Stuart M.

Leiderman "Environmental Refugees and Ecological Restoration" Environmental Response/4th World Project c/o Natural Resources Department, James 215 University of New Hampshire, Durham 03824 USA ph 603.862.1051/868-1004 fx 603.862.4976 leidermn@christa.unh.edu http://pubpages.unh.edu/~leidermn

THE ECONOMICS OF ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION: A PRELIMINARY REPORT

for Course on Ecological Economics Department of Economics University of New Hampshire-Durham, Spring 1993 Introduction Within a ten minute walk across the University of New Hampshire, one would almost certainly come across numerous signs of environmental wear and tear - some superficial and others quite serious - ranging from rills and gullies, overgrown bramble patches, old dumping sites and garbage patches in and around the dumpsters, some old and some recent oil spills near workshops and garages, scuffed-out lawns and barren places along driveways and parking lots where road salt has leached winter after winter. Within an hour's walk from campus, roughly five miles, one would likely encounter many of the same situations but in addition, there probably would be other extensive signs of abuse or neglect, including a town dump, salt pile, dirt roads and drainage ditches gouged out of peaceful wooded settings, boat launch pads trashed by vacationers, scarred or total clear-cuts for new home sites, stagnant wetlands in the crotches of highway interchanges, farm furrows plowed against the contour and barrels of used crankcase oil spilling over behind service stations. Within an hour's drive from campus, the true impact on Great Bay and Seacoast ecology would become apparent: an abandoned military air base harboring dozens of U.S. EPA-flagged Superfund toxic sites, many of them dispersed throughout wildlife areas along the Bay's eastern shore, yet another huge highway interchange totally obliterating natural wetlands, several cases of stream "straightening" and rechanneling to accommodate more urban development, a nuclear power plant discharging radioactive effluent into near-shore waters, forests being removed on steep slopes and along watercourses - contributing to sedimentation serious enough to impair fish and wildlife habitat, removal and export of precious topsoil from hundreds of home sites, condominiums and new shopping areas, regional incinerator ash dumps, holding ponds and other dumpsites - the urban and rural "sacrifice areas" that gobble up open space and further shrink community tax bases. There would also be exhausted farm fields, heavily herbicided landing strips and golf courses, septage dumps and quarry spoil covering what had at one time been wilderness of timeless beauty. What shall we say about an hour's air flight from campus in any direction? This three- to five hundred miles radius would encompass most the of the U.S. Northeast plus Canada's Southern Quebec Province - the home of three centuries of immigrant industrialization which has left contaminated mill towns, communities now inundated by large freshwater reservoirs, torn and eroded coastlines, strip mines and deep mines leaching acid into the countryside, square miles of primeval mixed hardwoods, pines, spruce and fir lost to monocultures of pulpwood, salmon streams dammed and now mostly abandoned, hundreds more toxic sites - some too dangerous to ever come near again without, perhaps, the investment of millions of dollars. A day's flight radius from campus would bring the whole continent under scrutiny. There would be thousands of mineral extraction sites, coal and oil fields, farms with receding water tables, river valleys leveed and gouged like so many monstrous drainage ditches, acidified and eutrophied lakes and ponds, towns sprawling over prairies and foothills, highways breaching mountain ranges and watersheds - intercepting, diverting, burying and drying up headwaters, receiving waters, marshes, estuaries and deltas, trans-basin pipelines competing with the evolved continental hydrological cycle. Finally, a week's flying would permit encompassing the world. The globe's damage would be revealed - a running tab would tally billions of dollars, millions of environmental refugees, thousands of ecosystems, countless species

endangered because of development pressure, the woof-and-warp of water and soil almost worn out and in very few places cared for with the needs of the seventh future generation in mind. It would be obvious that, from the campus to the continents, the need for environmental restoration is everywhere. What is Ecological Restoration? Of all forms of environmental activity, ecological restoration can be thought of as the most difficult to conceive and carry out but also the most important and rewarding. Other activities, including end-of-pipeline pollution control, recycling, mitigation, multiple use management, development moratoria, etc. are also essential but are more shortrange and limited-in-scope tactics compared to the comprehensive strategy of restoration which can ultimately bring society into harmony with Nature. A favorite public television series, "This Old House", is a useful parallel to describe the differences between restoration (which is profound) and the lesser forms of repair and maintenance (which are superficial by comparison). The series explains the importance of learning about and reincorporating the history, construction methods, original materials and design function of particular "old houses" because of l) qualities that have enabled them to keep standing through, often despite, generations of occupants and the natural elements, 2) built-in (and often accumulated) presence, style and ambience that give them distinction worth remembering and also preserving, and 3) valuable insight and lessons about houses, neighborhoods, communities and regions that can only be learned from the existence of the "real thing" rather than from photographs, blueprints, memorabilia and the like. For these reasons, it is not sufficient, for example, just to patch the roof with any suitable shingle, shore up the front steps with any available lumber, pave over the cobblestone drive, tile over the worn pine plank flooring or plaster over the fireplace to have a clean wall to locate the entertainment center, even though these measures might permit sooner occupation. Instead, the goal is to "return" to an original condition of structural integrity, functional purpose and aesthetics that will give the new occupants the experience of actually "being there" at the beginning while also "being here, now" (with the optional addition of running water, electricity, central heat, etc.). Although many may consider such a "return" a step backwards from modern living, growing numbers of restoration specialists, project participants and old-house owners understand that this is a way of "refreshing" history, i.e., greatly compressing time by choosing qualities that are enduring. In this way, restoration can be considered "real progress". Of course, old houses can't restore themselves; even in the mildest climates and with the most considerate occupants and timely maintenance, they steadily deteriorate. Restoration takes considerable motivation, research, planning, cooperation, financial investment, authentic materials and tools plus the construction skills necessary to return the house to prime condition. Such skills are generally quite different than what's needed to build a "new" house from scratch. On the other hand, natural systems are timelessly evolving until they reach a "climax" stage of frugal and efficient dynamic interchange of energy and matter within a stable condition of overall structure and function. When left alone, in the absence of man's excessive intervention and extraction or of cataclysmic natural events (firestorms, earthquakes, eruptions, etc.), climax-stage ecosystems are self-renewing and reliable support systems for all life on earth. But there's a catch. Not everything created by Nature or built by man came from, or reflects, a single significant origin back to which one can, or would want to, return in a successful restoration. A house, for example, may have had major overall changes, repairs, additions or removals in its lifetime...some or all of which have desirable characteristics. (It is not unusual for an old house in New England to have such a series of transformations, often at least once a century. There are many typical examples of this in the University and Durham community; one preRevolutionary War mansion was even moved several hundred yards prior to a major expansion over a century ago.) Likewise, many surviving, playable handmade violins built prior to the mid-l850's have longer necks "grafted" onto their original bodies, dating back to the time when the pitch of the key of "A" slowly climbed and then stayed at the current tone of 440 cycles per second. Many of these necks are beautifully carved, and few violin craftsmen or collectors would consider discarding them just because they weren't original, unless the purpose was to dedicate the instrument to only playing the older, lower-pitched chamber or orchestral music. Instead, the craftsmen would accept the present instrument; restoration of the scroll, pegbox, fingerboard, etc. would almost always be to save the existing neck. (Often, even if desired, the original neck would be nowhere to be found.) Next, consider restorative or reconstructive surgery: it would be unusual to rebuild an adult accident victim's face in the image of his/her youth, or to create shorter-than-adult limbs for an adult amputee. In such cases, restoration is towards the characteristics of the latest functioning body part(s). (Cosmetic surgery is an exception because the goal is to cheat time, at least for a while, with a variety of tucks, suction, implants, etc., aimed at turning back the clock or changing the original endowments.) With all of these - homes, violins, bodies - there is nothing to stop the aging process; restoration can temporarily renew, halt or slow the course of events, but they will inevitably require another round of restoration.

