Markets and movements -- Escaping asceticism: the birth of the health food industry -- Living and working on the margins: a countercultural industry develops -- Feeding the talent: the path to legitimacy -- Questioning authority: the state and medicine strike back -- Style: identifying the audience for natural foods -- Drawing the line: boundary disputes in the natural foods field -- Cultural change and economic growth: assessing the impact of a business-led movement.

Only through a concerted global effort can we protect our natural resources, save our precious natural environment, and indeed our future. But pressures on natural resources come from many directions such as overuse, mismanagement and contamination. This much-needed book reviews and evaluates the use of market and fiscal instruments in protecting our natural resources, from rural to marine environments. Market instruments that are designed to protect the global atmosphere are evaluated, along with carbon instruments and environmental tax incentives. Meanwhile, consideration is given to shifting the tax burden to achieve environmentally responsible outcomes, balancing sustainable use and natural resource protection, and protecting water resources.

This book is a product of investigations conducted within the Global Utility Research Unit (Guru) of Agici Corporate Finance (Milan, Italy). More specifically, it is the result of a project developed by the Observatory on Alliances and Strategies in the Pan-European Utility Market set-up seven years ago with the contribution of Accenture. The project, entitled “Pan-European Gas Industry Scenario – Truth and Lies”, was presented at the 2008 Milan annual international conference (www. agici. it). I would therefore like to thank Luca Cesari, Claudio Arcudi and Massimo Pagella from Accenture for their continued support. The scope of this book is to shed some light on a market, that of natural gas, which is highly complex and at the same time of fundamental importance for Europe for at least the next 20 years. We do not intend to build a theory but only to develop a better understanding of the key factors. We fully recognise that the each of the issues we cover deserves further investigation and we are also well aware that we may have omitted a number of important considerations and topics. These shortcomings are - at least in part - justified by the desire to keep the book to a r- sonable size for editorial reasons.