PREFACE 



This report attempts to help natural resource economists, wetlands 

 scientists, resource managers, government officials, and sportsmen better 

 understand controversies surrounding wetlands allocations by surveying some of 

 the recent economic literature on wetlands. It deals almost exclusively with 

 academic literature, though some of the best work cited is policy or management 

 oriented. This report is, in fact, a particular kind of survey paper--an 

 annotated bibliography of the recent (post-1965) economic literature on 

 wetlands--but it has a good deal in common with survey papers that attempt to 

 weigh, assess, and evaluate the ensemble of contributions that have occurred in 

 any fast developing field of social research. An effort has been made to list 

 the relevant literature in this report, and to interpret, analyze, and evaluate 

 this literature in accompanying commentaries. 



Some of the recent economic literature on wetlands attempts to impute 

 values to wetland functions and preservations benefits with the conventional 

 analytic tools of contemporary economic analysis. Numerous difficulties have 

 been encountered in developing methodologies for estimating wetlands preservation 

 benefits because of the low marginal values and large total values of the 

 resource and its various outputs and functions. Principal among these 

 difficulties is the use of the term "value"; economists use the term to denote 

 a quantitative economic yardstick for making objective comparisons of various 

 resource allocations. 



The sharply divergent meanings that the term value has for various other 

 members of the wetlands scientific community is taken as a fact of life rather 

 than as a starting point for discourse in the present study. Some wetlands 

 scientists clearly refer to value as the intrinsic esteem that society would 

 place on wetlands if society were both properly informed about the myriad useful 

 ecological, biological, and hydrological functions performed by these landscape 

 forms and (if society) used the correct set of ethical norms to value nonmarket 

 resources. Thus it is appropriate to warn the uninitiated that the rich 

 diversity of wetlands functions has a counterpart in the bewildering variety of 

 approaches to the economic analysis of the social values imputed to these 

 functions. 



Some wetlands scientists regard conventional economic analysis as a veil 

 that keeps society from acknowledging the obvious value of the panoply of 

 wetlands functions. Conventional economic analysis can attempt to measure 

 nonmarket value, but only within the context of a value system that--from the 

 economist's perspective--attaches implausibly high values to tickets to athletic 

 events, Beatles memorabilia, and Rolls Royce automobiles. The economic analyses 

 of certain of these scientists fall within certain familiar patterns (single 

 commodity theories of value) that are rejected out of hand by most Western social 



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