With ecosystem restoration, however, there are particular challenges and decisions for the restorers, coupled with invaluable assistance from Nature itself under proper conditions. For example, consider a eutrophied pond in the midst of a town park. Over recent years, heavy applications of artificial fertilizer have encouraged thick lawns, but the excess has washed off the land or leached from the groundwater into the pond, inadvertently fertilizing the pond as well...providing a stimulating shot of growth nutrients to algae, aquatic weeds and pond lilies. These, in turn, have slowly crowded out the sheltered near-shore and the open water habitats essential to crayfish, turtles, frogs, snakes, fish, shore birds and ducks. The explosion of perennial vegetation eventually has robbed the pond of dissolved oxygen and has begun to fill up the bottom with undecomposed plant material. The water depth is essentially reduced to where it now affects the recurring Spring and Fall turnovers, the temperature stratification, internal currents, etc., leaving a stinking, stagnant pool...an ironic but tell-tale symptom of unecological stewardship in the midst of acres of well-groomed green rolling lawns. Townsfolk no longer find it a pleasure to sit on the nearby benches, fish from the shore or wade during the hot summer. The natural biodiversity of the place is also gone. The aquatic scene is crowded, simplified and unexciting. It is the environmental equivalent of a prison cafeteria. Even this ordinary example contains the basic elements and challenge of much larger and complex situations. First, the restoration specialist must investigate, discover and acknowledge the simultaneous effects of the pond's symptoms (eutrophication, stagnation, death) which are the system's insufficient responses to pollution far beyond its carrying capacity, and the causes (surface runoff and groundwater leaching of fertilizer) which continue to stress the system. Which shall be tackled first? The symptom? The cause? Or both at the same time? Second, to what developmental stage will the pond be restored? The earliest stage may have been as a borrow pit from which sand and gravel had been taken to landscape nearby areas of the park. The pit may have gradually filled with clear water from spring seeps devoid of nutrients, perhaps only carrying in microorganisms, algae, aquatic plant fragments and insects. A later stage may have been after initial stocking by park staff: ornamental fish, lilies and a few bird feeders around the perimeter, followed by a period of relative balance. Then may have come goldfish, frogs, garden snakes from human visitors. Then, the most recent input of artificial fertilizers plus the wastes of more and more resident ducks, geese and pigeons... leading to the current pond overload and breakdown. Moving backwards to any of the earlier stages has particular requirements, costs and a time for system healing and recovery, followed by monitoring and maintenance at the desired stage. The specialist knows that the pond will always tend to develop toward later stages and that each can be prolonged somewhat by limiting nutrients, controlling pollution, establishing complete food chains that keep plant and animals in check, and by artificial stocking and/or harvesting. There is also the knowledge that at some stages, the pond will be a positive ecological and scenic asset, whereas at others, it will be relatively useless or downright repugnant. Continuing with this same example, the fact that normal ecological succession, i.e., moving through development stages over time, is fairly directional and not usually reversible means somehow capturing and reactivating the same conditions that once existed in the past, including the climate, nutrient availability and especially the population and mix of plant and animal species. Knowing what we do about normal species extinction and, more recently, the accelerated pace of human-induced extinction, specialists will be particularly wary about chances of restoration without the availability of sufficient biodiversity. The current movie, "Jurassic Park", illustrates what may be fictionally possible to restore were extinct species or their cellular constituents available to scientists and entrepreneurs. Strictly speaking, species restoration is still a far cry from restoring entire ecosystems, but the film brings to the public a taste of mechanisms and preoccupations in science today as more and more natural environments disappear from the earth. Compared to ecological restoration, all of the other forms of environmental management are actually stop-gap measures that deceive the public and decision-makers alike because they can be easily mistaken for long-term protection of the environment. End-of-pipe filtration, for example, slows the rate of effluent discharge, but still won't prevent remaining contaminants from biomagnifying in the food chain anyway. Building moratoria may temporarily ease development pressure on natural areas and over aquifers, but the slack is usually taken up when construction resumes. Policies of pollution prevention and recycling may begin to shift lifestyles and production methods but then free up the saved resources to expand and pollute new regions of the world. Clearly, all of these and others are insufficient alone or even in combination because, at best, they halt deterioration but don't guarantee recovery of previously-functioning ecosystems: The soil in cut-over tropical forests doesn't rejuvenate after serious logging. The blasted jungles and mangrove swamps in Southeast Asia are still damaged and malaria-infested twenty years after the Vietnam War. The Great Prairie water table will not soon rise again in Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas even if ultimate conservation irrigation methods are enforced throughout the region; nor will the soil come back after lying fallow two generations after the Dust Bowl days. No one in their right mind wants to return to Love Canal, New York, Times Beach, Missouri or the neighborhoods in Ponca City, Oklahoma that Conoco Oil Company poisoned by pumping

