What is a forest worth? How do we even measure its value, for us, for other species, for itself? If we just consider economic value‹and pretend the other values were not critical‹would that be adequate to decide its worth?
Economic values themselves can be further broken down by activity, as when a forest is used for scientific research, recreation, education, therapy, political symbolism (as in Idaho, the "wilderness" state), or religion (people go to experience a cathedral of white pines).
Even many of the economic kinds of value, however, have been difficult to quantify. For instance, until people were asked in surveys how much they would pay to have wild forests, existence value (that is, just knowing that a forest exists without having to visit it) did not have a dollar value. Some economists have estimated numerical amounts for option values (retaining options for the future) and bequest values (leaving as-is for future generations). For instance, Walsh et al. (in "Land Economics") found that a typical Colorado household was willing to pay annually $4.04 option value, $4.87 existence value, and $5.01 bequest value for 1.2 million acres of wilderness in Colorado. Multiplying that by the number of households in that state results in a significant value for wilderness.
The kind of value measured most often for forests, other than stumpage, is recreation. The costs of forest access for recreation can be identified and added up. Although the forest is a free good, transportation, logging, equipment, or entrance fees are often required to visit it. A typical visit may cost $15.00 a day in 1992 dollars. But this does not reflect the value of the experience or the value of the land for noncompatible timber sales. Some economists have proposed a "contingent valuation" by subtracting the actual costs from what the consumer is willing to pay‹this surplus value makes the recreational value more objective, because there is a dollar amount. A final category of value that we should consider is conservation value. Natural capital such as forests function to regulate climate, produce topsoil, and cycle elements through the ocean and atmosphere. These environmental services (the wild infrastructure) support the economy without providing direct economic benefits. If you think this is hard, try to figure the value of aesthetic or spiritual experience. Even if we cannot put a discrete amount on these values, common mathematical sense tells us that as the dividend (number of forests) approaches zero, its worth goes to infinity‹no one can experience it if it is gone. These "what-is-it-worth-in-dollars " games are entertaining to play (or would be if not taken so seriously by those in power).
We might consider, a "what-would-it-cost-to-replace-it" game instead that analyzes the replacement costs of natural services in terms of human labor and technology. Buckminster Fuller, for instance, once calculated that it would cost just over a million dollars per gallon if we were to manufacture gasoline using chemical processes and electrical power (California Con-Edison 1972 rates). We know many of the functions of the forest but not all. In this sense, the value of the forest is quite high. The following table from a 1994 Ecoforestry course is a thought experiment with very approximate numbers (especially dollars).
Table: Costs of Replacing the Forest
Function Natural Cost Human cost
Pure water $0 $0.70/liter
Pure air $0 $0.04/cubic liter
Climate Moderation $0 $22,000/day
Wind protection $0 $6000/hectare
Wild genes $0 $11,000,000/gene
Recreation $0 $2,000,000/park
Flood control $0 $24,000/hectare
As you can guess, for a city of 50,000 people in a forested watershed, the costs of replacing basic forest services would be billions per year. And the forest is home to people and other beings. One thing business can do is put a price on nature. But, let us make it a real price, reflecting the real cost of replacement, as Fuller did with gasoline.
Just last year, the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (reported February 17, 1997 in the Environment News Service) brought scientists and economists together to hear the message that ecosystems are worth trillions, according to Stanford ecologist Gretchen Daily.
The goods and services provided annually by natural ecosystems are worth many trillions of dollars in conventional economic terms, and the prosperity of all societies hinges upon safeguarding them, Daily emphasized. These services are the life support functions normally performed by ecosystems, such as purification of air and water; detoxification and recycling of wastes; generation and maintenance of soil fertility; pollination of crops and other plants; regulation of climate; and mitigation of weather extremes like flood or drought. Ecosystems also provide goods like seafood and timber, whose harvest and trade represent an important and familiar part of the human economy. And ecosystems support the vast diversity of life, the very species that are sources of key ingredients of our agricultural, pharmaceutical and industrial enterprises.
Ecosystem services operate on such a grand scale and in such intricate and little-explored ways that most could not be replaced by technology. They are priceless, but because they do not have a price, they are not traded in economic markets. The symposium drew together top ecologists and economists to discuss the urgent need for government and industry to incorporate these life-support values into policies and planning. Estimates of the lower- bound, marginal value of nature's goods and services is critical to informing decision-makers.
We are already interfering with those services. Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich used the disastrous mudslides in Washington and Oregon as a case in point. These mudslides were partly traceable to overharvesting of timber, which disrupted the natural flood controls that forests exercise over flows of water. Ehrlich suggested that the Forest Service should include the costs of floods and mudslides in their calculations of fees for timber harvesting.
As it is impossible to capture the value of human life in economic terms (either as $0.78 or $78,000), it is futile to estimate the value of nature in strictly economic terms. Even assigning monetary values to nature, homes and lives is problematic. Ask anyone who has lost a family member, home, or favorite woods if the money gained was reflective of the real value. The editors of The Ecologist (in their book, ":Whose Common Future?") relate that many people do not allow their ancestral homes to be assigned even the highest monetary value, since they have the right to occupy them. For example, Thai muang faai communities refuse to let sanctions against cutting trees in community forests be interpreted as prices on the trees, which are necessary to supply rice fields. Many people in industrial countries refuse to participate in questionnaires that ask them how much money would be acceptable to compensate for the loss of visibility by air pollution or the loss of forests by clearcutting.
Despite the misgivings of the economists whose premises are rejected, the infinite value of forests is only a constraint on economic exploitation and reasoning. Even without financial assessments as a commodity, a forest provides renewal services in the form of water, air, and inspiration, game, wood, shelter, and experience. Refusal to discuss the price of a forest is legitimate communication; it should serve to channel forest policy into larger noneconomic realms. The economic order is a part of the cultural order, which is a part of the physical/ecological order. All discussion of forest assessment and value should be in a cultural and ecological context.
In evaluating ecological situations, we cannot avoid making judgments and giving preference to human values. Not even all human values can be quantified and assigned common dollar values. Even if human values have objective meaning, not all of them will have dollar values; therefore not all natural processes can have dollar values, but all have some kind of values. Ray F. Dasmann notes that birds or dolphins have values to an observer that do not fit any yardstick. Even without knowing a complete dollar total of the value of forests, we have a small idea of the quantity and value of the interest and could tailor our economic system to that.
We get our values from knowing what is valuable in nature. Values usually encode information having survival or prestige importance. Perhaps the most valuable thing is living time, the experience of life--aesthetics (from the Greek meaning perception). This may be why humans value walking in the woods. Rich sensory experiences can be derived from direct contact with nature. But economists and planners rarely mention these values. Light, wind, dirt, plants, birds, all act during a walk, but not with the meaning of crops or sheep, which is for their utility‹they just are. People do not live without these things. All values are based ultimately on a healthy ecology. It must be kept healthy.
All the true costs of any technological process must be internalized even if it means assigning arbitrary dollar values to aesthetic resources. This does not necessarily mean that an aesthetic resource is worth $1 billion, but that is a potential economic and spiritual loss to the system if the resource disappears. The price system does not adequately account for a number of value factors: i.e., the benefits of people outside a transaction. Value systems are the driving variables in all economic systems, not just peripheral attachments. And patriarchal nations are devaluing these values and cultural wisdom with their dominant abstract, quantitative economics. Economic objectives have to include new concepts of value. A new economic system will have to capture values unimagined by most economists. It may calculate the potential of possible plant products from Amazon basin, or the value of forest susseration here in the Northwest. As soon as species and habitats can be shown to have more value in their saving than in their destruction, they may be saved.
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