why is meaningful collaboration between ecologists and economists so difficult?

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Collaboration Between Ecologists and Economists

JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY WATER RESEARCH & EDUCATION

Why is Meaningful Collaboration BetweenEcologists and Economists So Difficult?

Clifford S. Russell1 and Mark Sagoff2

1Vanderbilt University, Bowdoin College, AKF; 2University of Maryland

UNIVERSITIES COUNCIL ON WATER RESOURCESJOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY WATER RESEARCH & EDUCATION

ISSUE 131, PAGES 13-20, JUNE 2005

From a policy perspective, the collaboration ofecologists and economists seems clearlydesirable. At the very least, if a policy goal

involves implicit or explicit choices of ecological “endpoints,” estimates of the cost of attaining these willbe relevant to the original decision and to subsequentreviews of the policy’s performance. For example,consider the on-going heated debate about thewisdom, or lack thereof, of the goals and methodsof the Endangered Species Act. But even the CleanWater Act involves implicit ecological choices, asits goals include making all U.S. water bodies of“fishable” and “swimmable” quality.

A more ambitious, but also more controversialgoal for collaboration would be the assignment ofmonetary values to the ecologically defined endpoints, based on what the citizens directly andindirectly affected would be, or say they would be,willing to pay to see them achieved.1 And at the endof this road lies cost-benefit analysis (CBA) ofpossible or existing policies, which can be used eitheras a hurdle (as in requiring that benefits exceed costsfor a program, policy, or project to be acceptable) oras a basis for choice among competing alternatives(as in choose the alternative with the greatest excessof benefits over costs).2

It may be slightly less well known, and even lesswidely understood, that economists have gottenthemselves in trouble with prescriptions for policyinstrument designs that cannot perform as promisedthrough their failure to take into account thecomplexity of the natural world’s actions in translatingpollution discharges into ambient environmentalquality levels. For example, see Russell andVaughan’s (2003) discussion of whether and underwhat conditions, particular versions of charge or

tradable discharge permit schemes can deliver theeconomist’s touchstone, static economic efficiency(here lowest costs for given ambient quality results).

This much is hat for most readers who come tothis issue from work in the environmental policyarena. But those same people are also likely to befamiliar with one or more hugely contentious, if notactually failed, efforts to organize the sort ofmeaningful collaboration that is, on its face, highlydesirable. The purpose of this short paper, based ona longer version completed as part of a projectsupported by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers(Baumann and Bourge 2005), is to draw attention towhat we believe to be a very large stumbling blockpresent in the earliest stages of the road to suchcollaboration, a block built up of fundamentallymismatched understandings of how to think aboutthe “value” of actions that purport to changeecological outcomes.

By way of background, we briefly describe threeexperiences with attempted collaboration,experiences spanning about 35 years in three quitedifferent settings. (In the first two, one of us was anactive participant; in the third, we were outsideobservers with access to the interpretations ofparticipants.) These tales provide clues as to thedetailed composition of the block in the road; at leastas we interpret them. And in spelling out the lessonswe find in them, we define a problem for the future.We look for a way around the block and into thefuture, but, to anticipate, we certainly do not claimto have found anything remotely qualifying as amagic bullet. Indeed, we seriously doubt one exists.Rather, we think real progress will depend on theexistence of support for long-term collaboration, withall its frustrations, on fairly narrow, applied problems,

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in which contexts the fundamental disagreementscan be finessed long enough to get started. We donot advocate support for blue-ribbon committees ofthe eminent in the two disciplines, the products ofwhich are likely to be expressions of opposition tosin and support for virtue, but not operationalprescriptions for getting beyond the mismatchedunderstandings.

Tales from the Trenches ofCollaborative Efforts

The following brief descriptions of difficultiesexperienced in actual efforts at eco/eco collaborationillustrate several different guises in which thestumbling block to success can appear.