refinery wastes under ground. Byelorussia is still radioactively crippled, and will be that way for centuries and more, even though the wrecked reactor at Chernobyl is no longer operating. Therefore, to restore an ecosystem, these short-term measures and more must be coupled with l) accurate ecological understanding, 2) "transparent" and cooperative decisionmaking among agencies, occupants and victims, 3) unswerving environmental ethics and 4) an economic system that serves environmental and employment imperatives more than marketplace mythologies about "making do" on a dwindling resource base by scarcity pricing and substitution. Preliminaries on the Cost of Restoration Recently, a wide variety of ecological restoration projects and their costs have been in the news. The largest project was the U.S. Interior Department's announcement of a $350+ million settlement with Florida sugar cane growers to restore the Everglades. This vast bioregion has for years been drained, plundered and encroached upon from all directions. The conventional wisdom was that the region is just a swampy wasteland historically harboring some of the most feared creatures in the American South, namely poisonous snakes, alligators and Seminole Indians. Although lying atop Florida's central aquifer, which permeates a singular karst/limestone deposit, the Everglades has been nonetheless attacked by real estate developers, farmers, politicians and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers alike in the name of the state's economy; they never thought that, someday, it would become recognized as a critical endangered ecosystem of global significance. Now, there's been an about-face: the government will purchase approximately 35,000 acres from cane farmers and return the land to marsh so that it's filtration powers might be restored. Significant costs, will be incurred, such as an $81 million project just to breach one set of levees where the Shark River Slough crosses Route 41 near Miami so that long-drained water can return to its rightful location in the region's interior without flooding nearby recent urbanization. Lobbyists also claim the project will cost five thousand jobs and $362 million annual farm sales. However, the State has vowed to ensure the survival of the sugar and vegetable industry. As laudable as this plan may first appear, it is only a part of what's needed to restore the Everglades because: l) mercury deposited from wastes burned at a large South Florida incinerator and from coal burned by a Florida Power and Light electric plant are now at dangerous levels in the Everglades, in its sediments and fish, and now is showing up in abnormal levels in children and adults who eat fish from its slow-flowing waters; since 1989, the State has warned the public in Broward, Palm Beach and Dade Counties not to eat fish from the Everglades, and 2) indigenous Everglade plant habitat is being rapidly invaded and taken over by the prolific Australian melaleuka tree (also known as cajeput, punk-tree, bottlebrush tree and paper-bark tree) that thrives in wet areas and has thwarted State efforts to eradicate it despite the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars annually. At the other end of the cost spectrum is a more modest restoration project likely to get underway in the New Hampshire Seacoast/Great Bay region concerning plans for the new Port of Portsmouth. In exchange for permitting expansion into several acres of coastline, the State Wetlands Board has required the Port Authority to "mitigate" the consequences of the planned project by restoring 20-25 acres of State-owned mudflats, wetlands and saltmarshes in the nearby estuary that have been damaged in recent years beyond natural recovery. According to the Authority, the estimated cost is approximately $2 million, plus $30,000 per year for fifteen years to monitor and adjust the progress of the initial plantings, reshaping of shoreline, etc. It remains to be seen whether the monitoring methods will be able to accurately detect and measure the extent of recovery of the original ecosystems (aside from percent survival of transplanted eel grass, reeds and other vegetation) or whether another mix of plants and wildlife will simply take over as the project becomes protected from further human abuse. At any rate, mitigation is still a highly controversial policy because it relies on permitting the sacrifice of some natural areas to gain funds, and promises for attempting to upgrade a selection of other locations. Seen in this light, mitigation is actually a kind of environmental triage...a dangerous life-and-death tradeoff among critically limited (and linked) ecosystems based on society's notion of fairness (as if one could trade on the fate of open space). For comparison, and in the middle cost range, are two examples of toxic site "remediations" in the same seacoast region, although these and hundreds of other similar clean-up efforts are not ecological restorations in the strict sense but actually become expensive on-the-job training for engineering contractors trying to undo the damage of a generation or more of serious polluting practices...very few toxic sites have been brought under control despite the expenditure of billions nationwide; but there are lessons and technologies that could be useful in genuine restoration efforts: At the Coakley Landfill Superfund Toxic Site on Route 1 in North Hampton, dozens of area businesses, institutions

and government facilities have been tagged by the U.S. EPA for severely polluting a dumpsite that was only meant to accept "safe" municipal wastes. These "potentially-responsible parties" have signed a consent decree binding them to fund a $30+ million clean-up basically consisting of "cap and treat", which means installing a fairly impervious earthen cover to prevent percolating rain and snow from leaching the dump's chemical contents out the sides and bottom, and a catchment system (including monitoring instruments and equipment) to filter, neutralize or decontaminate the existing toxic leachate as it drains out over time. Complicating factors are l) that concentrations of chemicals there have already contaminated and closed a nearby community water supply and is threatening several private wells, 2) there is a recent history of serious chronic disease in the closest neighborhood and 3) it is likely that pollution already has penetrated the bedrock floor of the dumpsite, thus contaminating very deep groundwater supplies...the last private owner of the property blasted, quarried and sold off the site's rock for building the coastal stretch of Interstate 95 as it passed through New Hampshire; he then offered the resulting several-acre hole to the Town of North Hampton as a landfill location, with the blessing of the State environmental agency...by all rational thinking, this was an extremely dangerous place for any kind of waste disposal activity. Such cap-and-treat remediations are proceeding by the hundreds in the U.S., some on individual Superfund sites, some at closed landfills. This approach really only isolates the site from its surrounding natural environment...it doesn't reintegrate it at all because of the lingering fear of widening contamination. Because the dumpsite caps are relatively thin and vulnerable to puncture by deep-rooted vegetation, care must be taken to thwart the growth of trees, shrubs and other perennials upon it and instead favor the spread of shallow-rooting grasses (or in some cases, prevent the regrowth of any vegetation at all). This kind of remediation, therefore, although very expensive, precludes fullscale restoration and gives a false face to the dump's deadly contents. Estimates for complete excavation of toxics and refilling with clean rock and soil usually double the clean-up bill and meet with great resistance from the paying polluters and agencies alike; such a more- complete restoration may also require temporary evacuation and housing of nearby residents and businesses while work is underway...nonetheless, it is the only strategy that approximates ecological restoration. A fifteen-minute drive northward from Coakley is the now defunct Pease Air Force Base, a former B-52 outpost of the Strategic Air Command. When the Air Force pulled out, taking along with it a sizable chunk of the region's direct employment and secondary markets, the State of New Hampshire hastily formed a redevelopment authority to take title of the 4000+ acres for intensified civilian use of the site through aviation, commercial, industrial and government agency leases on buildings, runways and land. Popular outcry to protect some of its remaining open space succeeded in transferring approximately 1000 acres along the Great Bay to wildlife refuge status. Was it restoration? Not exactly. This turns out to be a cruel trick because of subsequent disclosure of numerous toxics and ammunition disposal sites created by the Air Force during its 40-year occupancy, even in the refuge-designated area. Indeed, several dozen disposal sites have now been discovered and classified as Superfund-caliber throughout the base, requiring an estimated $200 million or more for remediation. To date, it is said that $30 million has been expended for engineering investigations and pilot-scale toxics removal, but not a single site has been restored to uncontaminated status, least of all those in the wildlife refuge area. Chemical pollution has been found in all streams draining the base and in the significant fresh water aquifer that was once a high quality water supply for Portsmouth. Throughout the redevelopment process of the past 3-4 years, Authority officials have been deaf to proposals for returning the land to its pre-base agricultural use or suggestions that the extensive base housing community could become the core of a designed ecological village, even though either idea would likely generate many jobs and have less environmental and congestion impact than its current thrust for aviation and high-tech industry. It is interesting how the relatively short-term but intensive military (ab)use of the site has created, in some minds, a ratchet against ecological restoration, i.e., "once degraded, always degraded". There is now even uncertainty that any toxic sites will be given attention except those beneath locations bringing the Authority immediate rental revenue. The high cost of clean-up alone for these two local toxic sites gives an idea of the likely additional expenses for restoring any ecosystem for safe reoccupation by humans, plants and wildlife wherever chemicals have been used and discarded. The proven direct effects on wildlife (such as reproductive failure in birds of prey exposed to DDT) and indirect effects such as bio-concentration and passage on up the food chain (as with mercury and other heavy metals) mean that toxics decontamination is a significant added burden to the economics of ecological restoration. At clean-up costs reaching hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars per acre, one can begin to imagine, for example, how much more than the U.S. Interior's settlement of $340 million for 35,000 acres in the Everglades and the $2 million for mitigation of wetlands in the Great Bay will be the restoration bill when the toxics contamination reality is taken into account. Literature Search: Highlights

