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Europe and Japan as barriers to trade. The OECD came dangerously close to passing a M ul-tilateral Agreement on Investment (M AI), which could interpret environmental taxes or quotas as trade barriers threatening corporate profits, and the developed nations are still pushing for such an agreement within the WTO. Such an agreement could prove a formidable obstacle to the polices R oodman proposes.
In summary, this book offers little new to envi-ronmental or ecological economists except well-re-searched empirical support for familiar policies. H owever, the book is an excellent resource for students, non-economists, policy-makers and the general public, and as R oodman argues, at this point public education is what is required to make these ideas a reality.
References
D aly, H .E., 1996. Beyond G rowth: The Economics of Sustain-able D evelopment. Beacon Press, Boston.
Joshua C. F arley
CBL/UM CES , Institute for Ecological Economics, PO Box 1589,
S olomons, M D 20688,
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Oyster W ars and the Public Trust, by B.J. McCay,
The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, Arizona, 1998. ISBN 0-8165-1804-1
Bonnie M cCay has spent her career document-ing and interpretdocument-ing the relation between human culture and ecological systems. In Oyster W ars
and the Public T rust, she adds a legal and
histori-cal dimension to this body of work. The book addresses the lingering question of how American tidal resources — fish, shellfish and waterfront — should be owned, and examines this question
through the historical lens of early 19th and 20th century conflicts. M cCay’s stated goal for the book is to persuade the reader of the relevance of the past to the present and the future, and she succeeds admirably in connecting property, law and ecology across time.
M cCay’s earlier work on the culture of the commoners and the tensions between private and public rights to resources benefits the book’s argu-mentation. It presents a richly textured and nu-anced picture of people and their interactions with resources, with each other and with the law. The book raises important questions about the com-plex human causes of resource overexploitation, about the embeddedness of property rights in larger social and cultural contexts, and about whether fishing is a public privilege or a private right. These questions of ownership and sustain-ability are as current in the 21st century as they were in the 19th and 20th.
The book’s 14 chapters are divided into five sections, each with its own introduction, orga-nized around historic court cases related to fish, shellfish, and waterfront development. These cases demonstrate how people have struggled to resolve conflicting values and claims over resources through protest, poaching, piracy and subsequent legal change.
The first section looks at the early evolution of common, state and private rights to oysters, plac-ing these rights in their geographic, social and ecological context. The second section introduces the American public trust doctrine — the idea that resources are held in trust for the people — and its definition and redefinition by the courts. The cases of oyster conflict are enriched by look-ing at the events, issues and people behind the cases, both before and after changes in legal inter-pretation.
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wars’ of N ew Jersey’s coastal history were fought over privatized lease rights to tidal lands.
The fifth and final section follows the property rights conflict through the post World War II era, placing the private-public property debate in con-temporary context and revisiting the question of why there remains such strong resistance to priva-tization. This section draws lessons from the his-torical interpretation of the public trust doctrine to explain the continuing resistance to change in property rights over tidal resources.
The ongoing difficulties of finding an acceptable balance between private and public property ex-tend beyond history, beyond N ew Jersey and beyond fisheries, to wider present-day resource conflicts. Scholars of natural resource manage-ment, of ecological and human interactions, and of institutional change will find much of value in this book. G raduate students in a variety of
natu-ral resource fields will benefit from the lessons it contains about how the cultural and social con-text of the times shapes the evolution of legal thought. M cCay succeeds in demonstrating why resource problems are complex, why struggles over control and ownership continue, and why it is important to understand the historical origins of these problems if we hope to resolve them.
Susan H anna
Department of A gricultural and R esource Economics, Oregon S tate Uni6ersity,
Cor6allis,
OR 97331-4501,
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