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Battlefield, watershed valuable

There are different ways to assess long-range economic impacts.

Date published: 12/4/2002

By LARRY EVANS

WHEN New York City was faced 12 years ago with a $6 billion to $8 billion price tag on a new water-filtration plant mandated by the EPA, the city's water-supply planners went back to the drawing board and came up with a much cheaper alternative: Buy thousands of acres of open and wooded land upstream in the 2,000-square-mile Catskill/Delaware watershed.

New York City now has some of the cleanest tap water in the nation.

The cleanliness does not result from heavy doses of chlorine and other chemicals, which many localities use to treat "raw" water. Instead, the city relies on the natural filtering process that occurs when rain and melting snow flow down through relatively undeveloped places and into the city's vast plumbing system.

New York's low-tech, low-cost success story is one of several told in a new book by Gretchen C. Daily and Katherine Ellison titled "The New Economy of Nature: The Quest to Make Conservation Profitable." (Island Press, $25).

The authors point out that until recently, economists valued land, woods and water according to what it could produce in terms of hard dollars.

Forests, for example, were measured in board feet of timber.

There are an increasing number of economists, however, who say it would behoove society to recognize the value of "ecosystem services," as demonstrated by the story about New York's water-supply system.

A similar argument was made in 1993 by Paul Hawken in "The Ecology of Commerce." That was followed in 1999 by "Natural Capitalism," a book by Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins.

Daily--an interdisciplinary scientist at Stanford University--and Ellison--a journalist--say the new twist in the field of economics is still in its infancy, however, be-cause most people "still think of conservation basically as something to do for moral or aesthetic reasons--not for survival and certainly not for profit,"

That will not change, they write, until there is "a willingness to look at the world's economy in an entirely different way, starting with the assumption that ecosystems are assets whose output has concrete financial worth."

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Date published: 12/4/2002