This section highlights articles, summaries and excerpts from an extensive library search for background information on ecological restoration and its economic aspects. It covers cases from all over the world and provides a base of confidence in the likelihood of success should "The Economics of Ecological Restoration" be chosen as a dissertation, research project or new course topic: Aronson, J., C. Floret, E. Le Floc'h, C. Ovalle. R. Pontanier, "Restoration and Rehabilitation of Degraded Ecosystems in Arid and Semi-Arid Lands - I. A View From the South", Restoration Ecology, 1:1, pp 8-17, March 1993. "A general model is presented describing ecosystem degradation to help decide when restoration, rehabilitation or reallocation should be the preferred response. The latter two pathways are suggested when one or more 'thresholds of irreversibility' have been crossed in the course of ecosystem degradation, and when 'passive' restoration to a presumed predisturbance condition is deemed impossible." Vital attributes are related to ecosystem structure: 1) perennial species richness, 2) annual species richness, 3) total plant cover, 4) aboveground phytomass, 5) beta diversity, 6) life form spectrum, 7) keystone species, 8) microbial biomass and 9) soil biota diversity. Vital ecosystem attributes related to ecosystem function are: 1) biomass productivity, 2) soil organic matter, 3) maximum available soil water reserves, 4) coefficient of rainfall efficiency, 5) rain use efficiency, 6) length of water availability period, 7) nitrogen use efficiency, 8) micro-symbiont effectiveness and 9) cycling indices. Brinck, P., L.M. Nilsson, U. Svedin, "Basics of Ecoredevelopment", Ambio, 17:2, pp 84-89, 1988. This article reviews the concepts essential to understand the dynamics of ecosystem degradation and exploitation and the pathways for redevelopment which are: active restoration, passive restoration, rehabilitation, protected natural regeneration, unstable natural regeneration and unstable unprotected regeneration. The authors are careful to state, "Redevelopment efforts have to be addressed towards deliberately chosen goals. These are mostly valuedependent"...and..."embedded in a societal dress covering legal, administrative and economic aspects. Restoration schemes should never be isolated eco-engineering activities", nor should immediate action be postponed because of the ever-present "demand for new knowledge". Brinkerhoff, Derick W. and Arthur A. Goldsmith, "Promoting the Sustainability of Development Institutions: A Framework for Strategy", World Development, 20:3, pp 369-383, 1992. Recent studies show the "enormity of the sustainability problem...." One, done by the World Bank, analyzed 550 projects and nearly half had sustainability difficulties. Another done by U.S. Agency for International Development arrived at "even more damning" findings: of 212 evaluated, only 11% were considered to be sustainable after U.S. assistance ended. The authors partly attribute this dismal record to "the shortage of sustainable, development-oriented institutions in the Third World", and then propose what new attributes existing and future institutions need to have to improve the record of success. Cairns, Jr., John, "Is Restoration Ecology Practical?", Restoration Ecology, 1:1, pp 3-7, March 1993. "The estimated aggregate of public and private allocation to all environmental activities is only 1.6% of the U.S. gross national product. The portion of the 1.6% that is spent on restoration is difficult to determine, but it is almost

certainly less than 1.0% of the total allocated to the environment." "Environmental collapse is a far greater threat to global societal sustainability than any appalling national deficit. Both situations are in the news continually - although deficits appear more frequently - but neither is receiving more than lip service. Agreement on the need to reduce a national deficit is probably more likely than reducing the threat to ecological sustainability, yet neither problem is being resolved. In addition, no major action is being taken to alleviate the problems on either front." The cost of initial channelization of the Kissimee River (in Central Florida by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) was approximately $20 million. The cost to restore it will approach a half billion dollars. Dixon, John A. and Paul B. Sherman, "Economics of Protected Areas", Ambio, 20:2, pp 68-74, April 1991. The economic benefits from protection of natural areas go far beyond the returns from tourism. There is a wide range of private and social benefits including watershed values, biodiversity, education and research, consumption values from renewable resources, non-consumption values (aesthetic, spiritual, cultural/historical and simple existence) and future use values. There are direct, indirect and opportunity costs to maintaining protected areas. Direct costs include program budget outlays; indirect costs may include damage incurred by wildlife, fires and other natural occurrences; opportunity costs are those foregone by choosing to protect rather than exploit an area. "The magnitude and incidence of the three types of costs have important impacts on the pressures for or against protection." Elliot, Geoffrey K., "Ecology, Economics and the End of Forestry in the Tropics," Asian Affairs, 79:3 pp 315-321, October 1992. "The (tropical and almost always State-owned) market benefits from domestic and international processing and market activities, and involves the logging of some 850 million cubic meters of timber each year....Total tropical wood exports are valued at US$13,000 million per year, or 14% of total world trade in timber...." However, the total economic value of the forest extends beyond this market for wood goods, and are not limited to, homelands for indigenous people and increasing numbers of colonists, habitat for wildlife, watershed protection, microclimate functions and carbon storage. Fleischer, Sigfried, Lars Stibe and Lars Leonardson, "Restoration of Wetlands as A Means of Reducing Nitrogen Transport to Coastal Waters", Ambio, 20:6, pp 271-272, September 1991. An ecological study of Laholm Bay in the Kattegat Sea area of Sweden, found an urgent need to reduce nitrogen flows from land drainage by at least half to control damaging eutrophication there. Converting all area agricultural land to forest would accomplish the goal but would "probably be unacceptable" to that rural area. Instead, a five year study has begun to discover ways to restore the nitrogen capturing potential of the Bay's wetlands. It is already known that, in general, wetlands organic sediments are capable of denitrification, i.e., tying up the nitrogen into organic compounds or into less-damaging nitrogen gases. The wetlands restoration project will have a marginal cost of US$0.6 per kilogram of nitrogen retained, "based on paying landowners for altering land use" to create wetland, multiplied by two because of the additional land affected by restoration. Additional costs, such as land purchase, were estimated to be between zero and 50% of land costs, raising the total estimated cost to approximately US$2 per kilogram of nitrogen retained, which the authors claim is "economically very attractive"... however, labor costs for optional harvesting of higher plants in the wetland areas were not included. Forbes, Bruce C. "Small-Scale Wetland Restoration in the High Arctic: A Long-Term Perspective", Restoration Ecology, 1:1, pp 59-68, March 1993. "According to Gross (1987), 'One of the distinctive challenges of ecological restoration, as opposed to less ambitious forms of land reclamation, is the creation of communities with the relatively high level of species diversity that typifies many natural communities'...As Bradshaw (1987) points out in the same volume, the acid test of our understanding of the factors that determine diversity in natural communities will be our ability to restore or rebuild a reasonable facsimile of a community that has been damaged or destroyed (Gross, 1987)." Francis, George R., "Institutions and Ecosystem Redevelopment in Great Lakes America with Reference to Baltic Europe", Ambio, 17:2, pp 106-111, 1988. This article describes the innovative international organizational frameworks established to begin restoration of the Great Lakes in North America and the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. Budgets for various administrative and research activities are given: Baltic Marine Environmental Protection Commission: approximately US$740,000

