By Lester Brown. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 352 pages; $27.95 hardcover; $15.95 paperback. Also available for free online by downloading individual chapters in PDF format at www.earthpolicy.org.
Reviewed by Alex Wilson
Eco-Economy is, arguably, one of the most important books of the past several years. It is not only a book you should buy and read, but it is a book you should purchase extra copies of to give to policy makers, educators, corporate executives, and friends! Despite some redundancy, particularly in the early chapters, it is an engaging and inspiring book.
Eco-Economy was written by Lester Brown, a well-known author and founder (in 1974) of the Worldwatch Institute. In 2000, Brown retired as president of Worldwatch and a year later founded the Earth Policy Institute.
In Eco-Economy, Brown does three things very well. First, he lays out the extent of the damage we are wreaking on the global environment; his ability to present a huge amount of information very succinctly is remarkable. Second, he paints an uplifting picture of what a sustainable economy—an eco-economy—will look like. This will be an economy, according to Brown, in which the value of ecosystems is considered just as significant as gross national product and other conventional measures of economic performance. It is an economy that will be powered by solar energy (including wind) and hydrogen.
Third, Brown explains how we might make the transition to an eco-economy. This is the most valuable part of the book—at least for readers already schooled in issues of environmental degradation. One of the most important strategies Brown outlines is tax shifting. Suggesting that making changes in our personal lifestyles is critically important but not enough, Brown argues that "we have to change the system. And to do that, we need to restructure the tax system, reducing income taxes and increasing taxes on environmentally destructive activities so that prices reflect the ecological truth." Fortunately, this is an argument that can appeal not only to environmentalists, but also to a wide political spectrum.
Alex Wilson is founder and editor of Environmental Building News in Brattleboro, Vermont (www.BuildingGreen.com). He adapted this review from one he wrote for the January 2002 issue of that newsletter.
NESEA Network