but I think it is one we are 

 going to have to step into fairly 

 soon, because you have these driving 

 forces working on your ecosystem and 

 what we are really driving at a lot 

 of times is controlling them. Yet 

 we are so used to buying pieces of 

 wetland or building islands for 

 mitigation, that we often loose 

 track of the fact that what we are 

 really after is trying to conserve 

 the process base. 



Most of the agencies that may 

 be concerned about this whole pro- 

 blem tend not to appoint hydrolo- 

 gists, or very few of them. The 

 agencies that are interested in 

 engineering manipulation of the 

 river and estuaries, and there are 

 a large number of them, have hydrolo- 

 gists who don't have training in 

 ecology. This doesn't seem to enter 

 into their thinking. 



QUESTION : John Clark: I'd 

 like to ask just one more question 

 here before we move on to the next 

 speaker. I would like to ask Jim 

 what benefit he would see in the 

 work he does from far more exten- 

 sive quantitative, monetary evalu- 

 ation of the resources that are de- 

 pendent on estuaries. Is that 

 going to help or hurt your case? 



REPLY : Tripp. My answer is 

 that economic quantitative analysis 

 of the value of the Nation's natural 

 resource base should be pursued with 

 vigor. I think you have to be acute- 

 ly aware of the limitations of these 

 studies. You also have to remember 

 that the level of sophistication of 



economic analyses done to justi- 

 fy water resource projects is 

 also in an infantile state. Most 

 of the time, we can take any Corps 

 project, I won't speak for the Water 

 and Power Resources Agency because 

 I haven't done any work with it, and 

 easily find highly qualified econo- 

 mists who will go out and say it 

 is an absurd methodology that the 

 Corps uses and very overstated. 

 A large economic analysis is a tool 

 and nothing but a tool, carried out 

 by various groups to further a po- 

 litical fight. Even recognzing the 

 severe limitations of quantitative 

 economic analyses, I think that they 

 should be carried on. I got a paper 

 just the other day from an economist 

 on the value of wetlands. His ar- 

 gument was that the degree of so- 

 phistication of analyzing the value 

 of wetlands from the quantitative 

 point of view is still in a very 

 primitive stage, and that the major 

 economic argument in support of pre- 

 serving wetlands is uncertain, 

 i.e., the risks that you take by 

 destroying the resource. 



CLARK: 



I have some doubts 



whether the answer you get every 

 time is all that helpful to you 

 because I've seen some analyses of 

 the values of components of estua- 

 ries expressed in dollar terms 

 funded with state-of-the-art analy- 

 sis. In fact, it seemed like a 

 rather trivial price tag per acre 

 of wetland or per acre of estuary, 

 and I'm not so sure that in every 

 case the price tag we come up with 

 is going to give us the answer we 

 want. 



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