Economy and environment/rationality and ritual: A review essay

i%e Uncertain Search for Environmental Quality by Bruce A. Ackermann, Susan Rose-Ackerman, James W. Sawyer, Jr., and Dale W. Henderson (The Free Press (Macmillan): 1974), is interdisciplinary, multi-faceted, contextual, and variegated. It is as rich a work in social science as one is likely to find. The politics, the economics, the geography, the law, the engineering and the sociology of organizations not only are excellent in themselves but fit together in a lucid and compelling analysis. The authors’ technique of telling you what they are telling you before, during and after telling you is admirably suited to the needs of combining material from a variety of fields. About all Ackerman et al. leave out is anthropology purification rites and pollution taboos. And that, I must say, in as broad a counsel of perfection as can be offered, is too bad. The outlandish behavior the authors record, behavior that is intendedly rational but functionally absurd, is not at all well explained by economic profit or political gain or technical imperatives or organizational abuses or legal hubris, although each of these explanations has merit in its own sphere, rather like an unfinished skyscraper whose spaces are illuminated at night but whose superstructure the grid that gives groups of spaces their meaning is blacked out. The importance the authors give to their work is eminently justified. The effort of the Delaware River Basin Commission to mount a massive attack on the pollution in their estuary “hailed by many as representing one of the few triumphs of American environmental policy” (p. 3) was (and is) the largest effort to clean up American rivers. It involves five states, hundreds of millions of dollars, extensive efforts at the most modern technical analyses to compare costs and benefits. In its economic rationale and political process it is typical of environmental policy making. It is also a failure. Of course the river will be cleaned up in some sense of that word, except that, for the most part, it will remain unswimmable, unboatable, unsightly and only slightly more fishable, smellable and potable. That isn’t much for around three-quarters of a billion dollars, not much, that is, if you value end results. But if the process of cleaning “Out, damned spot!” is what you value, if the act of purification is what you aim at, then the whole thing is a rip-roaring success. How and why did this happen? Ackerman and his associates aim their first arrows at the quality of the cost-benefit analyses conducted for the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) by the technical staff that produced the Delaware Estuary Comprehensive Study (DECS). A helpful rule to follow in analysis is that no instrument of policy or measure of results is good for everything. If one decides to build roads on the basis of the lowest cost per square mile consistent with safety, for instance, flat desert areas will win out, and will be where the roads are built, which may not be exactly what is desired. The environmental equivalent is DO (dissolved oxygen) related to the biochemical oxygen demand of the river. Using DO, like any other overly-simple measure, does have its advantages. Immediately one can see that the areas between Philadelphia and Wilmington suffer the most severe oxygen sag. Would, then, raising the level of DO from 1 ppm (part per million) to 2 or 4 ppm the most that could be done without vastly increasing expenditure -