A resource economic perspective om erosion control for non-economists

My involvement in erosion control started over 50 years ago as an iowa farm boy learning about grass waterways and contour farming practices. My awareness of the importance of economics to soil conservation and my interest in pursuing it came during graduate studies at Purdue and Cornell universities. In the last 30 years I have spent considerable professional time bringing a resource economic perspective to joint work with soil scientists, foresters, and engineers concerned with soil erosion control. Resource economics starts with core concepts from neoclassical economic theory such as opportunity costs, willingness to pay, elasticity of income and demand, and modifies and extends these concepts to deal with critical issues in managing natural resource use and environmental protection. A major problem with this field of specialization and non-economists is that the resource economic concepts are either not known or concepts from economics that are known are applied inappropriately. Examples dealt with in this paper include: the important distinctions between financial and economic analyses and between efficiency and distribution analyses as well as sustainability from an environmental or ecological economic perspective. Specific tools used by resource economists to discern value (+/-) for environmental service flows including those provided by soils and residuals such as sediments include: avoidance and clean-up costs, travel cost models, hedonic pricing models and contingent valuation models. When applied to important erosion control issues,the foregoing tools and models can have very practical implications for improved economic well-being and conservation policy. I attempt to demonstrate this with numerous examples geared to a non-economist audience and provide a glossary that hopefully promotes understanding. Most of the focus is on Ohio examples but I include some other U.S. and developing country evidence for purposes of comparison and generalization.