PRESERVATION POLICY NEEDS TO BEGIN EARLY, EXPERT SAYS
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Policies aimed at preserving biological resources such as habitats and endangered species would be more successful and less costly if they were enacted earlier, an Ohio State University expert says.
Many preservation policies today are based on the idea of a safe minimum standard, said Alan Randall, professor of agricultural economics at Ohio State.
The goal of the safe minimum standard is to preserve a sufficient stock of a biological resource -- whether it be numbers of organisms or acres of habitat -- so that it could regenerate itself, he said. If the resource comes under stress and approaches some danger point beyond which it might not be able to recover, we essentially call a halt to whatever activity is causing the stress.
However, if saving this resource involves very high costs for the people involved, theres an escape clause by which the safe minimum standard can be abandoned. Its a double switch --
the policy is turned on when business as usual leads to a crisis, and turned off when the cost is just too high.
For example, a society that decided to preserve habitats or wild lands through a safe minimum standard policy might abandon this policy if the cost -- the inconvenience or higher prices associated with conservation -- became intolerably high.
Critics of safe minimum standard policies call them ad hoc, inconsistent measures that would be rendered unnecessary if preservation policy objectives were specified coherently at the outset, Randall said.
Randalls response to this criticism is not to abandon the idea of the safe minimum standard, but to relate the timing of the policys on switch to the point at which the policy might be abandoned and turned off.
For effective safe minimum standard policy, the trigger point, and the intolerable cost that would lead people to abandon it, must be systematically related, he said. For example, a society with a low tolerance for sacrifice would need to trigger the safe minimum standard policy relatively early.
Randall, who conducted this work with Michael C. Farmer from Georgia Institute of Technology, presented the pairs observations February 14 in Seattle at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The idea of a safe minimum standard is popular among people of different ethical philosophies, Randall said. However, he suspects that while this agreement is wide, it may be shallow.
It occurs to us that all these different folks are probably not agreeing as much as they sound like theyre agreeing, he said. One place in which the difference comes out is the magnitude of the cost or sacrifice that would justify bailing out of the safe minimum standard policy. If youre really into the intrinsic value of a resource, you might demand very substantial sacrifice before youd be willing to let society off the hook. If youre an ordinary utilitarian, you might argue for quitting the conservation policy far earlier.
One way to get around these disagreements, Randall says, is to cast the forming of safe minimum standard policy in a multi-generational light.
If safe minimum standard policy is going to work to preserve something for a long time, it must be accepted anew by each succeeding generation, he said. We can develop rhetoric to bind subsequent generations to the obligations of the policy. But if theres some huge sacrifice imposed on them because of it, they might bail out. We cant predict what people will do in a real crisis, and we cant even agree about what they ought to do. The goal of policy should be to avoid this dilemma. To do this, we need to get policy started early. Our safe minimum standard becomes a policy to trigger preservation at a point at which were fairly sure the costs wont be overwhelming to any subsequent generation.
The principles underlying this multi-generational approach -- that future humans and their welfare are valued, but that provisions for the future must be made by todays people with their own concerns and intragenerational obligations to each other -- are broad enough to create consensus among those of different philosophies, Randall said.
People will buy into these principles for lots of different reasons, but what does it matter, if the principles themselves provide a rationale for early action, he said.
The next step of Randalls research is to determine the environmental conditions at which a safe minimum standard policy should be implemented. The need for early implementation is pretty scary, because we might have to trigger it before the ecologists notice theres anything wrong, he said.
He and Farmer are running computer simulations of multigenerational economic and ecological systems collapsing over time, looking for patterns that emerge.
Were trying to see if there are characteristics we can find in trajectories of things, warning signs we can identify, he said. The next step will be to bring in ecologists, tell them what weve learned about scary patterns and ask them if these patterns have meaning in terms of ecology, if there are things related to them that are observable in the field.
Contact: Alan Randall, (614) 292-6423; arandall+@osu.edu
Written by Kelly McConaghy Kershner, (614) 292-8308; Kershner.4@osu.edu