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Only Summaries:
This is a wonderful collection of essays and the introductory sections are very informative, however the complete essays are not included, only 2-3 summaries written by the editors. This may not be clear from the information given by Amazon.com. The essays are the some of the best in the field and the summaries well written. But, the overall usefulness of this book is limited. It may be a good starting point for research; readers will quickly find themselves wanting the full text of some of the essays summarized. It may also be a useful study guide for students who have read many of the complete articles and would like a quick summary that is more complete then a usual journal abstract. Beyond that, this is not a helpful book. I would recommend Ecological Economics: The Science and Management of Sustainability by Robert Costanza, which contains many of the same articles and other works by many of the same authors. This book is priced much lower than other collections of essays in Ecological Economics, but considering it does not contain full articles it should probably be even cheaper.
One to have !:
As a student in environmental economics at masters-level, i must say that this essay collection has come as rain from a blue sky. Essay collections in general is a great thing, and indeed there is a few of reccommendation behind from this one. But two things stands out from this one. Firstly in embraces a vast number of articles which rightly belongs to the "classics" category. And unfortunately such articles are sometimes hard to come by, and a number of the article included in this collection has not, to my knowledge, been published before. Therefore the book is excellent as a reference collection. Furthermore the structure of the book, is made up in such a way, that the articles are printed under a thematic heading. And the editors has managed to provide some excellent introductions to each new subject, which mean that the reader, even though he's not capable of grasping the essence of all the collected essays, at least get a fair idea of the problems involved. In all, this means this collection, apart from being an important reference book, is providing a very comprehensive way of making essay collections in general. So all five stars are indeed well deserved.
Analytical summaries of the best of the literature:
The Frontier Issues in Economic Thought summaries, along with the overview essays, provide a markedly different service from the standard collection of abstracts. The series will benefit not only scholarly work but the application of our best thinking to the problems of the times. Kenneth Prewit, President, Social Sciences Research Council
A new paradigm of economic thought for the 21st century:
I worked for many years in Central America as a correspondent for the Financial Times and as an economist have felt frustrated at what I increasingly perceived as a yawning gap in economic, political, and philosophical thought, that was preventing our increasingly globalized world from facing the huge challenges of unemployment, poverty, and environmental catastrophe that seem to lay ahead. A SURVEY OF ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS has helped fill that gap for me, and has given me optimism that we are not too late to do something about these issues. The book is exactly what I have been looking for and has helped define for me at least what I believe could be the basis of a new paradigm of economic thought for the 21st century.
A comprehensive and systematic survey:
Although I did not understand this during my college years -- nor, I suspect, did the economists who wrote the texts I used -- economics has a key role to play in the urgent quest for a path toward sustainability. A SURVEY OF ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS is an extremely important record of how economics is beginning to collaborate with other disciplines to contribute to that quest, as well as to other essential inquiries into the manner in which people interact with each other and with the world around them. The editors have searched the literature in many different fields to find keynote articles which extend economic thinking into new areas. Unifying the whole contents of the book -- the overview essays of the editors, and their summaries of about 85 selected papers -- is the underlying theme that new methods must be found which will improve the quality of human lives. This purposeful use of the economic perspective to be of service in the quest for broad environmental and social improvement and for alternatives to the status quo is tremendously valuable. This book serves a unique purpose for me, and I suspect for many other readers. I am certain that I would never personally perform the literature searches which the editors have undertaken. The summaries and overview essays are an efficient way to introduce me to material that is far from my own discipline of training. Without this series I would not have access to the important papers, both current and historical, which are presented and interpreted in A SURVEY OF ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS and its companion volumes in the "Frontier Issues in Economic Thought" series. Steven Katona President, College of the Atlantic Bar Harbor, Maine
| Binding: | Paperback | | Dewey Decimal Number: | 338.9 | | EAN: | 9781559634113 | | Edition: | 1 | | ISBN: | 1559634111 | | Number Of Pages: | 423 | | Publication Date: | 1995-09-01 |
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