Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- About the Authors
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- 1 The Nature of Endangered Species Protection
- PART 1 BIOLOGICAL NEEDS
- 2 Endangered Thought, Political Animals
- 3 A Market Solution for Preserving Biodiversity: The Black Rhino
- 4 Extinction, Recovery, and the Endangered Species Act
- 5 Some Economic Questions about the Biology of Biodiversity Protection: Comments on Gibbons, Brown and Layton, and Beissinger and Perrine
- PART 2 POLITICAL REALITIES
- PART 3 ECONOMIC CHOICES
- PART 4 SUMMARY AND DATABASE
- Index
5 - Some Economic Questions about the Biology of Biodiversity Protection: Comments on Gibbons, Brown and Layton, and Beissinger and Perrine
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- About the Authors
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- 1 The Nature of Endangered Species Protection
- PART 1 BIOLOGICAL NEEDS
- 2 Endangered Thought, Political Animals
- 3 A Market Solution for Preserving Biodiversity: The Black Rhino
- 4 Extinction, Recovery, and the Endangered Species Act
- 5 Some Economic Questions about the Biology of Biodiversity Protection: Comments on Gibbons, Brown and Layton, and Beissinger and Perrine
- PART 2 POLITICAL REALITIES
- PART 3 ECONOMIC CHOICES
- PART 4 SUMMARY AND DATABASE
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
The three chapters the editors asked me to review are composed by specialists in biology, economics, and the law, but each casts its presentation in a multi-disciplinary mold. Though the chapters are heterogeneous in intent and in content, the authors apparently could not make personal sense of the bio-diversity issue without mixing their own discipline with other disciplines. Either they needed the other knowledge to implement their own knowledge or they could not resist the temptation that the biodiversity issue offers to fudge traditional disciplinary boundaries. This notion that a multidisciplinary perspective is the optimal way to think about environmental issues currently pervades both scientific and policy discussions (Arrow et al. 1995). Environmental issues are said to be broader than the content of any academic discipline. Federal funding of environmental research says so. Disciplinary mixing is therefore thought necessary to develop knowledge that will help society systemize and resolve these issues.
The form of disciplinary mixing differs widely among the three chapters. In Chapter 4, Bessinger and Perrine offer incidental remarks on morally appropriate worldviews toward the environment and on the design of environmental preservation incentive systems as they use their biological expertise to review succinctly the United States' biodiversity experience under its Endangered Species Act (ESA). In Chapter 2, a delightfully written essay, Gibbons, a lawyer with high profile, frontline federal and state bureaucratic experience in developing and implementing United States' environmental and land-use policies, artfully integrates an impressive array of biological, economic, and historical-political learning to compare the extent to which the ESA and its implementation on the ground reflect the public interest or the special interest theories of government.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Protecting Endangered Species in the United StatesBiological Needs, Political Realities, Economic Choices, pp. 72 - 88Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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