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I'm using Tietenberg and Lewis, Environmental Economics and Policy, in my sophomore level environmental and resource economics class this semester. I haven't taught this course in awhile so it seems very fresh. As such, I had some fun with planning out the order of topics. Here it is:

 Chapter 1 – Visions of the Future
 Handout: The Market Forces of Supply and Demand
 Chapter 2 – Valuing the Environment: Concepts
 Chapter 4 – Property Rights, Externalities, and Environmental Problems
 Chapter 5 – Sustainable Development: Defining the Concept
 Chapter 7 – Natural Resource Economics: An Overview
 Chapter 14 – Environmental Economics: An Overview
 Chapter 8 – Energy
 Chapter 15 – Stationary‐Source Local and Regional Air Pollution
 Chapter 17 ‐ Transportation
 Chapter 16 – Climate Change
 Chapter 9 – Water
 Chapter 11 – Agriculture
 Chapter 18 – Water Pollution
 Chapter 12 – Forests
 Chapter 13 – Common Pool Resources: Fisheries
 Chapter 10 ‐ Land
 Chapter 19 – Managing Waste
 Chapter 5 – Valuing the Environment: Methods

Tietenberg and Lewis first cover the basic welfare economics and intertemporal allocation of nonrenewable resources (under the guise of sustainable development). They then present a natural resource economics overview and march through natural resource topics. Next, they present an environmental economics overview, which is really a misnomer since all of the meat and potatoes of environmental policy analysis is contained in this chapter, and then march through environmental topics. 

My rearrangement first covers the basic welfare economics and intertemporal allocation of nonrenewable resources. I pushed the valuation chapter 5 to the end of the course for two reasons: (1) I'm not sure my students really need to know this stuff in detail and (2) I just finished teaching it in my Fall semester benefit-cost analysis course and am a bit burned out by it (i.e., "hypothetical bias, blah, blah, blah"). Then I'll run through the natural resource economics overview chapter quickly and spend plenty of time on the environmental economics "overview".

My guess is that we'll be about halfway through the course at this point. The rest of the course is divided into four modules:

  1. Energy and the environment – energy econmics, air pollution and climate change
  2. Water resources – water allocation, agriculture and water pollution
  3. Renewable resources – forestry and fisheries
  4. Land resources – Land use and waste disposal

I tacked on valuation at the end just because at that point I'll bet I'm ready to talk about it (if not before), but I doubt that we'll be able to get that far. 

That is the plan. Comments are most welcome, especially if you see a problem with how I've rearranged the chapters. 

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  1. Matthew Interis Avatar
    Matthew Interis

    Let me know how this works out. I’m teaching this course for the fourth time right now. One of the things I struggled with when I first started teaching it was covering so many topics (water, forests, fisheries, ag, land, transportation, etc.) – I was never satisfied because the examination of each topic seemed superficial (due to time constraints) and besides, I’m not an expert in most of them. Each time I teach it, I try to narrow down the topics and go more in depth into each. But I still try to cover topics that hit most of the main points in our field (e.g. in forestry you deal with dynamics, in water you deal with equity, in climate change you deal with free-riding and coordination issues, etc.).
    Also, there’s no single book out there that I find is perfect for my style. My course layout most closely follows the Ward book (first a review of micro principles, then a discussion of why env goods and services are differnt and how we think about them, then specific topics), but I steal some material from Tietenberg and Lewis and Barry Field’s natural resource book.

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  2. Daniel Hall Avatar
    Daniel Hall

    Matthew, this is my fourth iteration of undergraduate environmental economics too.
    My first two times I used “Environmental and Natural Resource Economics” by Tietenberg and Lewis. It was too technical for my students, and in hindsight I wish I would have tried “Environmental Economics and Policy” instead. Still, I think the bigger problem was trying to cover all of the topics and doing a hand wave to the theory and analysis toolkit or doing the opposite.
    I switched over to Field & Field’s Environmental Economics: An Introduction last year and I like it a lot. It goes into depth of about the theory and analysis toolkit without getting too technical. To save time for applied topics, I split my students into research teams to cover the topics that most interest them and to use the basic tools in their research and presentation of the topic.
    Downside of Field & Field is it only covers pollution, so I have to borrow some from Field’s natural resource book to hit all of the learning objectives.

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