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THE ENVIRONMENTAL TURN IN NATURAL RESOURCE ECONOMICS: JOHN KRUTILLA AND “CONSERVATION RECONSIDERED”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2019

H. Spencer Banzhaf
H. Spencer Banzhaf*
Affiliation:
Professor, Dept. of Economics, Georgia State University, PO Box 3992, Atlanta, GA 30302. [email protected]
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Abstract

Environmentalism in the United States historically has been divided into its utilitarian and preservationist impulses, represented by Gifford Pinchot and John Muir, respectively. Pinchot advocated conservation of natural resources to be used for human purposes; Muir advocated protection from humans, for nature’s own sake. In the first half of the twentieth century, natural resource economics was firmly in Pinchot’s side of that schism. That position began to change as the postwar environmental movement gained momentum. In particular, John Krutilla, an economist at Resources for the Future, pushed economics to the point that it could embrace Muir’s vision as well as Pinchot’s. Krutilla argued that if humans preferred a preserved state to a developed one, then such preferences were every bit as “economic.” Either way, there were opportunity costs and an economic choice to be made.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 27 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2019 

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Footnotes

I thank Kerry Krutilla for very helpful discussions. I also thank Kerry Smith, Charlie Cicchetti, and Polly Cleveland for helpful comments, plus participants at the 2015 History of Economics Society meetings, the 2016 ASSA meetings, and seminars at Duke University, Resources for the Future, and Yale University. Finally, I thank Lynn Toscano at the SUNY Stony Brook University Libraries for assistance with the Environmental Defense Fund archives.

References

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