Via 3quarksdaily, The Economist has a good article about various ways the environment's occasional contribution to industry's bottom line is starting to be protected. The area around the Panama Canal is privately (but collectively) being reforested; wetlands are being valued as water processing facilities. This sea change isn't attributed to a newfound recognizition of the economic value the functioning environment can provide, but rather to new valuation techniques. Putting a dollar value on the ecological services rendered by the environment makes it possible 1) to decide whether they're worth protecting and 2) to make someone pay.
The big problem with these efforts is not the striking practicality of their valuations (although that's what will probably offend most people), it's that they don't go far enough. In particular, there is almost certainly value being missed in this calculations, because they focus exclusively on the direct economic impact on industry. But what the economic impact on individuals or society from the standpoint of entertainment, aesthetics, or ecological morality (ie conservation)? These are notoriously difficult figures to calculate, but not including them means undervaluing the revelant environmental good -- which, from an economic standpoint, means the system is inefficient. So: keep tinkering with valuation, but look also for ways to include values that aren't directly economic.
MORE: I should explain further what I mean by the environmental value that's being missed here. Within a purely economic context, you have the value of something to people who use it. So in Chicago, some residents might go swimming in the lake, and you can quantify the lake's value to them for instance by seeing how much they'll pay to swim, including the opportunity cost of swimming etc -- the cost of a day at the beach. But there might also be value just in knowing that one can go to the beach -- there might even be Chicago residents who never go swimming who nevertheless like living in a city where it's possible to go swimming (as opposed to, say, Erie PA). This could be true on the scale of the whole country as well -- so, there might be some value to me in knowing that there isn't a mountain anywhere in this country that's filled with nuclear waste, even if I don't actually go to all the mountains in the country.
These kinds of values aren't caught by the valuation schemes in the article, and yet they are (arguably) quantifiable and presumably quite large in the aggregate. And of course there are other values that are more complicated yet to quantifiy -- moral value, whether it has to do with some kind of spiritual outlook on the part of millions or just ecological respect.
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