cases, other children want what he has, but S.J. won’t let them play with his newfound toys. He wants them all to himself.Then, one day at the beach, S.J. tries to build a sandcastle without any luck. When other kids come by to help, S.J. learns a very important lesson. Sharing is better than playing alone. By sharing, he makes brand new friends and has tons of...

The world's leading economies are facing not just one but many crises. The financial meltdown may not be over, climate change threatens major global disruption, economic inequality has reached extremes not seen for a century, and government and business are widely distrusted. At the same time, many people regret the consumerism and social corrosion of modern life. What these crises have in common, Diane Coyle argues, is a reckless disregard for the future--especially in the way the economy...

Since the financial crisis of 2008, many of us have had to reexamine our beliefs about markets and globalization. How integrated should economies really be? How much regulation is right?Many people fuse these two dimensions of choice into one, either favoring both globalization and deregulation-or opposing both of them.It doesn’t have to be that way.In World 3.0, award-winning author and economist Pankaj Ghemawat reveals the folly in both of these responses...

A new edition of a book that takes a comprehensive look at the ways economic processes affect global environmental outcomes.This comprehensive and accessible book fills the need for a political economy view of global environmental politics, focusing on the ways international economic processes affect environmental outcomes. It examines the main actors and forces shaping global environmental management, particularly in the developing world. Moving beyond the usual e...

Too Many People? provides a clear, well-documented, and popularly written refutation of the idea that "overpopulation" is a major cause of environmental destruction, arguing that a focus on human numbers not only misunderstands the causes of the crisis, it dangerously weakens the movement for real solutions.No other book challenges modern overpopulation theory so clearly and comprehensively, providing invaluable insights for the layperson and environmental scholars alike.

Countries worldwide are struggling to imitate the industrial prowess of the East Asian pacesetters, but growth accelerations have proven remarkably transient. Building a portfolio of tradable goods and services and steadily raising the level of investment in these activities, has generally defied the best policy efforts - in particular, bringing investment ratios on par with East Asian averages has presented the greatest challenge. Hence the search is on for growth recipes not so tightly boun...

Every day, we are presented with a range of “sustainable” products and activities—from “green” cleaning supplies to carbon offsets—but with so much labeled as “sustainable,” the term has become essentially sustainababble, at best indicating a practice or product slightly less damaging than the conventional alternative. Is it time to abandon the concept altogether, or can we find an accurate way to measure sustainability? If so, how can we achieve it? And if not, how can we best pr...

In this third volume of his award-winning American Crisis series, James Gustave Speth makes his boldest and most ambitious contribution yet. He looks unsparingly at the sea of troubles in which the United States now finds itself, charts a course through the discouragement and despair commonly felt today, and envisions what he calls America the Possible, an attractive and plausible future that we can still realize.The book identifies a dozen features of the American political econom...