annually; International Baltic Sea Fisheries Commission: US$72,000 (1986); Great Lakes Intergovernmental Joint Commission: US$2,000,000 annually; Great Lakes Fisheries Commission: US$6,740,000 annually for sea lamprey management and research and US$ 671,000 for administration and general research (1987). "The mere existence of these four commissions is an important accomplishment in regional cooperation", but, as the author explains, because the fisheries agreements evolved separately from those for environmental protection, they are characteristically sectoral and hierarchal in their basic organization, therefore "fundamentally unecological". Further, the four commissions are "inherently weak in term of powers and budgets...retaining only the 'soft management' roles of advising, informing, consulting and even then are highly dependent on cooperating jurisdictions for obtaining information". Their perceived strength comes from keeping open channels of scientific exchange, consulting and data interpretation. Goldstein, Morris and Robert S. Smith, "Land Reclamation Requirements and Their Estimated Effects on the Coal Industry", Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, vol 2, pp 135-149, 1979. At the time of the article's writing, surface-mined coal represented almost one-half of all bituminous coal mined annually in the United States, meaning roughly 1000 acres of landscape destroyed each week, and less than half of the land stripped had been reclaimed, thus resulting in "permanent loss of its productivity for agricultural and recreation" and "significant negative externalities...namely, i) the dangers of collapse from highwalls, ii) the erosion and water runoff arising from steep slopes and uncompacted soil, ii) the pollution of water downhill from spoils piles via the leaking of toxic materials and siltation, and iv) the diminution of the natural beauty of the landscape". The article estimates the impact to the coal industry of the (then) proposed federal strip-mine reclamation laws. There are two different problems associated with reclamation of strip-mines. In Appalachia, the land must be returned to its original hilly contour "in such a way that soil erosion, acid drainage and water runoff do not threaten the local ecology. In the flat, western states, reclamation is mainly a problem of revegetation, not contour. There, the lack of precipitation, the extremes in temperature, and the wind and poorly developed soil...all combine to render regeneration a slow process in some areas and almost impossible in others." In the 1970's, the Council on Environmental Quality estimated a cost of reclamation in Appalachia ranged from $730 to $2420 per acre. National Academy of Science estimates for the West ranged from $925 to $2250 per acre. Both of these were "incremental" costs, i.e., over and above what a company might normally expend to pile and slope mine spoil away from the working sites. These estimates were converted to costs per ton (accounting for variations in site and thickness of coal seam, and the average of 1440 tons of coal per acre-foot), and gave 14-58 cents per ton in Appalachia (with the "mostly" ranging from 25-35 cents) and 3-4 cents per ton in Central and Western regions, where yield in tons per acre is generally much higher. The overall average estimated cost increase in coal mining was 10 cents, with a range of 5-19 cents. This gave an idea of how much the price of coal should rise if reclamation laws were passed by Congress. The article goes on to discuss the relative impacts on use of now costlier strip-mined coal versus deep-mined coal...e.g., the low substitutiblity of coal for fuel in the electric and steel industries, and mining jobs (estimated decrease at strip mine sites with offsetting increase at deep mine sites, meaning an overall employment rise because deep mining is more labor intensive). The conclusion is that reclamation laws would have only a slight effect on either coal industry. Gottfried, Robert R., "The Value of a Watershed as a Series of Linked Multiproduct Assets", Ecological Economics, vol 5, pp 145-161, 1992. "This paper views ecosystems as long-lived multiproduct factories. Increased use of one ecosystem good or service (function) often affects the supplies of other ecosystem functions. The relationships between these functions can be modeled in terms of key variables related to ecosystem management...watersheds can be viewed as a series of ecosystems linked spatially and temporally by the downward flow of water - changes in the mix of upstream ecosystem functions change the mix of downstream ecosystem functions...if erosion in an upstream ecosystem causes it to lose value, but in turn causes the wetland downstream to gain value, does the value of the watershed rise or not?" In this article, the author shows how watershed value cannot simply be the sum of the value of its components, especially because of at least six additional values that may not yet be quantifiable but which are nevertheless important in ecosystem management: 1) the value of maintaining the ecosystem, now, to insure its complete functioning in the future, 2) the value of preserving an ecosystem, now, to prevent costly devaluation in the future, 3) the value of a system's "dependability", or stability, in the face of often substantial disturbance due to human and natural causes...stability here means persistence, resistance and resilience, 4) the value of avoiding conditions that might suddenly change or collapse the ecosystem altogether, 5) the value of avoiding unanticipated social costs, e.g.,

