The Non-Economic Valuation Perspective

Decision making in wetland policy today concentrates heavily on ways of deducing monetary values of natural functions, and our report mirrors this concentration. However, a significant movement exists in environmental studies which rejects economic, subjective, anthropocentric valuations of the natural world. In this section, we will explain this perspective and, in our final analysis attempt to logically incorporate non-economic valuations into a larger framework for improving wetland policy. The foundation of non-economic valuations, or intrinsic valuations, is environmental ethics.

Aldo Leopold was one of the first scientist-philosophers to lay out a system of belief, called the Land Ethic, which called for ecological rather than economic land use management. "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise (Leopold 1949 quoted in Pojman 1998 p.124)." Others have taken his initiative further and made more rigorous theories challenging the fundamentals of established Western thought by extending the moral consideration to all members of the Earth's biota.

If conservation policy only includes economic valuations in cost/benefit analysis, it implicitly dismisses the possibility of society intrinsically valuing natural resources. Dennis King, an environmental scientist at the U. of Minnesota, warns us of the dangers of conservation through the rigid numbers game of cost/benefit analysis. (King, 1998) Because difficult ecological valuations are at an obvious disadvantage when compared to the precise economic benefits of development projects, dependence on them is a false hope. Numbers produced by conventional ecological economic studies like willingness to pay may lead to wetland destruction despite the strong conservation mandate of no-net-loss.

There are two valuations which attempt to translate the intrinsic values of wetlands into terms that make sense economically, the quasi-option value and the contributory value. The quasi-option value is the value that society would place on wetlands IF the complex functions of wetlands were known by all. Uncertainty is acceptable in non-economic valuations, but must be accounted somehow in economic valuations. Quasi-option value is a concept allowing expert scientists to define wetland value. Contributory value recognizes the organic nature of ecosystems by recognizing wetlands' part in global life-support services of climate control, atmospheric composition, nutrient cycling, and overall biodiversity. The benefits of these services are obviously incalculable and form another basis to question the conventional cost/benefit analysis approach.

The social movement for wetlands protection has never been motivated by individual economic motivations, so willingness to pay and other economic valuation methods seem to be an unnatural foundation for conservation policy. There is no doubt that natural conservation is a legitimate political goal of a society, but we must remember that cost-benefit analysis cannot single-handedly challenge that legitimacy.