In which Monetary Valuation, even of Costs,is Seen as Wrong-headed when the Subject isthe Choice of Environmental Policy

In the early 1970s, Russell was working with anenvironmental engineer at Resources for the Futureon a large, for the time, mathematical optimizationmodel for regional pollution control. The goal was toillustrate the practical implications of theconservation of mass and energy in production andin pollution treatment processes, and was inspiredby Robert Ayres and Allen Kneese (1969). Themodel included air and water pollution links in theindustrially-diverse and densely populated DelawareEstuary region of NJ, PA and DE. The optimizationexercise was the minimization of the costs of meetingany given (feasible) set of ambient air and waterquality standards, while the underlying cost modelsreflected possible transfers of pollution mass fromone form to another and one medium to another, asin the burning of wastewater treatment plant sludge,or the dumping into water bodies of particulatesremoved from stack gases.

The first version of the model had for its waterquality side a very simple, traditional version of theBOD/DO relation in the river. But the overseers ofthe project, Kneese and Blair Bower, felt that successin reaching the overall goal would require moreextensive sets both of pollutants and of ambient qualitymeasures. They pushed for the addition of an ecologistwho would be able to build a model accepting at leasta generalized “toxic,” as well as nitrogen andphosphorous nutrients, and producing at leastpredictions of fish and algae as quality measures.

To make a long story short, such a person washired. While the desired aquatic ecological modelwas eventually built (Kelly, 1975), producingsomewhat peculiar results regarding fish, the wholeeffort failed in the policy arena (Spofford, Russelland Kelly 1976). This was because the Clean WaterAct (CWA) of 1972 shifted attention from ambientwater quality to treatment process definition. Butthe point here is not the policy failures. Rather, it isto set the stage for stressing that ecologists thought,and repeatedly said, that the idea behind the effortwas foolish, if not actually pernicious. For him, theanswer to the question, What should pollution controlpolicy look like? was crystal clear and had nothingto do with costs. That answer was to minimize theimpact of man, to aim for zero discharge, probablynot coincidentally the stated ultimate goal of theCWA. Anything else would leave us with “polluted,”unnatural, ecosystems, undesirable on their faces,whatever their multifaceted functioning might bepredicted to look like in detail.

In which “Valuation” and “Value” are Seen tobe Very Tricky Words

In the early 1990s EPA was spending substantialsums on the collection of masses of data about manytechnical indicators of ecosystem functioning in avariety of settings, from grasslands to wetlands, fromseashores to mountains. This “Ecological Monitoringand Assessment Program” (EMAP) was intendedto provide a foundation for better understanding and,ultimately, predictive modeling ability. But theindicators being studied were at the micro level anddesignated by names that only scientists could beginto relate to. To broaden the potential appeal of theprogram within and outside of the agency, includingamong those who held the congressional pursestrings, EPA funded at least one project aimed attranslating the indicators into more widelyunderstandable terms. A team of ecologists,sociologists, and anthropologists from Oak RidgeNational Laboratories (ORNL) joined with aneconomist, Russell, and a survey methodologist fromVanderbilt to undertake that task. While the basicchallenge was translating language and somehowaggregating micro measures, it was also necessaryto decide in advance how we would be able to tell ifthose changes “worked” in the sense that lay peoplecould relate to and understand what the newindicators implied for the ecological setting being

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described. (The project setting would be Appalachianforests, chosen because accessibility from ORNLwould be easy if on-the-ground testing turned out tobe necessary.)

It was this second challenge that got the groupmired in discussions about the meaning of “value”and “valuation.” The economist suggested that a wayto test understanding would be to ask a randomsample of lay individuals to judge among threealternative forests, described using the newlyconstructed indicators. These forests would bepresented to each respondent in pairs, and therespondent would be asked to say which s/hepreferred, or, equivalently to the economist, to saywhich s/he would be willing to pay more to visit fora day of recreation.

If the result for a person were a transitive orderingof the three forests, as in A>B, B>C, and A > C, thenthe indicators had been understood and “related to.”If the result were cyclic (A>B, B>C, C > A) it wasproposed that we interpret it as evidence of a failureto communicate the meaning of the indicators. Thisdid not go down well at all with the ecologists (or thesociologists and anthropologists, for that matter). Itwas not the possibility, found in laboratory experiments,of “preference reversals,” which show willingness topay and “preference” as being less tightly linked thaneconomists assume (see Grether and Plott 1979), thatbothered them. It was the idea that willingness to paywould be so casually equated to “value.”

