Reference cited AN ECONOMIC SYSTEM BUILT ON ...

Books on the United States when so much remains to be discovered and protected in Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and the islands of the Pacific. Without diminishing the importance of protection elsewhere, Stein, Kutner, and Adams effectively demonstrate that the United States harbors an extraordinarily rich diversity of living things much in need of our attention. They show that the bumper sticker has it at least partially right: We should think globally, and not forget to act locally. KENT E. HOLSINGER Professor of Biology Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology University of Connecticut Storrs, CT 06269-3043 Editor’s note: Professor Holsinger has been a member of the Board of Trustees for the Connecticut Chapter of The Nature Conservancy since 1992 and has served as Vice-Chair for Science and Stewardship since 1997.

Reference cited Wilcove DS, Rothstein D, Dubow J, Phillips A, Losos E. 1998. Quantifying threats to imperiled species in the United States. BioScience 48: 607–615.

AN ECONOMIC SYSTEM BUILT ON EXCESS CONSUMPTION Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train: Errant Economists, Shameful Spenders, and a Plan to Stop Them All. Brian Czech. University of California Press. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2000. 210 pages. $22.50 (ISBN 0-520-22508-2 cloth)

hat the title to Shoveling Fuel leaves out, the picture on the dust jacket supplies: an out-of-control, off-the-tracks train with a dollar sign on its boiler, wildflowers in its cowcatcher, and blackened

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have ensured a volume full of useful individual contributions. But they did not stop with securing useful individual contributions. They also ensured that each chapter fits securely into the book’s overarching theme so that it reads more like a book produced by a single, extraordinarily capable individual than one that is the product of 28 independent-minded contributors. In an effort to make the book accessible to nonprofessionals, every chapter begins with an anecdote illustrating the principles developed in the rest of the chapter. Professionals often scoff at this tactic, but by making abstract principles concrete the authors and editors help make difficult concepts much more accessible to the lay public. No book is perfect, but it is difficult to find flaws in this one. In fact, I can think of only one. The intended audience for this book seems to be primarily the interested lay public. However, the chapters on species diversity, conservation status of species, geographic patterns of diversity and imperilment, and the diversity and status of ecological systems in the United States offer more sophisticated and detailed information than all but the most ardent amateur conservationists will be able and willing to digest. At the same time, these chapters lack some critical parts of the technical apparatus (formal statistical tests, for example) that would make them useful as primary references for professionals. Similarly, the chapters arguing for the importance of biodiversity within the United States and describing the tools and techniques for biodiversity inventory seem directed more toward nonprofessionals unfamiliar with herbaria, museums, and the Natural Heritage Network than toward the conservation professionals who will be best able to appreciate the sophisticated analyses presented in the book. Some readers may question the book’s emphasis on the central importance of the Natural Heritage Network in conservation assessment and planning, but any book with the scope and ambition of this one is sure to reflect the interests and experience of its authors. Others may question its focus

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ated by the vast majority. He interprets the more popular literature of ecological economists and argues that at least some of them accept environmental limits and promote a steady-state economy. And he draws on the work of an early rebel economist and a psychologist to explain how we are all captives to an economic system built on excess consumption. I would like to include a fourth contribution, but we will come to that. After an interesting personal introduction, Czech provides an overview of the place of growth and macroeconomics within neoclassical economics (chapters 2 and 3). He then confronts the arguments of Jack Kemp (chapter 4) and Julian Simon (chapter 5) to document how economic reasoning leads us astray. Mr. Kemp, of course, is best known for having played football rather than having learned economics, before going into politics. Nevertheless, Kemp’s political career and campaign for the presidency of the United States provide a rich source

