Suchergebnisse

Whale oil lit the cities and greased the machines of the Industrial Revolution. In light of its importance, competition between whalers was high. Far from courts and law enforcement, competing crews of American whalers not known for their gentility and armed with harpoons tended to resolve disputes at sea over ownership of whales. Left to settle arguments on their own, whalemen created norms and customs to decide ownership of whales pursued by multiple crews. The Law of the Whale Hunt provides an innovative examination of how property law was created in the absence of formal legal institutions regulating the American whaling industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using depositions, court testimony, logbooks, and other previously unused primary sources, Robert Deal tells an exciting story of American whalers hunting in waters from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific and the Sea of Okhotsk

This review focuses on the assessment and economic valuation of ecosystem services from forest ecosystems--that is, our ability to predict changes in the quantity and value of ecosystem services as a result of specific forest management decisions. It is aimed at forest economists and managers and intended to provide a useful reference to those interested in developing the practice of integrated forest modeling and valuation. We review examples of ecosystem services associated with several broad classes of potentially competing forest uses--production of timber, sequestration of carbon, regulation of the quality and quantity of water, provision of residential and recreational amenities, and protection of endangered species. For each example considered, we briefly describe what is known about ecological production functions and economic benefits functions. We also highlight the challenges and best practices in the creation and use of this knowledge. In the final section, we discuss the process, strengths, pitfalls, and limitations of utilizing integrated models for benefit-cost analysis of proposed forest management activities