In the course of many exhausting and sometimesacrimonious sessions it became clear that “value”for most of the team referred to “principle,” as in“freedom” is a basic “value” of U.S. democracy,rather than to something for which it is meaningful,or at least not offensive, to talk about paying. Theycould accept that food, clothing, and transportationare priced but not that a functioning ecosystem couldor should be. One of the arguments made to supportthis position involved the assertion that the “value”of the forest should include all the “life-support”services it provided to humanity, such as CO2sequestration, and flood control, in addition to theaesthetics that make for a pleasant day’s outing.But how could the respondents possibly have a clueabout what those “values” might be?

This dispute about testing technique was neversettled because EPA backed out of its commitmentto the project with more than half the original lifeleft to run. (A paper summarizing the slender results

obtained to that point is Shiller et al. 2001.) Theeconomist came away from the experience with anappreciation that “value” and “valuation’ areseriously tricky words for ecologist/economist teamsto come to grips with. But he never could see thatthe insistence on taking into account all the serviceflows from nature made sense when valuingalternative forests that differed from each other inonly modest degree.

In Which the Argument Arises that, ifMonetary Valuation is Inevitable, Start withTotal Value

Roughly a decade after the problem of“valuation” set the indicator translation researchteam to wrangling, a conceptually related disputebetween ecologists and economists broke up a panelconvened by EPA to discuss and recommendmethods of deriving estimates of the ecologically-based benefits attributable to air pollution controlunder the Clean Air Act (CAA). The economist’svision for such an effort has already been noted,albeit very briefly: the physical, chemical, andbiological effects of the CAA controls would bedetermined from existing technical literature and thejudgment of experts. The specifically ecologicalimplications of these “forcing functions” would beteased out using predictive models, presumably thenewest intellectual descendants of the ecosystemmodels of the 1960s and 1970s. Then economistswould devise ways to estimate individuals’willingness to pay for the changes found. They woulduse either “indirect” methods that look for linksbetween the changes and people’s behavior inmarkets, or “direct” methods that involve askingpeople what they would be willing to pay to“purchase” those changes (see Freeman 2003).

Thus the economist’s vision looks only at thepredicted change in ecosystem functioning and theresulting flow of services. For the most part, it implicitlyassumes that policies such as the CAA involve onlymarginal changes to the underlying conditions withinwhich the ecosystems operate and thus will lead toonly small changes in service flows. But what if, aftera seemingly small human intervention, the ecosystemundergoes large, fundamental, changes? Ecologists tendto argue that we are sufficiently ignorant of the systemdynamics for all ecosystems that we can almost neverrule out such a result.



The ecologist’s vision for getting at the value ofecological system changes should, on this reasoning,start from the total value of the system, either as itexists if it is at risk from the intervention, or as itmight exist if the action contemplated seems topromise only improvement. And why draw linesaround “an ecosystem”? If everything is reallyconnected to everything else, such lines are not onlyarbitrary but also possibly dangerous. Rather thestarting place should be the total value of the world’secosystems, as estimated by Costanza andcollaborators (Costanza et al. 1997).

It was apparently a disagreement over whetheror not to start the EPA panel’s work with theCostanza total value, and try to pro rate changes inthat value to reflect the limited operational scale ofthe CAA, that pushed the panel ecologists andeconomists apart. The economists criticized theprescription as, on its face, unhelpful because theycould see no way that this total value was relevantto what had apparently been marginal changes infunctioning attributable to the CAA. They alsocriticized in some detail the methods used by theCostanza team in arriving at the total value. But theecologists felt their concern about uncertainty,reflecting ignorance, was being shunted aside byfellow panelists who were not trained to appreciatethe depth of that uncertainty—and who were, in anycase, famous (or infamous) for always being readyto assume the existence of the proverbial can opener.The long and short of the tale is that the ecologistswalked out, and the rump of the panel, mainly theeconomists, was in a position to impose its vision bydefault. But the economists were left without theability to get the ecologists’ insights and judgmentsconcerning the available predictive models of thesystems putatively affected by the CAA, and withoutthat guidance it would be hard for policy makers toknow how realistic a vision had been presented. (Inwriting this “tale” we have relied heavily on aUSEPA [2001] report and on first hand accountsprovided by V. Kerry Smith and A. Myrick Freeman.)

