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From
Putting a Price on the Red Kite
by Peter Midmore, Planet 156
The understanding that environmental limits should constrain
the extent of human economic activity has developed gradually,
if sometimes painfully, since the late 1960s. Unfortunately,
there has been less success in creating a decision-making
process which can take into account both the economy and the
ecosystems within which any economy must operate. How, for
instance, should we value clean air, biological diversity
and landscape aesthetics, particularly when such things are
complex, diverse and linked together across a diversity of
scales?
For some, the environment should be beyond price because
its characteristics are too valuable — an altogether
separate nature ethic is required so that it can be insulated
from grubby commercial practice. However, more pragmatically,
if the environment is placed beyond price it is priceless,
so that any decisions relating to it lack an appropriate basis
of comparison in relation to other activities where money
values are central. Seen in market terms, money values express
the strength of preferences, so that estimating its monetary
value might help policy-makers take the environment more seriously.
In these circumstances, any price, even if the reflection
of social preference it provides is wrong, might be considered
better than none at all.
But the very ambiguity of “value” unsettles this
convenient compromise. In one sense, “to value”
is “to cherish” which, evolutionary biologists
might argue, is a mechanism to ensure the preservation of
the conditions necessary for the reproduction of our species.
Another meaning of the verb, however, is “to calculate”
what one might reasonably expect in exchange. A currently
fertile branch of economics is attempting, through a rational
or perhaps rationalising stance, to link both these senses
of value. For the environment is important to the economy
— that much is clear in Wales, at least, following the
disastrous effects of foot and mouth on recreation and tourism.
However, the increasing currency of the rather nebulous concept
of sustainable development has also brought to light subtler
influences which the environment has on the quality of life.
The “environment”, of course, is not a single
concept but a portmanteau term covering the diverse elements
of the biophysical envelope we inhabit. In the past decade
excellent scientific work has increased our understanding
of the environment and its dynamic interaction with our species.
Nonetheless, controversies and uncertainties persist over
the most fundamental matters…
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