How people view resource scarcity often depends on how distant they are from the resource. Flying over Brazil from north to south a few days ago certainly drove that lesson home for me.
The problem of tropical deforestation is real. One can find all sorts of data about the area of forests in the Amazon River basin each day. These figures are accurate. Even so, one can still fly over the area in a jet plane for hours and see very little trace of human activity.
On the ground, one can find large areas of environmental devastation because of deforestation. But vast tracts of untouched forest still exist. One’s sense of the magnitude of the problem varies with distance.
The same is true, albeit on a different scale, in the cases of cutting aspen trees for paper in Minnesota; natural gas development in the Four Corners area of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona; or oil exploration on Alaska’s North Slope. Perceptions of the magnitude of the problem and the trade-offs involved vary greatly from one person to another.
Again, this is not an argument that increased clearing and settlement in Brazil or increased use of natural resources in the United States are benign impacts on the environment. It is instead a call to moderation in public debate about natural resources and environmental policy.
We have very imperfect information about the value of natural resources and about the costs of environmental damage caused by resource use. People on different sides of a particular issue cite different estimates. Such estimates vary depending on who makes them and when they are made. Even when there is agreement on the scope of benefits and costs, different people place different values on crucial gains or losses.
Those physically distant from the Amazon Basin or the Four Corners tend to emphasize the societal value of long-term ecosystem preservation. Those close to the resource tend to place more value on available land and jobs.
Both sets of concerns are legitimate. No resource-use policy will please everyone. The fairest and most-efficient outcomes can emerge when debate about trade-offs involved is moderate, with all sides respecting legitimate concerns of others.
That seldom happens. Advocacy groups often rely on extreme arguments as a way of mobilizing concern and support among the general public. But as for politics in general, appeals to both extremes make sensible compromise in the center difficult. That was true in Minnesota with the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, it is true with Western natural gas development and it is true with tropical deforestation.
Flying over the Amazon Basin and traveling on the ground in Brazil evoke two other comments. Environmentalists in high-income countries need to recognize that rich people telling poor people they need to stint to benefit humanity as a whole is morally troublesome. Yes, deforestation in Brazil or dirty industries in China can harm citizens of those countries now and might harm them much more in the future. But it is very troublesome to tell people earning $1,500 a year that they need to place more value on the future.
Sustainable land uses might provide greater employment and income in the long run than can destructive practices. But poor people in the tropics might not understand that. Moreover, advocates of conservation often are blindly optimistic about how easy it is to implement their ideas.
The second comment involves property rights in resources that cross national boundaries. If you privately own a resource such as a piece of land, you have a great deal to say about how it is used. If such use of your resource hurts others, they can pay you to stop such damage or resort to legal means to stop you. Nobel laureate Ronal Coase argued that either approach can result in economically efficient outcomes, as long as property rights are well-defined.
People in wealthy countries in North America and Europe might well be affected by resource and environmental policies in poorer developing nations. But international law is such that rich people have no property rights in resources located in poor countries. We have no right to dictate use of such resources.
If preserving forests in the Amazon Basin benefits humanity as a whole, then wealthy nations could compensate South American nations for such preservation. Wealthy nations can also use economic and foreign policy muscle to coerce preservation. But that is morally troubling and understandably will be resented by citizens in the bullied nations.
The same applies to other global problems such as greenhouse gases. We can pay China to clean up dirty industries or we can bully it. The second approach might be attractive to taxpayers and to demagogic politicians in wealthy countries. But like environmental degradation, foreign policy coercion has long-run consequences.
© 2006 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.