Linking the Experiences:Uncertainty, Risk Aversion, andViews of “Value”

We believe it is useful to attempt to tease out andmake explicit the links among the recountedexperiences; in our view they tell us more when

seen as pieces of a single puzzle than when simplyrecounted ad seriatim. Thus, at the time of the firstdispute, when the ecologist, hired exactly for hismodeling skills, dismissed the entire cost-effectiveness modeling project as a waste of time,the economist’s reaction was, in turn, to dismiss thatgesture as mere politics. It seemed that the call forautomatic zero tolerance for human impact on naturethrough pollution was just an example of a newPh.D. imitating the then-current antics ofCommoner, Watt, and Erlich, who were much in thepublic eye. But, seen in combination with the otherexperiences, the initial refusal to play the game canbe seen as quite likely an implicit acknowledgementof ignorance, and the choice of extreme risk aversionin the face of that ignorance.3

In the second tale, to the economist the argumentsover “value” seemed to be just hugelycounterproductive distractions from the task ofdesigning a research methodology. The claim thatasking people to “value” days of recreation indifferent forests was in any way akin to asking themto put a price on “freedom” seemed merelyperverse. Further, the fall back position, that anypurely recreational “value” would potentially bemisleading because it ignored differences among theforests in their ability to provided basic life-supportservices to humanity generally, while possibly correctin principle, seemed over the top as a practical matter.After all, how much could these forests actuallydiffer in the latter regard? But, if one starts from thebelief that tinkering with ecosystems, even with thebest of intentions, can lead to disaster, thenemphasizing the total value of what is at stake, oreven implicitly making that total value infinite byanalogizing it to matters of fundamental principle,may be seen as rational, if extreme, risk aversion.The fact that the research team was not going to betinkering with any actual forests, and thus would notbe risking actual disaster, was apparently easy tolose sight of in the hothouse atmosphere of theinfrequent team meetings.

In the third situation, real ecosystems were atstake. The CAA exists and has real effects on theground. The danger for the risk averse might wellbe seen to be the possibility of undervaluing itsaccomplishments. That would more likely be avoidedif the base from which benefits were measured weredestruction rather than simply a slightly less desirablestate. This line of thinking may or may not have

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been explicitly behind the insistence of the ecologiststhat the panel’s methodological recommendationsstart from the Costanza et al. total value number,but it does provide room for cross-disciplinarydiscussion. As it happened, discussion faltered andthen stopped more or less completely.

This interpretation of the “tales” amounts to thedefinition of a theme that helps in understanding thedifficulty of eco/eco collaboration. We suggest thatthe outline of this theme runs as follows: Ecologistsare aware of linkage, complexity, and ignorance asthey look at the natural world. They find it difficult,even impossible, to ignore the chance that ecologicaldisaster will result from human intervention in thatworld, even if its proponents might characterize thepurpose of the intervention as “pro nature.” Thus,total ecosystem value is never irrelevant: the end pointof an intervention could be disaster, and the potentialdamages, if monetized, enormous. Decoupling of partsof the affected system, or the assumption that smallinterventions make only for small changes in the systeminvolved, do not come easily.

Economists, on the other hand, especially microeconomists who dominate applied policy fields,including environmental and resource economics, aretrained from their earliest courses that assumingdecoupling (though that word is not generally used) isthe best way to make progress in the analysis of policyproblems and potential solutions. Assuming givenprices or quantities (or both) in every market but theone being studied comes as naturally as breathing.Economic “collapse” (almost) never need beconsidered in the set of possible outcomes resultingfrom a candidate policy. Small changes in rules orincentives structures may be assumed to producecorrespondingly small changes, both in size and inreach, in the outcomes observed in the world. Andthose small changes are what the valuation problemis (almost) always about. From this background,economists ask ecologists for help with predictions ofthe (small) changes in natural world outcomes,proposing to use their disciplinary tools to supply valuesfor the changes. They are taken aback, to say theleast, when they are instead lectured on the importanceof the life support services of ecosystems and thereal meaning of “value.” But they often do not havethe time (in the setting constructed for the proposedcollaboration) or background to allow them tounderstand whence come these lectures. The dialogueall too often never gets down to the real issues of

ignorance, risk of disaster, and how to do policyanalysis in such a setting.

