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Outside Magazine, March 2005

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As a Matter of Fact, Money Does Grow on Trees (cont.)


	(Photograph by Dan Winters)

THE SILENT ENGINE

To some, it might seem pretty cut-and-dried: the value of leaving beautiful but "worthless" wilderness alone versus the potential for jobs, profits, and the prospect of reducing America's dependence on foreign sources of energy. Oil companies might mess up the landscape, but that's forgotten come payday. Wilderness advocates don't cut checks, and a man can't feed his family on scenery.

That's the old line, anyway, but it's not as convincing anymore. A reversal of that conventional wisdom began taking shape in the early nineties, following the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska's Prince William Sound. Shortly after the disaster, economists working for the state of Alaska calculated a fair estimate, in dollars, of the spill's damage. They used a number of then-controversial methods like "contingent valuation," which relies on polling data to estimate what the average citizen would pay to keep, say, Glacier National Park protected from destruction. Using such measures, the economists came up with a damage estimate: $3 billion.

Many of the theories, methods, and benchmarks used to produce the Valdez estimate didn't just emerge overnight. They were part of a 30-year-old work in progress by economists based in various academic outposts in the West—among them, Loomis, at Colorado State; Thomas Power, at the University of Montana; Gundars Rudzitis, at the University of Idaho; Gretchen Daily, at Stanford; and Ed Whitelaw, at the University of Oregon. Though the Valdez brought some publicity to what these thinkers were doing, their ideas didn't significantly influence national policy until 1999, when President Clinton first proposed the roadless rule.

"The timber industry launched an economic salvo against the roadless rule early on," recalls Ken Rait, a wilderness activist and former director of the Heritage Forests Campaign, a Washington, D.C.–based coalition of environmental groups that lobbied in favor of the rule. "They said it would condemn the future of rural economies. We knew they were flat-out wrong. So we brought John Loomis on to look into it."

Building on previous research that calculated everything from the spending average of wilderness visitors ($30 a day) to the value of roadless areas for scientific research (about $5 million a year), Loomis and Robert Richardson, a doctoral student at CSU, produced a study with impressive numbers. They found that wilderness pays primarily in three ways: direct income from recreational use and as a quality-of-life benefit to lure new businesses and residents; passive-use value (what it's worth to maintain the opportunity to visit wilderness, or to pass that opportunity on to future generations); and "ecosystem services," natural processes like the air- and water-purification functions of an undisturbed forest.

They estimated that the 42 million acres of roadless forest in the contiguous U.S. supported 24,000 jobs and provided nearly $600 million in annual recreation benefits. Passive-use values added another $280 million per year.

And then they came to the ecosystem-services figures. The idea of ecosystem services came of age in the mid-nineties, when academics like Stanford's Gretchen Daily and the University of Vermont's Robert Costanza argued that forests and other ecosystems provided billions in indirect benefits. The question they asked was simple: How much would it cost to replace these natural systems with an artificial device?

They answered it by extrapolating from real-world examples. In 1989, for instance, EPA officials ordered the City of New York to build a water-filtration plant that would cost $8 billion to construct and $300 million a year to operate. Instead, the city spent $2 billion to restore and protect its Catskill Mountains watershed, letting a healthy 2,000-square-mile forest do the work of an $8 billion industrial plant. Estimated value of water filtration provided by the watershed: $6 billion and counting.

Ecosystem services remained a little-known idea until 1997, when Costanza and 12 colleagues published the mother of all estimates, the value of the entire planet's ecosystem services: $33 trillion per year. The number, published in the journal Nature, seemed all the more astonishing when compared with the 1997 gross world product (the combined output of every nation), which was $18 trillion.

Applying the idea to the roadless rule, Loomis and Richardson pegged the ecosystem services of that acreage at between $1 billion and $1.5 billion. This brought their estimate of the total value of the 42 million roadless acres to a whopping $1.88 billion to $2.38 billion. The projected value of harvesting timber from that same swath of land? Some 730 temporary jobs and $184 million in lumber revenue.

The wilderness-economics numbers tend to be ignored or dismissed out of hand in the Bush administration's push to restore extraction-is-king priorities. Yet the figures for recreation alone are stunning. In 1995, U.S. Forest Service economists took stock of the agency's land and found that national forests generated $125 billion a year in economic activity. Recreation accounted for 75 percent of that figure. Timber and mining made up 15 percent.

"When I first quoted those figures, people in the agency couldn't believe it," recalls Jim Lyons, the Department of Agriculture's undersecretary for natural resources and environment in the Clinton administration. "Jack Ward Thomas, the Forest Service chief at the time, looked at me and said, 'Where'd you get that from?' But this was our own report, and it tracked a shift that had been happening for a long time. Recreation, not timber, is the Forest Service's main product."

"Wilderness," adds Peter Morton, an economist with the Wilderness Society, "is the silent engine of the West's economy."

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