From: gil@Gilsys.DIALix.oz.au (Gil Hardwick)
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Subject: The Criterion for Ecocentrism
Distribution: world
Date: Fri, 06 Nov 92 02:31:54 GMT
Organization: STAFF STRATEGIES - Anthropologists & Training Agents


In article <1992Nov3.203220.5129@ke4zv.uucp> gary@ke4zv.UUCP writes:

 > The economic and political problem is that the different values are
 > to different people. If I own the land and I can realize a $20,000
 > an acre net gain from it by selling to a developer, and little or
 > no gain from keeping it as a wetland, then my interest is best served
 > by selling the land to the developer. Now, here's the rub, if the land
 > is worth more to someone as a wetland, then they should *pay* an amount
 > greater than the alternative uses for the land to keep it a wetland.

Assuming that the land only attracts a money value. Perhaps you are
being offered a different currency, but you refuse to accept it.

 > What riles many people is that the environmental movement supports a
 > *taking* of property without proper best use compensation by banning
 > development on wetlands. If the value is to the commons, then the 
 > commons should *buy* the property at it's best use price, not penalize
 > a landowner by prohibiting his exploitation of his land's best use.

Assuming that the notion of land ownership carries with it absolute
privilege, which it may well in a totalitarian state but certainly not
in a democracy where all privi*leges* are conditional on those of the
parliament, which you Americans yourselves call the *Legis*lature.

What has historically riled nations has rather been the propensity of
landowners among them to unilaterally assert absolute privilege on
the basis of their holdings, leading to bloody civil wars. It might
well pay you to read a little history.

 > In the case of National Forest lands, this property is already a commons.
 > It's up to the owners, you and me, to set a best use price on it. If
 > the value *we* receive from timber sales is greater than the costs we
 > incur during the regeneration period, we should sell the timber. If not,
 > we shouldn't. We should keep in mind that timber is a perishable resource.
 > If we don't use it, we lose it as it grows senile and dies and decays.

Sorry, but this notion is preposterous. Timber is eminently renewable,
and since trees grow all by themselves there are no costs associated
with their regeneration, beyond those you impose upon yourself by your
intervention on "economic" grounds.

 > That's at the individual tree level of course, the overall forest system
 > may remain healthy. In many cases we can selectively harvest while not
 > severely impacting the health of the overall resource. Sometimes conditions
 > conspire to make it uneconomic to harvest selectively and we have to balance
 > the costs of regeneration against the value of harvest. Just leaving the
 > trees to rot is usually not a best economic use.

I can only assume here that by "economic" you mean profitable for your
business. The problem we are experiencing with resource "harvesting"
arises from the propensity for business so engaged to proceed on the
basis of significant debt to shareholders and financial institutions,
such that they are actually borrowing money against their estimates of
the future value of the resources targetted for harvest.

The drive against selective harvesting arises from the fact that the
selectable timber often brings insufficient money return to service the
company's mounting debt burden, and the mounting panic has little to
do with the renewability of resources but to the risk of corporate
collapse. When such companies do collapse, they leave a double burden
of debt someone else has to pick up; the money owed and the forest
regeneration not carried out.

The question arises not on the matter of forest management at all, but
on aspects of company management in particular and economic management
in general. It appears reasonable that private companies might err on
the side of conservation, and work with the environmentalists rather
than opposing them so frantically. I mean, what *is* the panic about
anyway?

 > What we want is to arrive at optimum useage of resources, not neccessarily
 > at maximum use of resources, with the people gaining the benefits paying
 > the costs. Clean air, for example, is not free. To gain that benefit for
 > some, others must forego actions that would benefit them, such as closing
 > a factory and losing their jobs. This cost must be distributed fairly to
 > those who benefit. Regulation doesn't do this well and the issues are
 > rarely either/or. In most cases, the effect is to impose a large cost
 > on a small group for a marginal benefit for a large group. If the costs
 > are assigned correctly, an optimum level of abatement can be derived as
 > the large group decides how much they are willing to pay for a given
 > marginal increment of clean air and the small group decides how much it
 > is willing to accept for the loss of jobs and income. At some point, 
 > cleaning the air further becomes unacceptably expensive to the beneficiaries 
 > and a balance is struck. With pure government coersion, the balance is 
 > often tilted far off optimum as regulations are set according to politics 
 > rather than economic valuation.

Sure, do you have any clear strategies in mind for achieving this by
yourself, outside the legislative framework, you might like to share
with us? Unless you have it in mind to impose your own totalitarian
regime, perhaps your interests might be better served by entering
politics.

 > There is no free lunch, in human economics, or in nature. There is only
 > a balancing of costs and benefits in every action and *inaction*. This
 > should be kept firmly in mind by environmentalists. Opportunity costs
 > are just as real as any other cost, and must not be ignored in developing
 > optimum use strategies.

There is also the perversity of human nature, which I do believe is what
you are actually chafing against here.

--
Gil Hardwick                                      gil@Gilsys.DIALix.oz.au
Independent Consulting Ethnologist                            3:690/660.6
PERTH, Western Australia                                 (+61 9) 399 2401
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