Chapter Synthesis

No conservation effort can ultimately succeed without intimate connection to value. And no conservation value can endure with vitality unless it finds expression in economic behavior. Some conservationists, eager to see endangered species, vital habitats, and rare ecosystems stand toe-to-toe with industrial output, residential real estate development, and intensive agriculture, have developed or employed a variety of creative measures to document the dollar values of their concerns, whereas others, equally creative and passionate, have laid elaborate plans through which humanity can continue to take more but, through its increased ingenuity, degrade the environment less.

Both these approaches, although well intentioned, have got the question backward. The first fails because it does not ask whether current systems of individual-preference, market-driven valuations can ever rightly determine what is good for many, or how people will ever become better than their own self-centered appetites if those appetites are all that determine their economic behavior. The second errs because it sees human activity as an endless process of acquisition and degradation, progressively made more efficient to acquire what people want with less environmental harm, but never directing anyone to want the right things.

Conservation biologists, if they are to help construct a future in which conservation can succeed, must offer a different set of assumptions about economic behavior and ask a different array of questions. Specifically, what are our rightful obligations to other species, habitats, and ecosystems and how can we design economic systems that recognize, and even reward meeting them? How can we better choose what we shall value, instead of taking our immediate appetites, wants, and desires as givens that must be satisfied, regardless of environmental cost? And finally, how can we restructure the human enterprise of growing and gathering our food and making and using our goods so that such activities not only cease to degrade the world, but make human activity and human presence agents of ecological restoration?

It has been said that most people want progress as long as they don't have to change very much to get it. We can see, in individual communities and isolated efforts, that it is possible to make economic activity the reflection of value rather than the determinant of it, and it is possible to make human activity a restorative ecological force rather than an agent of ecological degradation and destruction. These conditions, although rare, are possible, and represent true progress. Today, private economic incentives can aid conservation because social values have been changed, and that change has itself been shaped by laws and policies of the government that set certain environmental and conservation values, such as endangered species, wetlands, clean air and clean water, above and beyond market forces. These laws and policies were themselves expressions of changing social values that, in democratic societies, lawmakers were forced to address because the public demanded it. The call by some to make all conservation efforts entirely market driven is a mistake at best and a misrepresentation of environmental history at worst. Markets and property rights can be harnessed to achieve conservation goals efficiently when they are made to serve socially normative conservation values enforced by law and policy. But markets and property rights cannot intrinsically generate conservation value, and their historic failure to do so is an inarguable witness of the human experience. Unguided by any end but the force of collective individual desire, human want and appetite inevitably overwhelm all other concerns. Conservation biologists, with environmental economists, must offer a careful and well-designed integration of conservation as an expression of human economic behavior that is guided toward conservation goals established outside the economic process itself. And in doing so, conservation biologists must work to make conservation a normal pattern of economic behavior, not simply a series of heroic (but ultimately futile) efforts to save things that no one ever really valued.

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