IT'S ABOUT HUMANS:

As a Matter of Fact, Money Does Grow on Trees: With an anti-environmental backlash inflicting one defeat after another on conservationists, a band of maverick economists is riding to the rescue with a startling revelation about the true value of our natural resources: Follow the money, and you end up in a very green place. (Bruce Barcott, March 2005, Outside)

Studies of rivers and lakes reveal that healthy watersheds provide millions of dollars' worth of water filtration, just one of many such natural services critical for healthy communities. Researchers digging into the economy of the West are finding that forests often have a higher cash value standing than they have as cut timber. Small towns born as logging outposts now thrive as recreation gateways.

"Fifteen years ago we knew intuitively that cutting down these forests didn't make sense," says Bob Freimark, Pacific Northwest director of the Wilderness Society. "We couldn't point to any economic studies to back us up. But not anymore." [...]

[T]he new way of thinking, if embraced by both sides, could lead to an era of compromise, in which decisions about extraction and preservation are based on assessments of long-term value, and of how that value might or might not be sacrificed for short-term gains.

If that happens, we'll owe thanks to people like John Loomis, 52, an economics professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and one of the pioneer thinkers in wilderness valuation. Loomis has written dozens of papers showing that mining, logging, drilling, and grazing are rarely the most economically beneficial uses of public land. His personal revelation came 28 years ago, in 1977, shortly after the young Cal State Northridge graduate took a job with the federal government's Bureau of Land Management, which put him to work in the slickrock canyons around Moab.

"My second week on the job," Loomis recalls, "the Forest Service held a public hearing. About three-quarters of the people there said they didn't want any wilderness in Utah, period. And I thought, Now wait a minute. Surely there's some economic value in wilderness." Along with a handful of like-minded colleagues scattered around the West, Loomis would spend the next quarter-century proving that there is. [...]

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.

And then they came to the ecosystem-services figures. The idea of ecosystem services came of age in the mid-nineties, when academics like Stanford's Gretchen Daily and the University of Vermont's Robert Costanza argued that forests and other ecosystems provided billions in indirect benefits. The question they asked was simple: How much would it cost to replace these natural systems with an artificial device?

They answered it by extrapolating from real-world examples. In 1989, for instance, EPA officials ordered the City of New York to build a water-filtration plant that would cost $8 billion to construct and $300 million a year to operate. Instead, the city spent $2 billion to restore and protect its Catskill Mountains watershed, letting a healthy 2,000-square-mile forest do the work of an $8 billion industrial plant. Estimated value of water filtration provided by the watershed: $6 billion and counting.

Ecosystem services remained a little-known idea until 1997, when Costanza and 12 colleagues published the mother of all estimates, the value of the entire planet's ecosystem services: $33 trillion per year. The number, published in the journal Nature, seemed all the more astonishing when compared with the 1997 gross world product (the combined output of every nation), which was $18 trillion.

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."

Neither side is likely to be happy with the implications--wilderness that we can use for human activities should be protected; wilderness we can't, like ANWR, should be exploited.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 17, 2005 7:54 AM