Thank you.
In the spirit of my just completed assignment, here's yours. What's Wilderness Worth? Seems economists are finally starting to figure it out. And wow... apparently money does grow on trees!
Want to see the future of the environmental movement? This is it. If we have both the moral and the economic arguments on our side, well...
For those of you who can't be convinced to click without a reason, here's a short excerpt:
| "The timber industry launched an economic salvo against the roadless rule early on," recalls Ken Rait, a wilderness activist and former director of the Heritage Forests Campaign, a Washington, D.C.–based coalition of environmental groups that lobbied in favor of the rule. "They said it would condemn the future of rural economies. We knew they were flat-out wrong. So we brought John Loomis on to look into it."
Building on previous research that calculated everything from the spending average of wilderness visitors ($30 a day) to the value of roadless areas for scientific research (about $5 million a year), Loomis and Robert Richardson, a doctoral student at CSU, produced a study with impressive numbers. They found that wilderness pays primarily in three ways: direct income from recreational use and as a quality-of-life benefit to lure new businesses and residents; passive-use value (what it's worth to maintain the opportunity to visit wilderness, or to pass that opportunity on to future generations); and "ecosystem services," natural processes like the air- and water-purification functions of an undisturbed forest. They estimated that the 42 million acres of roadless forest in the contiguous U.S. supported 24,000 jobs and provided nearly $600 million in annual recreation benefits. Passive-use values added another $280 million per year. ..snip.. Applying the idea to the roadless rule, Loomis and Richardson pegged the ecosystem services of that acreage at between $1 billion and $1.5 billion. This brought their estimate of the total value of the 42 million roadless acres to a whopping $1.88 billion to $2.38 billion. The projected value of harvesting timber from that same swath of land? Some 730 temporary jobs and $184 million in lumber revenue. The wilderness-economics numbers tend to be ignored or dismissed out of hand in the Bush administration's push to restore extraction-is-king priorities. Yet the figures for recreation alone are stunning. In 1995, U.S. Forest Service economists took stock of the agency's land and found that national forests generated $125 billion a year in economic activity. Recreation accounted for 75 percent of that figure. Timber and mining made up 15 percent. "When I first quoted those figures, people in the agency couldn't believe it," recalls Jim Lyons, the Department of Agriculture's undersecretary for natural resources and environment in the Clinton administration. "Jack Ward Thomas, the Forest Service chief at the time, looked at me and said, 'Where'd you get that from?' But this was our own report, and it tracked a shift that had been happening for a long time. Recreation, not timber, is the Forest Service's main product." "Wilderness," adds Peter Morton, an economist with the Wilderness Society, "is the silent engine of the West's economy." |
What's particularly interesting about this is the recent (albeit early) signs of resurgence of the Dems out West. Montana in particular. I have to say, if it starts in that state it won't surprise me either. A few years back I had a run in with some of the natives that proved quite surprising.
An environmental populism based on economics. Interesting...
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