Customer Reviews

Green, Inc.: A Guide To Business And The Environment

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Cairncross is pleasingly cogent, as befits a former writer for the Economist. Environmental topics can be fraught with fuzzy-minded-ness, posturing, and blaming others. Cairncross, in contrast, discusses topics in a gentle, direct, well-rounded, and practically sensible tone. By framing environmental topics in the light of economics, she provides strong insights. This should be a book that can be looked back at 50 years hence for wise nuggets. Publishing this book redounds to the credit of Island Press.
The last chapter provides policy advice to governments. There are many wise points along the way. For instance: "because links between pollution and damage are often difficult to establish beyond a reasonable doubt, environmentalists have increasingly pressed governments to adopt the so-called precautionary principle...even if pollution kills people, is that a good enough reason to prevent it? Not necessarily...the chances of dying from some kinds of pollution are so small that a wise government should simply ignore them." Counter-intuitive to the layman, but sensible, because the environment holds detectable residues of most substances used by man.
Cairncross points to fish stocks as endangered, since not privately owned. Government policies that distort prices of energy or water can be wasteful.
This book offered encouragement to industry about how to serve goals for environmental quality. Now, a decade later, industry tends to be more disposed to do so. Today's challenges are often in the realm of identifying apt goals or means. Many purport to be green, but appraising a fog of competing claims about green-ness is becoming ever more important. For industry to contribute practically, environmental goals need to be well-founded.

Haven't had the chnace to procure the book, but since the central theme is quite close to my research interest, I am commenting on the basis of the Tableof Contenets and other books by the same author; ewhich seem pretty impressive in terms of the title / subject matter. The sale of 130,000 copies is equally impressive. ( Costing Earth..) I haven't kept uptodate in my readings the way I should, but this particular/ unique area has not been covered very often- not in the focus Ms Cairncross has taken - which also coincides with my personal interest. My comments could only be superficial at this point, not having had the chance to leaf through the book, as yet. Might rush to the library and cram it into my reading (Must) list. Quite obviously, Ms Cairncross has probably picked up the interest from working with the Economist - and an interest in the environment, sooner or later evolved into an understanding of the intertwining of these two issues. It would really be intersting to see the actual ideas flow on from this choice of topic. The Table of Contents provided a good size catalogue of issues, which is a bit distracting to the succinct treatment of the central theme of the book - if one was intended, or rather, if the obvious ( as spelled out by the title of the book )theme was the focal point of the flow of new (?) ideas. There was a tendency towards the end of the book to attempt to cover all topics in the fear of neglect an issue. this had an unfortunate effect of distracting away from the main focal theme. The conclusion could bear one or belie this observation. in any case keep up the good work along this ' uniquely ' important topic. aidylcottage@usa.net. Would be interested to get in touch with the author to further discuss this commentary.