Acknowledgments
This book has taken longer to write than I care to admit. It really began over twenty years ago, when I was a graduate student. From that time to today, my university mentors have been a continued inspiration to me. Neil De Marchi, to whom this book is dedicated, first inspired me to a career in scholarship. Through many conversations over the years, he helped steer me on the course that led to this book. Kerry Smith has read and reread the material in this book numerous times and provided priceless feedback. Together, I could not have asked for a better combination of mentorship in history and environmental economics.
The book draws on previously published work, although substantially revised and reconfigured. Portions of Chapters 2, 3, and 6 draw on “The Environmental Turn in Natural Resource Economics: John Krutilla and ‘Conservation Reconsidered’,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 44(1), 2019, pp. 27–46. Chapters 3 and 4 draw on “Consumer Surplus with Apology: A Historical Perspective on Non-Market Valuation and Recreation Demand,” Annual Review of Resource Economics 2, 2010, pp. 183–207. Chapter 7 draws on “The Cold War Origins of the Value of Statistical Life (VSL),” Journal of Economic Perspectives 28(4), 2014, pp. 213–26. Chapter 8 draws on “Objective or Multi-objective? Two Historically Competing Visions for Benefit-Cost Analysis,” Land Economics 85(1), 2009, pp. 1–23. Finally, Chapter 9 draws on “Constructing Markets: Environmental Economics and the Contingent Valuation Controversy,” in The Age of the Applied Economist: The Transformation of Economics since the 1970s, ed. by R. Backhouse and B. Cherrier, History of Political Economy 49(s), Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017, pp. 213–39. I thank these publishers for permission to republish from these works.
Along the way, I received help from many people. I’m especially grateful for comments and suggestions from Roger Backhouse, Nathalie Berta, Elodie Bertrand, Dan Bromley, Béatrice Cherrier, Charlie Cicchetti, Robert Dimand, Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay, Michael Hanemann, Bob Haveman, Reginald Hebert, Robert Ekelund, Jack Knetsch, Kerry Krutilla, Harro Maas, David Major, Steve Medema, Philip Mirowski, Theodore Porter, Malcolm Rutherford, Thomas Schelling, Tom Stapleford, Chris Weber, Roy Weintraub, and two anonymous reviewers from Cambridge University Press.
This research has been supported with generous grants from the National Science Foundation (grant #0750610), the Alliance for Market Solutions, and Georgia State University. I thank them for their support. I also thank the Property and Environment Research Center for generous hospitality over the various summers in which I worked on this manuscript. For access to their special collections, I thank the libraries and their staff at the American Heritage Center, the RAND Corporation, the Rockefeller Archive Center, SUNY Stony Brook, the US Army Corps of Engineers Office of History, and the US National Archives. For help with the manuscript and seeing it to the finish, I thank the staff at CUP, including Phil Good and Sable Gravesandy, and the series editor, Harro Maas.
Last but not least, this book was written only with the constant patience of my family, Melissa, Lizzy, and John. I’m so grateful to them.
