WILLINGNESS TO PAY FOR DESERT PROTECTION

I. INTRODUCTION Establishing new national parks and wilderness areas in the Mojave desert of eastern California has the potential to alter significantly current and future land use patterns. For example, the 1993 version of the California Desert Protection Bill (S. 21) would add about three million acres to the national park system and create almost four million acres of new wilderness areas outside the parks. Mining would be restricted in the national parks, while no new claims would be allowed in the wilderness areas. Cattle grazing in the parks would end within 25 years, and hunting would not be permitted there, although both grazing and hunting could continue in the wilderness areas. Vehicle access would be restricted in the parks, while the operation of any motorized or mechanized vehicle, including mountain bikes, would be prohibited in the wilderness areas. (Note that this description of the legislation applies to the bill S. 21 as it was considered in May 1993. Some changes have been made since that time. The revised version of the bill was passed by Congress and signed into law in October 1994.) The proposed creation of these three new national parks and 76 wilderness areas in the California desert would benefit some of the State's residents and businesses while harming others. Benefits include the enhanced protection of desert ecosystems and increases in various types of recreational activities. On the other hand, future losses of revenue and employment in the mining and ranching industries, as well as restrictions on some other recreational uses, make up some of the costs. Deciding whether the possible benefits would exceed the potential costs requires estimating each. Minerals and beef are examples of market goods for which one readily can observe the prices paid by consumers. Therefore, estimating the economic losses to the mining and ranching industries is relatively straightforward. On the other hand, estimates of benefits are much more difficult to generate since the goods that would be provided, ecosystem protection and enhancements in certain types of recreational opportunities, are not purchased by consumers in typical markets. In the last few decades, a number of indirect and direct methods have been developed to assist in estimating the value of these and other "nonmarket goods." This paper presents the results of a study that utilizes contingent valuation, a direct method based on responses to surveys, to estimate the value to California residents of enacting desert protection legislation. II. METHODOLOGY Though consumers do not purchase nonmarket goods directly, they do pay more for housing in areas with higher environmental quality, as well as spend money and time traveling to their favorite recreation areas. Indirect methods of valuation use information on these types of observable behavior to estimate the benefits of providing a cleaner environment or creating new recreation sites. For example, the hedonic price method estimates the relative value to an area's residents of existing differences in local environmental quality, while the travel cost method provides estimates of the value to current users of visiting an established recreation site. Unfortunately, these indirect methods can be used only to estimate the value to users of currently-existing nonmarket goods. Such limitations render indirect methods inappropriate for estimating the benefits of desert protection, since the proposed changes in land use have not yet occurred and some of the benefits may accrue to those who neither visit nor reside in the California desert. For example, benefits might include the value of preserving the desert area until more can be learned about its potential uses (quasioption value), the value of preserving it for the use of future generations (bequest value), or the value of simply knowing that the unique species and ecosystems still thrive there (existence value). …