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sal. The following chapter uses the framework of chapter 8 to describe a real-world example of recovery of an endangered species, namely, the black-footed ferret in South Dakota. In chapter 10 the problem of dynamic pest management is addressed. Chapter 11 deals with a nested-sched-ule model of stormflow. Because of the dynamic complexity, all the models in this part of the book use the cellular management variable definitions. All in all, part 3 provides some interesting insights into the spatial processes that take place in forest ecosystems.
Part 4 presents an ecological – economic per-spective on optimising the distribution of diverse habitat types. This is perhaps the most interesting part of the book for ecological economists as it focuses on capturing considerations such as bio-logical diversity and sustainability in objective functions. Chapter 12 develops specific species-richness objective functions. It examines the prob-lem of allocating habitat types to species so as to optimise species richness and equity. Chapter 13 provides an analysis of optimised species-richness equilibria that are sustainable over the long term. Regrettably, the authors do not treat genetic di-versity, although they are aware of the fact that several recent papers have discussed methods for using measurements of genetic distances between species to construct an overall measure of genetic diversity.
Chapter 14 attempts to step back and synthe-sise the variety of material on spatial optimisation in the four different parts of the book. The au-thors express the ultimate hope that the book provides some small impetus for integrated mod-elling using optimisation methods.
This unique book is designed as an ideal intro-duction to the new field of spatial optimisation in the management of ecosystems for ecologists, con-servation biologists and advanced undergraduate and graduate students of ecology and resource management. Despite the evident importance of this approach, the mathematical presentation may be hard to absorb by some readers of the book. On the other hand, mathematics is balanced with simple examples and plain and illuminating figures. These make it possible to skip the math and still understand the general idea. This book
not only serves natural scientists, but also pro-vides a tour of the field for economists. Any of the methods described in parts 1 – 3 can be easily extended with economic objective functions to come up with integrated models for capturing spatial relationships in ecosystems. As an economist, I found the fourth part especially in-formative, as it explores how to deal with non-economic objective functions.
C. Martijn van der Heide Department of Spatial Economics, Free Uni6ersity,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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Pri7ileged Goods:Commoditization and its Impact
on En7ironment and Society, Edited by Jack P. Manno, 2000. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, 267 pp. ISBN 1-566-70390-5
An ongoing debate in ecological economics concerns the degree to which the value of goods and services of nature — natural capital — can be captured and made apparent to people. In this interesting and potentially controversial book, Jack Manno argues that much of natural capital, like much of social capital, is undervalued because it cannot be turned into marketable commodities. Although this is hardly news for either economists or ecologists, Manno develops a thesis that never-theless provides new insight into why economies have increasingly marginalized many aspects of nature and society. It also means that the path to sustainable development will be a tough one to pursue.
According to this thesis, all things can be di-vided up along a gradient of ‘commodity poten-tial’. Items and processes that have high commodity potential (HCP) share certain charac-teristics which make them easier to package, mar-ket, and sell than those with low commodity potential (LCP). Because of this, the HCP goods and services are ‘privileged’ or favored by market economies, and receive disproportionately higher
Book re6iew 537 inputs of research and development, promotion,
etc. Conversely, LCP goods and services are con-sistently underprivileged, so that it becomes difficult for these to be appreciated, stewarded, and used sensibly. The process of privileging goods is a selection process, similar to natural selection in evolutionary biology.
The key properties of commodities that make their manufacture and exchange so successful in modern economies include the ability to assign sole ownership; mobility in the sense of ease of packaging and transport; and universality of use and interest. American culture, for example, can be commoditized and sold globally through films and music, or through products such as Levi jeans and Coca-Cola. Other aspects of commodi-tization have down sides for environmental sus-tainability: HCPs are generally energy- and capital-intensive to develop and manufacture, and whereas their sales show up in GNP ac-counts, their environmental and social costs do not. LCPs are often most valuable in a local context, which limits their appeal as items of trade. Furthermore, LCPs tend to require more specific knowledge: the organic farmer needs to know about nutrient cycles and properties of the farm’s soil and drainage, whereas an industrial farmer solves the problem by purchasing and applying remotely-produced fertilizers and irriga-tors. Both forms of agriculture produce food, but the former does it with much lower investment in, and returns to, the monied economy. There-fore, argues Manno, many more dollars are put into research and development for the latter be-cause of the eventual economic gains, and or-ganic farming remains a marginal activity. In Chapter 4, Manno goes through several examples of how commoditization distorts development of various societal sectors, including agriculture, medicine and health care, pollution control, en-ergy and transportation, and even science and academia. In each case, those goods and services that are more amenable to identifying property rights, mass-producing, packaging, and sales are favored over others that are not.
After introductory chapters that develop the fundamental concepts of commoditization as an evolutionary and selective phenomenon, Manno
goes on to explore some of the institutional roots, social costs, and pathways out of com-moditized ways of life. The review of the history of institutions (Chapter 6), co-authored with Alex Antypas, is a little out of step with the rest of the book because it does not build on the theme of how goods are privileged, but neverthe-less is a nice pre´cis of economic history and probably should have been introduced earlier. I found the chapter on oppression through com-moditization (chapter5) to be far more interest-ing in terms of showinterest-ing commoditization as a driving force leading to colonialism and extinc-tion of LCP ways of life. This, linked with his final chapter which suggests a ‘road map’ toward sustainability, is where Manno’s political stripes almost come out. He argues that improved effi-ciency in producing commodities will not get us off the trend of increased consumption, but rather we must develop ‘policy wedges’ that both conserve resources and encourage ‘…actions and behaviors that lead to voluntary simplicity and lower levels of individual consumption’ (p. 207). Manno looks deeply into an increased role for government, and how, through participatory democracy, to build a social movement away from the system of privileging goods.
This book would be a useful introduction for people interested in some of the socio-political and economic aspects of the development of the current economic system. It turns some of the standard thinking around and examines econom-ics from a nontraditional perspective, drawing heavily on systems ecology. I could easily see the book being used in a graduate-level seminar or perhaps an upper-level undergraduate seminar on ecological economics, markets, and consumption. There are unfortunately a number of irritations that should have been caught in producing this book, e.g. some poorly formatted tables that are difficult to read, a graph or two with insufficient explanation, and typographical errors scattered about.
There is enough ecology and systems analysis in Pri6ileged Goods to qualify it as a kind of
ecology text, and perhaps enough social science to qualify it as a book about political economy. But it is more than that: it is a man’s reflections,
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at times passionate, on the consequences of com-moditizable, consumable things — as drivers of economic patterns that serve as drivers of human societies, which drive changes in the environment. Much asI admire his spirit, I think Manno’s pre-scription (Chapter 8, ‘Toward a coordinated de-commoditization strategy’) will be a difficult one to follow as long as free-market societies are wedded to neoclassical economic theory.
Karin E. Limburg SUNY College of En6ironmental Science and Forestry,
Syracuse, NY 13210-2778, USA
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