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Environmental Economics and Responsibility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

David Sarokin  and
Jay Schulkin
David Sarokin
Affiliation:
Office of Pesticides & Toxic Substances, US Environmental Protection Agency, 401 M Street SW, Washington, DC 20460, USA
Jay Schulkin
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Behavioral Neurosciences, Risk & Decision Processes Center, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-6366, USA.
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Extract

We are optimistic about the ability of our social institutions to respond to the challenges of environmental degradation, but recognize that (a) restoring environmental quality to a world inclined towards rapidly-increasing consumption of resources and generation of wastes will require profound institutional changes, and (b) environmental challenges cannot be separated from the global-scale issue of achieving an equitable distribution of resources. Conventional economics practically ignores environmental consequences, and is inadequate to the challenge of environmental restoration. A new way of ‘doing business’ is called for.

Three industries — energy, agriculture, and automobiles — have a responsibility to become the avant garde of global environmentalism, owing to the large toll which they exact in resource utilization and pollution, and for the almost universal role that each of these industries plays in the planet's diverse societies. In order to effect changes of an appropriate magnitude, these industries will need to reorient their priorities and goals — as will the institutions with which they routinely interact, including governments, research and development, and financial institutions.

Type
Main Papers
Information
Environmental Conservation , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , Winter 1992 , pp. 326 - 330
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation for Environmental Conservation 1992

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