In a recent Policy Forum article in Science, a prestigious, multi-disciplinary group of scholars urged that environmental policy set the protection of the resilience of ecological systems as an important social goal (Arrow, et al, 1995). I would follow these authors in arguing that true sustainability requires resilient ecosystems, but I would go further and attempt to relate resilience more explicitly to important social values, especially to the value of maintaining options that depend upon ecological processes and features. One way to emphasize this evaluative aspect of the search for sutainability is to refer to the "integrity" of the systems in question. Ecological systems will continue to respond and adapt to both natural and human-caused disturbances--some change is therefore inevitable. Humans cannot protect every process just as it is without freezing nature, which would be the ultimate, and self-defeating, outcome of over-doing "preservation". But ecosystems are unlimited in their plasticity and that they can really be "managed", controlled, and manipulated at all levels for human ends. Ecosystem management is understanding human communities as ecological elements in larger, and longer-term, ecological communities and physical systems. Once we fully accept that humans are a part of natural systems, ecosystem "management" loses its taint of hubris--more often than not, in ecosystem management, the unruly element in biotic communities--what requires "management"--is the human community and its impacts. What is needed, given these arguments, is a suite of characteristics which are nevertheless essential to supporting future well-being and cultural development.
Members of every culture encounter their "environment" as a mixture of oppportunities and constraints. This mix is partly based on characteristics of the environment itself and partly based on what goals are being pursued. Explorers searching for gold encounter a paucity of gold ore as a constraint, whereas this lack is no constraint to agriculturalist. Lack of gold ore is a state of reality; but the evalutation of that state is also a function of the goals and purposes of the explorers. The concepts of "opportunities," "options for free choice," and "constaints on free choice," therefore represent an implicit "negotiation" between the "hard" facts of physical reality and the values and goals of individuals and cultures. This cluster of terms, then, represents an attractive approach to defining intergenerational obligations, because the terms options and opportunities imply both a physical state of the world and a positive judgement of its value. These words are "morally thick" terms. Like "stalwart," or "honorable," in ordinary discourse, they embody both descriptive and prescriptive content (Williams, 1986; Nelson, 1995; Callicott, 1995; Norton, 1995).
I would suggest that we attempt to operationalize, as the basis for a new approach to evaluation of ecosytem management plans, a physical, measurable index that tracks the degree to which ecological, as well as economic, options are protected for future generations. A process or feature of an ecological system will then be understood to have value to the extent that it is associated with economically or culturally important options that should be held open for future generations. The idea of options can play an important role because of its dual nature - the options available to members of a local culture in the future will be dependent on the land, on the physical and ecological characteristics of the landscape that is passed on to them by the present; and also by the goals, values, and aspirations of people in the future. Just as firms often keep separate accounts, with different time preference assumptions for operating and for capital budgets, the approach proposed here would keep separate accounts for economic well-being and for inter-generational values.
Once we are resigned to keeping separate accounts for short- and long-term values, we can continue to use willingness to pay as a guide in the short term. Economic well-being--having economic resources to purchase needed an desired service--can be measured in dollars, which can be thought of as "options" that can be exercised through exchange in "markets". These markets model individual behavior against a backdrop of assumptions about market rules and trends, and also against a backdrop of assumptions about the constancy of the available resource base and the quality of the functioning of ecological systems and processes. Economic, cost-benefit models, therfore, continue to have an important role in policy analysis, especially regarding policies with short temporal horizons.
When concern shifts to multi-generational frames of time, we can retain the goal of measuring value in terms of options and free choices available, but we will not, on this temporal scale, be able to assume constancy of economic and background ecological conditions. So we must replace dollars witha nother currency--a measure of ecologically sustained options maintained as a culture adapts to the opportunities and constraints embodied in the habitat of a human community over decades and generations. Whereas both operating and capital budgets are normally kept in monetary units, our system of evaluation for ecosystem management policies goes one further step--the longer-term analysis is expressed in different currency, and recognizes a different criterion for success. To keep matters simple, assume that short-term impacts of human choices can be measured in terms of dollars representing individual welfare, and that the decision criterion applicable to to decisions with short-term impacts is the highest possible benefits-to-costs ratio (BCA criterion). By contrast, accounts to calculate benefits of sustaining ecologically based options should be measured in terms of an opportunities-constraints index (OCI). The OCI would be designed to track those particular physical characteristics of ecological and physical systems that would indicate the presence, in the physical environment of a culture, healthy ecological processes and structures that will maintain, into the indefinite future, culturally valued options and opportunities.