of quotes documenting how the reasoning of economists translates to political rhetoric and policy. Growth is the answer to every question, and it matters little how or whose consumption grows. Julian Simon, an outspoken technological optimist with considerably less attachment to nature than the economists I know, was also on the fringes of the economics profession. He is most famous for arguing that we need rapid population growth, for the frequency of Einsteinlike brains, which are critical for saving humanity through science, is very low. Czech adroitly exposes how Simon selected and misrepresented facts, relied on popular sources of information as if they were scientific, and twisted his logic to reach distorted conclusions about ecosystem resilience and resource abundance. He less successfully tries to identify why the vast majority of economists, many of whom are far more concerned about the human condition than Kemp and Simon, allow the extremists to prevail in public discourse. Scientific revolutions are difficult, and even more so in a discipline in which “ordinary science” supports powerful economic interests. In chapters 6 and 7, Czech gives an overview of the historical development of ecological economics and the difficulties of making it politically potent. By predilection, he focuses on a carrying-capacity view of the human dilemma and selects ecological economists such as Herman Daly and Robert Costanza as paradigmatic examples. Daly and Costanza have very effectively made the case for accepting ecological limits and resource scarcity; they were critical to the founding of the field. No single (or even two) ecological economist, however, can represent the wide array of thought in this emerging field. Czech presents a good “lay” introduction to ecological economics, but he by no means does justice to the range of thought. Czech’s third contribution is to draw on economist Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, written early in the last century, and on Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of human needs” to explain (chapter 7) how we have developed an economic system in which consumption feeds upon consumption without

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forests in the background. I am not sure about the lunatic man with a shovel coming out of the smokestack—probably an economist. The back cover shows a coal shovel full of cute animals. This is not your typical, staid academic publication, but neither the University of California Press nor the author of this volume makes apologies. Brian Czech is a conservation biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. He knows that other species are not the problem, he has delved deeply enough into economics to see that it lacks a concept of carrying capacity, and he has written a heavily charged exposé of economic growth. In a crisp, personal, and highly amusing style, he effectively conveys both rage and insights into economic thinking. Shoveling Fuel is fun to read. Dr. Czech makes three significant contributions. He documents how arguments favoring materially wasteful economic growth are actively promoted by a few economists and passively toler-

Books Czech strives for a fourth contribution, a path to a solution. Here I find his argument unconvincing. Dividing the world’s people into “liquidating,” steadystate, and amorphic classes, and then proposing that the steady-staters put social pressure on the others, allows some amusing commentary. What I find frustrating is that Czech argues for social pressure to the utter exclusion of other approaches for dealing with indiscriminate consumption. Surely social pressure has been undervalued in past reform movements, but to argue that social pressure must precede ecological taxes, for example, because there is not sufficient support for them is to deny the ecological taxes we already have and existing interest in strengthening them. To argue that we need social pressure because we cannot wait for “the full academic development of ecological economics” is to deny the importance of the new discipline’s development to date: His own analysis is rooted in ecological economics, and further development of the

discipline could surely be spurred through a reallocation of funds. Surely, to lay new tracks and slow down the train, we need to harness all possible approaches, most of which will reinforce one another. I highly recommend Shoveling Fuel as a college text for environmental studies courses and an optional reading for high school students. It provides a stimulating argument for all concerned with environmental sustainability. Indeed, it is a great book for electrifying classroom discussions, and it will undoubtedly figure in the debate in various arenas about the future well being of the Earth and ourselves.

RICHARD B. NORGAARD Energy and Resources Program and Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics University of California Berkeley, California 94720–3050

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end or even direction. After the basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter, we all seek a sense of identity, respect, and dignity. Our social system does not provide these intangibles, while our economic system keeps telling us that our emptiness can be filled only by buying and owning more goods. Thus the race to consume is sustained. Czech also documents the importance of “display” in the social hierarchies of other species, noting that technology limits the ability of other species to let display lead to abuse of the environment. He reviews a multitude of other explanations for the overall failure to check consumption, including our inability to see how our consumption affects the distant poor or people yet to be born. Moreover, he maintains that prices of the market system can never adequately provide signals to manage the complexity of ecological interconnectedness. He identifies many critical components in his analysis of overconsumption, but a sophisticated integration is still lacking.