Can Anything Be Done AboutMismatched Concepts, Concerns,and Conclusions?

While we believe that the above analysis helpsexplain the difficulties ecologists and economists haveexperienced in attempts at collaboration, we do notsee that it leads to a simple prescription for changingthings. Neither discipline can tell the other it is wrongand expect to be heard, let alone to have an effect.The bases of the “models” that underpin habits ofanalysis lie deep in decades of methodologicaldevelopment and graduate education. Understandingmay lead to tolerance, but collaboration is not a productof tolerance so much as of shared concepts thatinclude the nature of the problems being addressedand the tools for addressing them. Ecologists andeconomists see different problems when they look atthe interactions of humans and the environment, andthey are taught to apply quite different assumptionsto the analysis of these interactions. We do, however,want to suggest one negative and one positive, iflimited, conclusion bearing on the question: Cananything be done?

The negative conclusion concerns the notion thata “safe minimum standard” (SMS) approach canbe helpful as a basis for eco/eco dialogue. In the1990s, the SMS idea was espoused by individualsinterested in furthering that dialogue (see Norton1995) and analyzed sympathetically by card-carryingeconomists (see Toman 1994). The idea was (andis) that the SMS approach to policy decisions shouldcome into play when the stakes arguably involvelong-run irreversibility and large spatial impact. Forquickly and easily reversible, small-scale decisions,the ordinary economic approach that looks for“efficient” solutions via cost-benefit or cost-effectiveness analysis (CBA or CEA) would beacceptable. Unfortunately, if the reasoning presentedabove is correct, the argument between ecologistsand economists in nearly any policy setting is likelyto be about exactly the issues of how irreversibleand how large scale the impacts of the decision arelikely to be...about the nature and extent of the riskbeing faced. If one follows Toman and Norton byconceiving of the SMS vs. CBA decision as involvingplacing the problem setting at issue within a box, the



axes of which are degree of irreversibility and extentof impact, and then observing where the problem islocated relative to a pre-decided frontier within thebox, the terms of the arguments as traced abovemay be changed but the substance will be the same.Ecologists are very likely to want to place mostproblems further out on the impact and irreversibilityscales than are economists. Maybe such a shift interms would be a healthy thing, but we are deeplyskeptical that it will lead to real progress.4

So, what can we offer by way of positivesuggestions? Only this: We believe that progress canbe made on the applied level, through theestablishment of multi-disciplinary teams that staytogether for long periods and work, at least in thebeginning, on fairly narrowly defined problems. Timeis essential for getting beyond the arguments fromconflicting principles. Narrow problems will help tofocus attention on real systems and options ratherthan generalized “ecosystems” with abstractproperties and ill-defined human “interventions.”Unfortunately, there are few institutions around thathave the money and mandate to offer real supportfor such efforts, where “support” would ideallyinclude not just salary but the currency of academicrespectability, such as some version of tenure. Inthe U.S., we have been told that the Institute forWater Research (IWR), part of the Army Corps ofEngineers, offers this setting, though whether theacademic link from IWR to academe is sufficientlystrong to give young scholars career flexibility isunclear. Russell has spent almost a year at the BeijerInstitute, part of the Swedish Royal Academy ofSciences, and can testify that it is such a place. (Forexample, a major ongoing project there has involvedecologists and economists in studies of the problemof nutrient discharge to the Baltic Sea, with theconsequent problems for aesthetics, recreation andecosystem structure.) U.S. universities are neverlikely to find it easy to play in this game because ofthe dominance of traditional departments and schoolsin the administration of the reward structure. Tenurein traditional departments rewards publication in“core” journals of the discipline, not collaborativepapers in interdisciplinary journals, or, worse yet, foran economist, papers in ecology journals, or viceversa.5 Perhaps the existence of graduate programsin “ecological economics” (as at RennselaerPolytechnic Institute) and of an eponymous journalcan be taken as evidence that, in the longer run, the

new discipline embracing eco/eco collaboration willsuccessfully be established in academe. Thiscertainly cannot be ruled out, but at this point,assuming it is going to happen would seem to be arisky strategy for the young person who wants bothto collaborate across the eco/eco line and hopes fora successful academic career.