environmental refugees, which would bring about environmental and political pressures to destination regions or neighboring countries, and 6) the value of maintaining or not upsetting the existing distribution of costs and benefits to those living throughout the entire ecosystem. Green, C.H. and S.M. Tunstall, "The Evaluation of River Water Quality Improvements by the Contingent Valuation Method", Applied Economics, vol 23, pp 1135-1146, 1991. This article concerns a method for estimating recreational benefits of water quality improvements in the Mersey River Basin, England. The cost of improvements is estimated at 2 billion pounds. Project proponents have considered and eliminated the concept of tradeable discharge permits for financing such a project. Instead, because it will be a government-sponsored cleanup, a cost-benefit analysis may suffice as long as there is some way to quantify benefits, say recreation, which in this case (where the river is shallow and slow flowing) is likely to come from onshore rather than instream activities. In this evaluation method, four questions are asked: Who benefits? What is the good, changes in the availability of which they derive a benefit? Why do they benefit? and How can the validity and reliability of the resulting estimates of benefits be both maximized and tested? The authors carried out detailed surveys, quantified enjoyment-of-the-riverif- improvements-were-made and willingness-to pay-increased-water-rates. "The results of the study described indicate that the benefits of water quality improvement are likely to be substantial. This occurs simply because even small local parks attract relatively large numbers of visits through the year....In addition...non-use benefits also appear to be large. However, it is not currently possible to attach accurate estimates of non-use value to particular river reaches." Grewal, S.S., S.P. Mittal and Gurmel Singh, "Rehabilitation of Degraded Lands in the Himalayan Foothills: People's Participation", Ambio, 19:1, pp 45-48, February 1990. In India, 6000 million metric tons of soil are annually washed to the sea because of soil erosion conditions. This soil contains 5.4 million metric tons of plant nutrients worth more than one billion U.S. dollars. The river valley projects are losing a potential worth of almost one hundred million dollars per year. Floods cause almost 200 million dollars damage annually. "The associated loss due to environmental degradation is unlimited." The article describes severe ecological problems in the Shiwaliks region of Northern India and the benefits of a locally initiated, Ford Foundation-supported restoration project begun in 1975: a combination of rainwater catchments, earthen dams, landshaping, replacing goats with stall-fed buffaloes, replacing grazing with grass cutting, employing landless small farmers as daily wage laborers in the project, and subsidizing the project costs as "capital investment not recoverable from beneficiaries, but from benefits received in terms of minimization of floods and sedimentation of reservoirs". This has doubled wheat yields (helping achieve a 3-year payback on some project elements), effectively blocked the downstream assault of seasonal storms, produced local milk surpluses and dramatically improved year 'round employment. To date, the project has been replicated in 72 other villages, "with successful results". Harris, Hallett J., Victoria A. Harris, Henry A. Regler and David J. Rappaport, "Importance of the Nearshore Area for Sustainable Redevelopment in the Great Lakes with Observations on the Baltic Sea", Ambio, 17:2, pp 112-120, 1988. This article describes the importance of nearshore ecosystems and their vulnerabilities to metropolitan and rural point and non-point pollution of freshwater systems (in the case of the Great Lakes) and seawater (in the case of the Baltic Sea). Two kinds of nearshore ecosystems characterize these regions: the well-defined algae-based ecosystems that can, to an extent, absorb excess pollutants (in the authors' words, functioning as "metabolic converters" to increase primary productivity), and the coastal wetlands with established stands of higher plant life. (In the Great Lakes, nearly 50% of wetlands have been permanently lost in the last century; Baltic wetlands have been "severely modified" and obliterated since the 17th century.) In the Great Lakes, twenty years of restoration have begun to pay off and, as might be expected, "various groups with interests in economic development are organizing to benefit from the ecological recovery of degraded areas of concern and also benefit from new developments in and near the so-called heritage areas." But, predictably, these new developments "do generally have strong adverse effects on the heritage areas"...and..."there is little basis for optimism that heritage areas will soon be effectively protected." What will make a difference is, as the authors continue, quoting their past colleague, C. Jarrell Yarborough, "The basic idea is to make the ecosystem the legal and political, as well as scientific, framework for environmental problem solving." (Yarborough, 1985, "Multi-Institutional Management - The Green Bay Experience", International Joint Commission, Great Lakes Regional Office, Windsor, Ontario)

Hayden, F. Gregory, "Instrumental Valuation Indicators for Natural Resources and Ecosystems", Journal of Economic Issues, 25:4, December 1991. This article struggles with how to value natural resources and ecosystems in the face of existing paradigms that still resist inclusion of Nature in measuring or predicting the condition of economies. The author believes that system stability, biodiversity and ecodevelopment potential all have to be recognized through some method of valuation before economic sustainability can be planned or achieved. On the other hand, "the establishment of restoration costs to restore a damaged ecosystem is not a case of valuation. It is an operational action to convert the damages into a budget sufficient for restoration." Further, "restoration costs are not even necessarily market costs in the sense that the prices to be paid for the equipment, labor and materials were established by a competitive private market system. Some prices are explicitly governmental through price regulation; others by indirect governmental impacts through subsidies and taxes; and others are charges by other governmental agencies to do the cleanup....:" Throughout, it must be understood that "restoration valuation is different from restoration cost". Valuations depend on selecting the best path to return to a previous environmental quality, with minimal use of resources. Helm, Pete, "Marsh Restoration in Progress...Finally!" (New Hampshire) State Planning News, pp 10-11, AugustSeptember 1992. This article describes commencement of restoration work in Awcomin Marsh near Rye Harbor on the New Hampshire seacoast. Efforts are underway to reverse the damage from U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredge spoil piles from operations in 1941 and 1962. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the NOAA-subsidized New Hampshire Coastal program each contributed $25,000 to the project, which includes saltmarsh restoration through extensive transplanting of grasses from a unique marsh-plant coastal nursery, Great Meadows Farm, in Rowley, Massachusetts. "Helping Nature Heal: Environmental Restoration: A Special Issue", Whole Earth Review, No. 66, Spring 1990. This is a highly recommended, comprehensive and contemporary account of ecological restoration activities in North America plus an annotated directory of books, tools and other currently-available restoration resources. "Restoration, like any art, seeks a greater understanding of existence, which tends to deepen our appreciation, gratitude and humility, salubrious states of mind that are less fringe benefits than compelling requisites for further work. Moreover, the art of restoration is finely balanced between mind and body, thought and sweat." Licht, Louis A. and Mark F. Madison, "Agriculture on a Landfill Cap", Agricultural Engineering, p 16, July 1990. A 60-acre landfill in Beaverton, Oregon has begun to plant deep-rooted trees, such as poplar, with the goal of growing a renewable resource while stabilizing soil and providing wildlife habitat, improving uptake of nitrates and phosphorus, reducing wind velocity and improving community aesthetics. The expected high-density root mass over the site is designed to minimize percolation through the landfill. The site owner claims the project is a much more desirable alternative to "permanently removing this 60 acres from production by covering it with a synthetic membrane". (The landfill is considered to contain non-toxic wastes.) Lin, William, Robert L. Spore and Edmund A. Nephew, "Land Reclamation and Strip-Mined Coal Production in Appalachia", Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, vol 3, pp 236-252, 1976. This article was written during the throes of the U.S. energy crisis and after the President twice vetoed a federal reclamation bill because he believed it would result in reduced coal production and loss of 36,000 jobs, particularly in Appalachia. It analyzes dozens of discrete mining and reclamation tasks and arrives at a total reclamation cost estimate of $2.44 per ton of coal mined, based on a model mine located on a 20-degree slope with a maximum highwall height of 90 feet. Backfilling alone accounts for $2.26 per ton, with topsoil replacement and revegetation costs being minuscule by comparison. The estimate on loss of jobs due to reclamation costs added to the price of strip-mined coal were only 1467 for all of Appalachia, many of which would be offset by new employment in reclamation and thus "diverge(s) sharply from estimates prepared elsewhere which were reportedly used as the rationale for the President's veto of the Federal Surface Mining Bill". Mangla, Bhupesh, "Chilika Lake: Desilting Asia's Largest Brackish Water Lagoon", Ambio, 18:5, pp 298-299, 1989. In the heart of Orissa State, Chilika Lake covers approximately 1000 square kilometers near the Bay of Bengal in India. It is a noted wildlife refuge and source of livelihood for "thousands of fisherman's families". The lake is now facing "severe ecological degradation due to unchecked eutrophication and siltation", with one-fourth of it already

