During the summer of 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro was hailed as a watershed moment in the ecology movement. Over 100 nations signed a new international treaty intended to conserve biological diversity. Yet, every day, species--many not even discovered--are driven into extinction and the ecological crisis continues to be a pressing global problem. Stressing the need to build bridges between the scientific community and international policymakers, Timothy Swanson here develops a new theory of the interplay between human society and the biological world. Biodiversity regulation, he argues, must focus specifically on the regulation of the global economic forces driving species into extinction. As the global development process becomes increasingly sophisticated, the spectre of a homogenized biosphere looms large. Yet, while biological diversity is responsible for a host of global benefits, it confers few tangible gains onto individual nations that offset the financial advantages of exploiting these same natural resources. The same economic rationale that drives farmers to grow coca leafs instead of grain compels countries to exploit natural resources, rather than conserve them. In order to stave off the decline of biological diversity, Swanson proposes the creation of specific policies that will internalize the benefits of biodiversity on a national level.

Product Description: Ivory is big business, and in some parts of Africa elephants have been hunted almost to extinction in the quest for it. The losses to African economies have been catastrophic. Now there is an international ban on the trade and conservation is...read more

Product Description: This volume assembles a group of eminent scholars to look at the problem of growth and environment from the perspective of environmental regulation. The questions addressed are: How does economic growth interact with regulation, and what are the best approaches to regulation in use today? The context for the volume is the current situation in China, where twenty years of rapid growth have created a situation in which there are both demands for environmental regulation and needs for choosing a future development path...read more

Product Description: This volume assembles a group of eminent scholars to look at the problem of growth and environment from the perspective of environmental regulation. The questions addressed are: How does economic growth interact with regulation, and what are the best approaches to regulation in use today? The context for the volume is the current situation in China, where twenty years of rapid growth have created a situation in which there are both demands for environmental regulation and needs for choosing a future development path...read more

Product Description: The environment has been exposed to a range of damaging contaminants from a wide variety of sources. Regulation of and legislation against offending parties has frequently been hampered because of the difficulty with cooperation among disparate disciplines in the natural, social and political sciences...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: How will the industrial changes implicit within new biotechnologies affect modern agriculture? This book investigates these changes and provides an economic analysis of the industrial and distributional impacts of new biotechnologies, addressing in detail the significant consequences for developing countries...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The advent of new biotechnologies implies significant changes in the world, both biologically and industrially. Biologically, these new technologies represent changes on a scale never before witnessed in the context of evolutionary systems...read more

Product Description: The ozone layer is threatened by chemical emissions, the climate is endangered from fossil fuels and deforestation, and global biodiversity is being lost by reason of thousands of years of habitat conversions. Global environmental problems arise out of the accumulated impacts from many years' and many countries' economic development...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The urgent need to ensure the conservation of biological diversity is now widely recognized, but practical measures to protect endangered species and habitats are still small-scale and generally limited to developed countries. This volume offers a detailed analysis of the economic and scientific rationales for biodiversity conservation...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The cause of global change has been the subject of heated debate in the past few years, especially in relation to climate change and biodiversity decline. However, a systematic explanation for changes in the biosphere at the global level has still not been found...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Economics of Environmental Degradation provides an institutional economics approach to analyse the underlying causes of continuing environmental degradation: poverty, population, poor policies and trade. After a critical, up-to-date survey of the most recent literature, the authors consider whether there is some common or deeper explanation of environmental degradation...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The urgent need to ensure the conservation of biological diversity is now widely recognized, but practical measures to protect endangered species and habitats are still small-scale and generally limited to developed countries. This volume offers a detailed analysis of the economic and scientific rationales for biodiversity conservation...read more

Essays discuss biodiversity, sustainable use of rainforests, wildlife tourism, and illegal exploitation

A collection of interrelated essays arguing that the best way to ensure the conservation of the wilds is an economic structure that fully values their resources. The book stresses a need for a sustainable utilization strategy of wild species and habitats.