Acknowledgements

The chapter on which this shorter paper is basedwas written for an interdisciplinary book of reflectionson the history of methodological developments inintegrated water resources planning andmanagement. The effort has been supported by theInstitute for Water Research of the U.S. Army Corpsof Engineers, and was organized by DuaneBaumann, Paul Bourget, and Mark Dunning. Weare grateful for helpful comments on early versionsof the chapter made by Baumann, Rick Freeman,Chuck Howe, Peter Loucks, Larry MacDonnell, andKerry Smith. In addition, participants at an IWRseminar, during which the entire book wassummarized, made several useful points, but withoutgiving their names. And, finally, we appreciate theinterest and comments of participants in the sessionat the UCOWR meetings during which chapters ofthe book were again summarized by their authors.

Author Bio and Contact Information

CLIFFORD S. RUSSELL is a professor of Economics Emeritus atVanderbilt University, a Research Associate in Economics andEnvironmental Studies at Bowdoin College, and a VisitingProfessor at AKF (Local Government Research Institute) inCopenhagen. From 1968, when he received his Ph.D. inEconomics from Harvard, until 1985, he was employed atResources for the Future (RfF). When he left for Vanderbilt hewas director of RfF’s Quality of the Environment division anda senior Fellow. At Vanderbilt he was director of the VanderbiltInstitute for Public Policy Studies as well as a member of thedepartment of Economics. In 1996/97, he spent nine months atthe Beijer Institute of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciencesas the Valfrid Paulson Visiting Professor of EnvironmentalEconomics. His email address is [email protected].

MARK SAGOFF has published widely in journals of law,philosophy, and the environment. His most recent book is Price,Principle, and the Environment (Cambridge University Press,2004). He was named a Pew Scholar in Conservation and theEnvironment in 1991 and awarded a Fellowship at the WoodrowWilson International Center for Scholars in 1998. Sagoff has anA.B. from Harvard and a Ph.D. (Philosophy) from Rochester.He taught at Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, the

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University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Cornell before comingto the University of Maryland, where he is now Senior ResearchScholar at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy. Hisemail address is [email protected].

References

Argyle, M. 1986. The psychology of happiness. New York:Methuen & Co..

Ayres, R. U. and A. V. Kneese. 1969. Production, consumption, andexternalities. American Economic Review 59 (July): 282-297.

Baumann, D. and P. Bourget. (in press). Water Resources Policy:An Assessment. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress.

Blamey, R., M. Common and J. Quiggin. 1995. Respondents tocontingent valuation surveys: Consumers or citizens? AustralianJournal of Agricultural Economics 39(1): 263-288.

Bromley, D. 1990. The Ideology of Efficiency: Searching for aTheory of Policy Analysis. Journal of EnvironmentalEconomics and Management 19(1): 86-107.

Costanza, R., R. d’Arge, R. de Groot, S. Farber, M. Grasso, BHannon, S. Naem, K. Limburg, J. Paruelo, R. O’Neill, R.Raskin, P. Sutton and M. van den Belt. 1997. The value ofthe world’s ecosystem services and natural capital. Nature387: 253-260.

Fischhoff, B. 1991. Value elicitation: Is there anything there?American Psychologist 46: 835-847.

Grether, D. and C. Plott. 1979. Economic theory of choice andthe preference reversal phenomenon. American EconomicReview 69: 623-638.

Kelly. R. 1975. The Delaware Estuary Model. In EcologicalModeling in a Resource Management Framework, ed. C.Russell. Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future.

Lane, R. 1993. Does money buy happiness? The Public Interest113: 56-65.