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badly eutrophied. Alarmingly, the Lake's original area of 2200 square kilometers has shrunk by more than half...its lifetime is now estimated to be 460 years. Approximately 30 million metric tons of silt enter the lake annually from tributary rivers and streams because there is no upstream soil conservation practice; there is also suspicion that fishermen's fine-mesh bamboo nets are contributing factors. Overall lake water circulation has slowed and turbidity is rising. Concentrations of mercury in the south end of the lake are "alarmingly high", and believed to be coming from discharges at a large upstream chloralkali plant. Proposals ranging up to US$8 million have been submitted. In response, the Orissa government awarded a US$1.33 million contract to a private firm to dredge the mouth of the lake "which is virtually choked by heavy siltation". This operation will be accompanied by extensive de-weeding. New estimates for total restoration, including wildlife habitat, amount to US$13.33 million." Nepsted, Daniel C., Christopher Uhl and Emmanuel A.S. Serrao, "Recuperation of a Degraded Amazonian Landscape: Forest Recovery and Agricultural Restoration", Ambio, 20:6, pp 248-255, September 1991. This article concerns the Paragominas region of eastern Amazonia which has been heavily ranched and logged for more than twenty years, precipitated by the opening of a 1900-kilometer all-weather highway from Belem at the mouth of the Amazon River, to Brazilia in the interior, in 1964. Much of the land was rapidly exhausted and abandoned, with a few ranchers attempting to "reform" the land by selling off their forests to loggers for cash to purchase bulldozers, fertilizer and plantings to establish pasture. The authors believe that this is a vicious cycle which can be stopped by an alternative ranching method emphasizing deep-rooted trees in old fields that will produce economically valuable crops of fruits and nuts and some timber within only a few years after planting. "Island-forming" tree species that grow well in clusters and soon provide wildlife habitat as well as food and fiber are also mentioned as ideal candidates to "catalyze" or accelerate the reclamation of exhausted ranchland. Pudlis, Eugeniusz, "Poland Launches Major Program to Restore and Regulate Country's Largest River System", Ambio, vol 10, 1981. Poland's water supply, per capita, is below the European average. This article summarizes Poland's Vistula River plan, primarily a drinking water supply development project with 30 stages of locks and dams and 16 reservoirs, 188 domestic drinking water plants and approximately two hundred industrial effluent treatment plants...plus hydropower stations and a network of large intercepting basins to capture the salt runoff from the country's numerous coal mines. Ray, Dixie Lee, "A Forest Rises from the Ashes, Privately", Wall Street Journal, April 1, 1993. This op-ed piece is excerpted from the ex-Washington State Governor's new book, "Environmental Overkill", wherein she describes the results of artificial reforestation on slopes devastated by the Mount St. Helens volcanic eruption on May 18, 1980. The work, done privately by Weyerhauser Company and others adjacent to protected U.S. government land, apparently resulted in a forest "not significantly different from the original (pre-1980) forest below the slopes of the volcano..." with "approximately the same complex of tree species and varied undergrowth, and the same wildlife, birds and insects inhabit both" and dramatically more developed than the 110,000-acre site experimentally protected to allow Nature to takes its course "perturbed and unaffected by human action". (Ray is a long-time enemy of environmentalists, conservation foresters and safe energy advocates; this excerpt was carried in the Wall Street Journal shortly before President Clinton arrived in Portland, Oregon for his controversial Timber Summit. Sinclair, Lani, "International Task Force Plans to Reverse Tropical Deforestation", Ambio, 1985. An international task force organized by the World Resources Institute has released a 56-country plan for averting and "ultimately reversing" the destruction of tropical forests. The nine-member task force recommended a public/private investment of eight billion dollars over five years. The plan is in a report entitled "Tropical Forests: A Call to Action" and states that more than eleven million hectares of tropical forests are lost annually, an area larger than Austria. The plan has five broad action areas: fuelwood and agroforestry, land use on upland watersheds, forest management for industrial uses, conservation of tropical forest ecosystems and strengthening institutions for research, training and extension. Stevens, William K., "Restoring Lost Wetland: It's Possible But Not Easy", New York Times, pp C1,9, October 29, 1991.

