|
|
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."
A "big challenge" society faces, they say, "is how to measure, capture, and protect these newly discovered values before they are lost."
The issue is global in scope, of course, but the concept of "natural capital" also pertains to very local issues.
For example, the proposed Town of Chancellorsville would be built only a couple of miles up the watershed that drains into the city's Motts Run Reservoir, an integral part of the local water-supply system.
That point was made by James Anderson during the public comment period of a Nov. 6 hearing held by the Spotsylvania County Planning Commission. Anderson, a former member of the commission, urged county officials to determine what effects the proposed development might have on the reservoir.
The company proposing the new town, Dogwood Development Group, says it intends to go beyond what is required by environmental regulations. Still, Anderson raises an issue that deserves serious study before the county's Board of Supervisors decides whether to approve the rezoning that Dogwood needs in order to proceed.
Economist John Adams, who lives in Spotsylvania, also wants to see the county government do a thorough analysis of the proposed project, which would have about 2,000 dwellings and up to 2 million square feet of stores and offices.
Adams thinks a consulting firm working for the development company has submitted a "flawed" fiscal-impact analysis. He thinks the tax revenue generated by the new town would not cover the public costs of services the town would require.
There is nothing new about the concept of conducting a fiscal-impact analysis. That's a fairly standard tool used when local governments make decisions--although economics is by no means an exact science, and figures can be massaged to make whatever subjective point someone wants to make in a debate.
Adams does not talk about "natural capitalism." However, his unsolicited, 14-page economic assessment of the Dogwood proposal includes two pages about what economists term "contingent valuation." Those two things sound like close cousins to me.
There is widespread public interest in the Dogwood proposal because part of the 800-acre new town would be built on land where a Civil War battle was fought on May 1, 1863.
"Contingent valuation studies offer a means of putting a dollar value on the preservation of an historical asset" or a natural feature," Adams wrote in his assessment.
"Because it looks beyond a narrow economic costs and benefits, and weighs environmental and amenity factors, which are real to many people, contingent valuation is very helpful and, in fact, it, or a similar method, should always be employed before making a decision concerning historic, cultural, or environmental asset or amenity."
The mechanism that economists would use for determining the value of a preserved battlefield, Adams wrote, is to conduct a scientific survey to determine how much the typical American would be willing to pay to keep that land open.
That process could lead to a dollar value assigned to the battlefield. That number could be used to help determine a fair market value that preservationists or government could use to gauge how much to offer the landowner.
In traditional economics, the "highest and best use" of the land would be its potential for the kind of project Dogwood Development Group wants to build.
That line of thinking rests on the assumption that nothing is more valuable than money.
However, in the traditional economic theory that has guided American capitalism, the value of something goes up as it becomes scarce.
Nobody is making any more Civil War battlefields.
LARRY EVANS can be reached at The Free Lance-Star, 616 Amelia St., Fredericksburg, Va. 22401; by fax at 373-8455; by phone at 374-5409; or by e-mail at levans@freelancestar.com.