Valuing nature

During the 1970s, Congress created a new statutory foundation for public land management by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. The stated goal was to establish a rational administrative process for resolving the demands of competing users. Economists argued that public land decisions therefore must be made through comprehensive application of benefit-cost and other economic methods. The hopes to ground public land management in economic analysis, however, were not realized. It would have required a radical change in the politics of the public lands, including a large loss of influence among historically dominant groups, and there was no powerful constituency to make that happen. By the 1980s, moreover, the environmental movement was promoting ecosystem management as a replacement for traditional multiple-use management. In place of economic benefits, ecosystem management substituted biological goals that could not effectively be captured by economic methods. This article offers a case study of the failure of professional economic analysis to have much impact in many real-world government settings.