The theory of efficient markets, when applied beyond financial markets, is proposed by those who bridle against government regulation of business. Their idea is that markets will punish bad behavior of individual firms or even whole industries and thus create incentives for firms to produce goods and services without harming employees, consumers, or the environment. […]
We went for the first time this year to the Orono Bog Boardwalk on Monday morning. This is an absolute gem of a resource for the Penobscot Valley community, giving people easy access to a part of our Acadian landscape that is not often so easily visited. If you have never been there you will […]
Let’s start with two facts. First, the human population continues to change in unprecedented ways how the Earth’s systems function. Originally this was called global warming. The realization that changes in the global climate included more than just temperature changes led to use of the term climate change. Now we understand that more in nature […]
If you have read Stirring the Pot blog very much (thank you), you will have noticed two persistent themes — inequality and the environment. Examples of bogs on inequality include: Class Warfare? Shame on Us The Crisis of Our Age: Part II Welfare Economics Among those on environmental issues are: When Did We Stop Worrying […]
For the past few weeks we have heard a Northern Bobwhite singing in our neighborhood. This is a bird we associate with Southern New England, so we were surprised to hear it in Eastern Maine. My first thought was, here is yet another bird whose range has moved north in response to climate change, a […]
Before last weekend, the last time I had spent any time on Maine’s Southern beaches was a field trip for a geology class in my first year of college (don’t ask the year). Professor Hussey used the trip to immerse us in the patterns of coastal geology. In early April we spent a couple of […]
I first encountered the idea that the future was something one could study in 1971 from historian Roger Howell Jr. In one way or another, thinking about the future informed much that I have written about since, including here in Stirring the Pot. In my way of thinking about the future, I believe there should […]
In the environmental debates of the 1970s, one common name hurled at environmentalists was to call them “neo-Malthusians.” This dismissive insult was meant to imply that the concern for environmental issues was nothing more than the contemporary application of the failed analysis of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834). Malthus was a classical economist in the tradition of […]
In the last two decades of the 20th Century, environmental economists made tremendous strides in developing techniques to measure economic values when there are no markets (they call these “non-market valuation”). These efforts grew out of the criticism of the environmental statutes adopted in the 1970s like the Clean Air Act or the Endangered Species […]
In Henry Beston’s eloquent classic of nature writing, The Outermost House, he worried about the decline in birds he was seeing on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. Even in the 1920s when he spent his year on the Beach, humans were adversely impacting birds and other parts of nature. Beston identified a “new” danger: […]