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This article describes the work of several individuals in the U.S. active in wetlands restoration, focusing on Dr. Ed Garbisch, co-founder of Environmental Concern, Inc., a non-profit organization on Maryland's Eastern Shore. The company's specialty is wetland restoration; they claim approximately 350 successful projects. In the U.S., there were originally an estimated 200 million acres of wetlands in what is now the lower 48 states; that is being destroyed at the rate of 200,000 to 400,000 acres a year. In California, more than 90% of the original wetlands have been obliterated. It is agreed that restoration is much more expensive and difficult than outright preservation of wetlands; likewise "creation of new wetlands is much more difficult than restoration of old ones" - this fuels the opposition to mitigation policy and refutes the feasibility of making new, specialized ecosystems where none had before existed. Furthermore, "a recent study for the South Florida Water Management District found that of 1058 acres of wetlands required by permit to be created or restored by developers, only 530 acres had actually been constructed...most of the 40 projects were improperly designed; 23 were located where surrounding land uses - parking lots and housing, for example might prevent the wetlands from fulfilling their intended functions". Tomich, Thomas P., "Sustaining Agricultural Development in Harsh Environments: Insights from Private Land Reclamation in Egypt", World Development, 20:2, pp 261-274, 1992. The author describes the efforts of more than eighty farm families and settlers to reclaim small plots from the desert and brackish lakes in the Nile Delta region. In the 1980's, 95% of Egyptian farms were under five acres and half were less than an acre, often on mounds of sand hauled from adjacent dunes or in sand-filled trenches whose bottoms reach the shallow water table. The author meticulously accounts for the agriculture production costs (watermelon, rice and tomatoes), task by task. It is found that annual cash outlays of 6000-8000 Egyptian pounds per acre for sand-fill farming and 400-2000 Egyptian pounds per acre for lake bed reclamation typically get returns on investment of 15% and 5-7% respectively, "but even the modest rate of return from these activities depends on ability to evade official crop rotations that emphasize rice and cotton". Winterbottom, Robert and Peter T. Hazelwood, "Agroforestry and Sustainable Development: Making the Connection", Ambio, 16:2-3, pp 101-110, 1987. This article describes agroforestry, or the "deliberate association of trees and shrubs with crops, livestock or other factors of agricultural production..." and one case history describing an Oxfam International project in the northwest region of Burkina Faso along the southern edge of the West African Sahel. Fifteen to twenty-five percent of the land there had become devastated. After State independence in 1960, and for approximately twenty years thereafter, regional development assistance was unable to remove the area's vulnerability to periodic drought. Oxfam began a reforestation project in 1979 and rapidly learned the importance of coupling forestry with agriculture, soil and water conservation in order to win over the cooperation of local farmers. Within five years, one hundred twenty villages were participating and more than three hundred hectares were being monitored; crop yields began to exceed those in neighboring untreated fields. "During the first six years of the project, Oxfam's contribution totalled less than US$150,000. Another case describes a 1981 U.S. AID reforestation project in Haiti, where firewood dependency has played havoc with the island ecosystem's ability to withstand extreme effects of alternating rainy and dry seasons. Through voluntary organizations and extension workers, U.S. AID's investment of US$8 million in an exploratory reforestation program supplied more than 27 million tree seedlings to 111,000 farmers, "far exceeding the original objectives of the project". Wirth, Conrad L., "Civilian Conservation Corps Program of the United States Department of the Interior, March 1933 to June 30, 1943; A Report to Harold L. Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, January 1944. More than 3 billion dollars (in 1933-1943 dollars) were expended by the U.S. government during the Depression years and early in World War II to create and maintain a workforce for a wide variety of conservation and improvement projects throughout the country. Thousands of volunteers were organized into as many as two thousand (in peak years 1935-1937) 200-man camps assigned to several federal agencies: Bureau of Reclamation, Fish and Wildlife Service, General Land Office, Grazing Service, National Park Service and Office of Indian Affairs. The work projects were planned to have enduring value for the environment, economy and national security, and many of the sites, buildings, trails and other physical accomplishments still exist in use today. Discussion and Conclusion No matter what role one is likely to play in the rapidly opening field of ecological restoration, suddenly discovering

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and then coming to grips with the "economics" dimension of the subject is going to be very much an emotional as well as an intellectual experience-something akin to the "sticker shock" many people experience at a new car showroom when they see how many essential options there are beyond the four doors and wheels... just to get the vehicle out to the street; or, even more apt, trying to prevent a relapse when going over the hospital's bill itemizing what went into your recent recovery from a serious illness. The body breaks out in a cold sweat, the mind goes into a rapid-fire questioning mode: Do I really need this? How will I ever pay for it? Is there some other way out? Even the barest, superficial costs or estimates for ecological restoration are staggering: $150,000 per acre to reconstruct a wetland in Maine, for example; but this is also oddly relative to other kinds of expenditures which are routinely made every day: it's roughly equivalent to a coronary bypass operation. Take another example: the annual budget of the commission protecting the Baltic Sea's environment is $740,000, or what someone might pay for a home on the Great Bay here in Durham. One can't help but begin to wonder about such juxtapositions, cash values and return on investments. Also, it becomes clear that paying for restoration in the conventional ways - cash up front, installment plan, group insurance, long-term loan, increased utility rates, etc. - may not be sufficient to cover the variety and extent of needed projects here and abroad. Beyond appearing to be a rich man's (country's) game, there are future lifestyle choices that come along with restoration, such as doing without many goods and services unless they directly relate to maintaining healthy ecosystems. Where does this put the space station project? moon colonies? superconductor-supercolliders? fifty-thousand dollar automobiles? pump-up tennis shoes? liposuction? road salt budgets? The bills for ecological restoration are going to challenge bank accounts at all levels of societies worldwide. Much of the work will not be contracted out in the expected way...in some parts of the world, there will probably be forced labor. Is this an ominous development or a good thing? Based on this preliminary research paper, a comprehensive treatment of the economics of ecological restoration seems to be warranted and timely for many reasons: 1) Ecological restoration is now a "hot" area for the investment of very large amounts of public and private funds, partly in response to public pressure for restoration of polluted or devastated natural areas, partly because restoration projects are obviously a new market for scientific, engineering and construction professions; 2) There is beginning to be a realization of the degree and value of environmental improvement possible and their associated relative costs, requiring careful selection of projects and budgeting to fit the limited funds available; 3) Policy considerations for dominant international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, make it prudent to direct some funds away from strictly "development" projects to restoration projects, if only to correct for the "environmental boomerangs" created by previous grants and loans gone awry; 4) The public must get used to the high cost of restoration projects necessary to recover natural ecosystem functions, economic and aesthetic values in order to learn about the penalties for not operating a steady-state, i.e., sustainable, economy from here on out; 5) Awareness of the cost and perceived public priority for ecological restoration may help such projects compete against and even eliminate expenditures for other projects that are likely to be environmentally damaging; 6) The availability of a guide to the economics of ecological restoration will make it much easier for individuals, organizations, businesses and governments at all levels to envision themselves promoting or actually becoming involved in restoration projects; and 7) Increasing population pressure, including the growing numbers of environmental refugees, means that we can no longer accept the creation of sacrifice areas and simply move on to other undisturbed ecosystems - the land and natural resources are severely limited and urgently needed on all continents. It is clear from the literature search that very few articles now discuss even the rudimentary economic aspects of their restoration projects, even though this discussion is integral to deciding the question of restoration ecology as opposed to any other method of environmental management. Writers should begin to realize that such an omission handicaps the influence of their work and permits the public and potential funders to settle for less-effective projects. Although almost twenty years old, the two articles on strip-mine reclamation are by far the most advanced of those encountered so far in their treatment of the economics of any level of environmental restoration and how this impacts other sectors of society. For these reasons, the articles are included in the Appendix (available upon request). The Restoration Ecology article covering the basic concepts of thresholds of environmental deterioration and how they may preclude achieving total ecosystem restoration, is a valuable analytical tool and for that reason is also included in the Appendix (also available upon request). 93econ

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