Economic of natural resource use

This is a textbook on the economics of using natural resources, a subject that has been intensively refined and developed since the 1960s. The 1960s brought, among other things, the "greening" of industrial countries, particularly the United States. Great concern was focused on pollution, environmental degradation generally, and urban growth. Recycling of paper, bottles, and cans became popular causes, and natural resource scarcity received great attention. Many academic economists immersed themselves in the analysis of environmental problems, urban growth and sprawl, and the use of nonrenewable resources such as oil and iron ore and renewable resources such as forests and fish. This text is a distillation of the work done in these areas by economists in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Since much of this material evolved recently, there were often no established lines of exposition or explanatory diagrams to draw upon, so we have had to inno vate. The content of this book has been used in two quite different one-semester courses at Queen's University and has been extensively commented on by indepen dent reviewers. Students who have been exposed to intermediate microeconomics will be well prepared to learn easily from our book. Knowledge of finding maximums and minimums with elementary calculus is the only mathematics relevant to our central analytical sections; complex derivations and more advanced mathematics are in optional appendixes related to particular chapters. Descriptive and institutional material is often highlighted in boxes.