ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author describes the tension between ways that environmentalists look at the world and ways that economists look at the world. The two predominant features of economic analysis as applied to the formation of environmental policy are cost-benefit analysis and "market-based" approaches toward environmental regulation. Valuing wilderness, health, and ecological balance shows a concern about an instrumentalism that makes people willing to do bad things to produce something else that is good and to fail to value sufficiently for its own sake what we are destroying. And the concern with ecological balance reflects a worry about putting the whole world at risk instrumentally in order to make a buck or to increase production. The environmental movement has become very much a repository for the desire of people to preserve that separate domain from other things going on in their lives.
