Publisher's Synopsis
"When our descendants look back at the last part of the 20th century, and now at the beginning of the 21st, we want them to be able to say: "That's when they began to take the degradation of the natural environment, with its threats to human life and the life of the planet, seriously." Furthermore, we would like them to be able to see that around this time we took serious steps to halt and reverse this process. This book is an introduction to environmental econom-ics, one way of approaching the steps that need to be taken. It's about the way human decisions affect the quality of the environment, how human values and institutions shape our demands for improvement in the quality of that envi-ronment, and, most especially, about how to design effective public policies to bring about these improvements. Problems of environmental quality are not something new; in fact, history is filled with bleak examples of environ-mental degradation, from