Norton, B. 1995. Evaluating ecosystem states: Two competingparadigms. Ecological Economics 14: 113-127.

Ready, R. and R. Bishop. 1991. Endangered species. AmericanJournal of Agricultural Economics 73(2): 309-312.

Russell, C. and W. Vaughan. 2003. The choice of pollutioncontrol instruments in developing countries: Arguments,evidence, and suggestions. In The International Yearbook ofEnvironmental and Resource Economics, eds. H. Folmerand T. Tietenberg. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar.

Sagoff, M. 2004. Price, Principle, and the Environment. NewYork: Cambridge University Press.

Shiller, A., C. Hunsaker, M. Kane, V. Dale, G. Suter, G. Pion,M. Jensen, and V. Konar. 2001. Communicating ecologicalindicators to decision makers and the public. ConservationEcology 5(1).

Slovic, P. 1995. The construction of preferences. AmericanPsychologist 50: 364-371.

Spofford, W., C. Russell, and R. Kelly. 1976. Environmentalquality management: An application to the Lower DelawareValley. Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future.

Toman, M. 1994. Economics and sustainability: Balancing trade-offs and imperatives. Land Economics 70 (4): 399-413.

USEPA 2001. Review of the draft analytical plan for EPA’ssecond prospective analysis – Benefits and costs of theClean Air Act 1990-2020. Science Advisory EPA-SAB-COUNCIL-ADV-01-004, Environmental Board (1400A)September. An Advisory by a special Panel of the AdvisoryCouncil on Clean Air Compliance Analysis. Available online at: http://www.epa.gov/science1/pdf/councila01004.pdf.

Notes

1. This notion is something of a lightning rod forcontroversy—philosophical, theoretical, and empirical.For an introduction to the issues see Argyle 1986;Fischhoff 1991; Lane 1993; Slovic 1995; and Sagoff 2004.2. That CBA is also controversial is hardly news. Bromley,1990, does a very fine job of explaining why, even from anarrow economic perspective, it must be taken with alarge grain of salt. In a broader view, its addition of(presumably self-regarding) individual valuations flies inthe face of the intrinsically communal nature of mostenvironmental decisions (Blamey et al. 1995).

3. It is by no means clear that the young ecologist involvedwould, or could, have provided this interpretation ifpressed. In the beginning, it seemed that he believed itwould be straightforward to use the modeling tools hehad been taught to capture the estuary’s aquatic systemoperation. Only later did he, and his colleagues, discoverhow hard this was. But the Delaware was a very dirtyriver then, and the news was full of foaming and evenflaming rivers elsewhere, so opting for zero dischargemay have seemed a sensible way to put pressure on thoseresponsible, roughly what the 1972 CWA actually did.

4. It is worth pointing out that the work of Ready andBishop (1991) puts in doubt the value of the SMS, evenas a risk averse approach to policy decisions. They showthat whether the SMS is, in fact, going to strike interestedparties as truly risk averse in a species extinction decisionsetting depends on the nature of human ignorance aboutthe species in question when the decision whether or notto set an SMS must be made. The common variety ofignorance about the vast majority of species would leadto rejection of the application of the SMS because in theabsence of knowledge we would have no basis for valuing



them, in contrast to the "development" alternative, thechoice of which would lead to their loss. The finding thatignorance vitiates the apparent protective role of the SMSought to make us veryuncomfortable.5. Since we began sharing drafts of the chapter uponwhich this brief paper is based, we have had pointed outto us more than once, as evidence that we are flogging adead horse, the existence of papers in Science, Natureand other journals, jointly authored by some of the greatnames in both economics and ecology. We may beperverse, but we are inclined to believe the horse is stillbreathing, even kicking. When you are famous enough,you can do what you want; and when you are mellowenough and face a broad enough charge, you can easilyfinesse the problems that trip up lesser mortals trying tobuild an operational model or produce an actual monetizedestimate of ecological damage or improvement. Thesejoint statements are good things, but they do notsubstitute for a strategy of fostering collaboration in thetrenches where the real work is and will be done.

why is meaningful collaboration between ecologists and economists so difficult?

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