The evaluative system proposed is pluralistic in the sense that it keeps at least two sets of books and applies different criteria of acceptable action within distinct systems of analysis. Further, the metrics employed to measure success in the two sets of books refer to different units of value. This dualistic system requires that we resolve a formidable conceptual problem. We must operationalize the OCI in such a way that it (a) designates physical states of ecological systems that are measurable, or at least operationalizable, and at the same time (b) represents a legitimate social value that could be supported democratically by concerned and informed citizens. We can call this the problem of operationalizing.
In this Part we push the concept of OCI as far as possible toward operationalization. It should be noted that, because of the high degree of local determinism regarding ecological condiions, opportunities, and constraints, it is questionable whether it is possible to define an OCI as a general concept applicable everywhere. We may only be able to give general guidelines for developing many locally defined indices of the integrity of particular places. My goal here is to establish that it is in principle possible to define a measurable characteristic of human and natural systems that are likely to maintain their OCI, and to propose this index as an operationalizable measure of intergenerational equity. Again, we interpret our problem as that of defining a fair bequest package for future generations, and we assume our definition will express the idea of strong sustainability, that there are some structures and processes of nature--natural capital-- that are essential elements in any fair bequest package to future generations. The next step is to show how certain interactions of economic and ecological forces can result in increased options, and how others can result in reduced options for a community as it develops over decades and generations.
As a first step in explaining the social value of maintaining options, consider an actual case, that of the rpid deforestation of the ancient temperate rainforests of the U.S. Pacific Northwest over the last century. Can we--with hindsight, but from the perspective of 50 yars ago--define an alternative development path for the Northwest that would have (a) used tha magnificent resource of forests to build a strong regional economy and (b) resulted in a landscape that included a sustainable source of timber and sufficient old-growth to protect the biological diversity and key ecological processes in the region?
Suppose that fifty years ago farsighted state governments in the Pacific Northwest had set up a revolving fund of low-interest loans to encourage local entrereneurs to form milling and furniture-building cooperatives, diverting some investment from expansion of logging operations into the wood processing industry. Suppose also that the program was successful and the Pacific Northwest developed so that most cities or regions had a timber extraction industry, cooperatives to mill raw timber, and other businesses that produce wood products such as furniture and fabricated elements of homes. The economy, rather than specializing in cutting and exporting whole logs, with these added incentives, might have organized to maximize value added near the site of the timber extraction. It seems reasonable to believe that, since there would have been more value added per log, and more jobs generated per log cut, this alternative development path would have resulting in a more varied and diverse economy, with more options for careers and investments, and also with retention of more old-growth than in actuality has been retained. To define the difference between these two development paths in a general and operationalizable way--to distinguish economic policies that protect and expand opportunities from those that destroy and limit future options--would be to provide a more positive characterization of the values and goals embodied in the search for sustainable institutions and policies. It would be to define strong sustainability as an intergenerationally measurable index of opportunities embodied in resilient ecological systems.
It is now possible to understand how the current movement toward ecosystem planning and evaluation represents an important new direction in environmental management. Whereas traditional atomistic environmental management has focused mainly on commodity production and on the impacts of such produciton on individual consumers, ecosystem management layers a second scale of value on top of short-term economic measurement of social values. Economic valuation, based on supply and demand assumptions, models the relationships between the economic system of production and the freedom of consumers to choose affordable products generated by that system. Ecosystem valuation and management, by contrast, focuses on the larger- and longer-scaled relationships that develop between a human population and its habitat over generations. These levels of activities can be modeled independently, because many individual choices of producers and ocnsumers will be canceled out and have no significant impact on the larger system. For example, if one farmer chooses to cut down his woodlot and plant wheat, this may have no long-term impact on ecological features of the system if the farmer's neighbor simultaneously chooses to let his wheat field go fallow. Ecosystem management can build upon this independence between the short-term effects of individual decisions, and long-term impacts, and set out to model and evaluate, these two relationships as distinct dynamic systems.
Terms such as integrity and resilience--once they are defined as associated with maintaining human options--embody sufficient semantic richness to connect discourse about values, especially the value of future freeedom of choice, with physical discourse about ecological systems experienced as a mixture of opportunities and constraints. These terms therefore provide a new alternative for evaluation methodologies. Admitting that we still have much to learn about how to value options that will be faced in the future, and admitting that we need a lot more work to operationalize physical features that can be expected to be associated with important human option values, we at least have a bridge for connecting these two bodies of information, a bridge that will allow commmunication back and forth between the social and natural sciences, and new oppoortunities to correct our beliefs and our valuations.
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Updated: October 25, 1996 |
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