I was certainly very pleased (and honored!) to receive an invitation from Peking University to participate in the 10th anniversary of the Beijing Forum. This is an annual event that draws in prominent political and academic representatives (including Australia’s recent Prime Minister Kevin Rudd this year), and one of its themes this year was “Forty Years of Environmental Protection in China and the World: Retrospect, Prospect and Institutional Innovation.”

The organizers couldn’t have known it, but that time period matched my own career almost exactly. I started out as an environmental engineer in January 1974 at ETA Engineering (an Argonne National Labs spin-off located in the Chicago area), before heading east to Penn to study market-based approaches to pollution control. Observations about the changes in environmental management that have occurred in the decades since then led to my own Forum contribution, entitled “Engineering to Economics, and Price to Quantity: Two Environmental Management Transitions in China and the World.”

In preparing the paper, I re-visited some early environmental readings, & one book clearly stood out: William Ophuls’ Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity. That book was appropriate as well for such a 40-year review, since it was based on Ophuls’ award-winning 1973 Ph.D. dissertation in political science at Yale. I had first read it back in the late 1970s, & was amazed in this recent review to see just how prescient it was! The parts I had underlined years ago could have been written yesterday, and the problems and concerns outlined were every bit as relevant – and indeed, were actually even more germane – today. So I took along his most recent effort on this trip – last year’s Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail. (Warning: the new book, while very well argued & written, is a truly sobering read and certainly not for the faint-hearted!)