In the late 1970s, I wrote comments on enough draft plans for people in the Pacific Northwest Region of the Forest Service to know who I was, but not enough to have a major impact on the plans. But I found or developed three tools that helped.
The first was described in a book titled The Economics of Natural Environments by John Krutilla, of Resources for the Future, and Anthony Fisher, an economist from the University of California at Berkeley. The book argued that, since development of a roadless area was irreversible, a special calculation was necessary to weigh the benefits and costs of such development. Their proposal was to assume that the recreation and other amenity values of undeveloped areas would increase forever because such areas would become increasingly scarce. Even if today’s amenity values didn’t outweigh today’s commodity values from development, they argued, the discounted sum of future amenity values might do so.
I applied Krutilla and Fisher’s method to Oregon roadless areas in a paper called An Economic View of RARE II. The paper showed that, while some areas had tremendous timber values that outweighed potential wilderness values, most were more valuable for amenities than commodities. Continue reading
