Toward an environmentally sustainable economy

The world needs a vision of what an environmentally sustainable economy would look like and a way to assess whether progress is being made in realizing that vision, believes Lester R. Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, who recently launched the Earth Policy Institute (EPI), a Washington, DC-based environmental research organization, to achieve those goals. In EPI’s first book, Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth, Brown calls for a new global economy, in which renewable energy replaces fossil fuels and recycled products replace disposables. In this eco-economy, Brown sees the need to restructure the current tax system, so that the environmental costs associated with a particular product are incorporated into the market price as a tax. Eco-Economy can be downloaded free of charge at www.earth-policy.org. —BRITT ERICKSON