Rick Olson, in a guest editorial in this issue, offers some insight on how we might be able to obtain large-scale protection of our karst resources and the biota they contain. The KWI has collected 29 of the extended abstracts from the presentations, as well as an abstract of the Mammoth Cave field trip, into a volume called KWI Special Publication 3, Conservation and Protection of the Biota of Karst. The table of contents of that volume is available online , along with ordering infomation. That advice was to express the value of environmental services provided by ecosystem functions in economic terms. Even with retention and treatment systems to mitigate impacts, our runoff and effluents are not generally what we would consider to be potable waters.
Water is a commodity, and it is easy enough to apply a unit price to a discharge rate.
Likewise, tertiary treatment facilities of specified capacity can be purchased and operated with money. Maybe someone has. One of the most significant aspects of this strategy is that we can employ it in the near term. At this point, I think it will not because our current economic system does not value conservation of natural resources per se. If we exhaust one type of commodity such as copper, then we substitute aluminum or a superconducting ceramic.