Accounting for Mother Nature: Changing Demands for Her Bounty

In the face of growing pressure on our natural landscapes and increasingly bitter conflict over their management and use, simply defending the status quo is not enough. Finding a balance between producing commodities, such as lumber, and maintaining amenities, such as open space, is crucial if we hope to promote environmental stewardship and healthy economies. Accounting for Mother Nature brings together experts with wide-ranging experience to provide a comprehensive examination of the critical debate around the management of scarce natural resources.

The contributors to this volume consider how unconstrained use of nature’s bounty had lead not only to damage and waste, but also to divisive conflict. With a focus particularly on the American West, this volume examines the often-negative outcomes of government’s management of land and natural resources. In turn, the contributors explore the role that private individuals and organizations can play in protecting natural and agrarian landscapes.

Through its detailed analyses, Accounting for Mother Nature makes the case for innovation within the private nonprofit sector and marks out new frontiers for research.

Terry L. Anderson is the Executive Director of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC); Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; and Professor Emeritus at Montana State University. His work with Donald Leal helped launch the idea of ＂free market environmentalism.＂ Anderson is the author or editor of thirty books, including the most recent, Self-Determination The Other Path for Native Americans (2006), coedited with Bruce L. Benson and Thomas E. Flanagan. Laura E. Huggins is a research fellow and Director of Development with PERC, as well as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. Huggins is the author, along with Terry L. Anderson, of Property Rights: A Practical Guide to Freedom and Prosperity (2003).Thomas Michael Power is Professor of Economics and Chair of the Economics Department at the University of Montana. He specializes in natural resource and environmental economics and their relationship to local and regional development. He is author of five books including Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies: The Search for Value of Place (1996) and Post-Cowboy Economics: Pay and Prosperity in the New American West (2001).