Perspectives on Sustainable Resources in America

Roger A. Professor Sedjo, Roger A. Professor Sedjo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136526053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Environmental Law
• Index: Law

The vast size of the United States and extensive variation of its climate, topography, and biota across different regions contribute to both the richness of the nation's natural heritage and the complexities involved in managing its resources. A follow-up to RFF's popular America's Renewable Resources (1990), Perspectives on Sustainable Resources in America updates readers about the current challenges involved in managing America's natural resources, especially in light of the increasing emphasis on sustainability and ecosystem approaches to management. Written to inform general audiences and students, as well as to engage the interest of experts, the book includes assessments by some of the nation's most renowned scholars in natural resource economics and policy. An introductory chapter critically examines the concept of sustainability as it has been developed in recent years and asks how the concept might apply to individual resource systems. It considers the interrelatedness of ecosystem, economic, and social sustainability; the paradigms of resource sufficiency and functional integrity; and the contrast between weak and strong sustainability.The chapters that follow examine America's experience with forests, water, agricultural soils, and wildlife. Highlighting the adaptability and resilience of resource systems, each chapter provides a description of the physical characteristics of the resource, a history of its use, a policy history, and a review of ongoing debates in management and policy.Perspectives on Sustainable Resources in America concludes with an innovative treatment of biodiversity as a natural resource. The chapter reviews the definitions of biodiversity, the ecological and economic meanings of biodiversity, and current efforts to preserve biodiversity, especially through regulatory approaches.

CHAPTER 1

Are America's Resources
Sustainable?

Roger A. Sedjo

THE QUESTION OF HOW society should deal with its natural environment is not new. Biblical directives call for man to “subdue” the earth. Resource management questions go back to the practices of early herders and agriculturists. Primitive attempts at water management systems are often credited with having contributed to the development of social institutions and bureaucracies. An important part of America's resource history is found in the intellectual disputes between Gifford Pinchot and John Muir more than a hundred years ago. Pinchot espoused the “wise use” doctrine of conservation, arguing that resources should be used wisely for the betterment of humankind. Elements of this message carried over to the ethos of the Great Depression. Woody Guthrie, for example, wrote songs lauding the growth of great water development projects with lyrics like “while the water is flowing to the sea, why not let it do a little work for me?” By contrast, Muir embraced notions closer to that of pristine preservation, arguing against resource development that compromised the pristine nature of the resource or resource system.

Toward the latter part of the 19th century, diminishment of the bounty of resources in America became apparent, and resource scarcity pressures became a serious concern. It was largely the wise-use perspective that generated concerns about the sustainability of forests and the water flows that emanated from them, leading to legislation that established the forest reserves in the 1890s and ultimately, in 1905, the National Forest System. Concurrently, the dramatic decline of some wildlife species led to serious restrictions on market hunting and other activities that threatened wildlife. Concerns for pristine values, meanwhile, generated the establishment of an extensive national park system, which is still expanding.

By the latter part of the 20th century some of the earlier concerns had diminished but were replaced by others. The impending timber famine forecast in the 19th century never materialized, and the losses of wildlife habitat had largely abated. Indeed, deer were more numerous than ever, and bald eagles, coyotes, and wolves had made remarkable recoveries. However, increasing population and development made greater demands on many of the country's resources. Although agricultural productivity reduced some pressures on agricultural and forest lands, limited water resources, not only in arid areas of the West but also in parts of the densely populated East, created continued concerns over the future of water adequacy and flows. Finally, even as it was acknowledged that ecosystems were more complex and multifaceted than formerly recognized, concepts of sustainability became more sophisticated, requiring new resource management approaches.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of this volume and its purpose and describes the content, including the limitations, of the chapters that follow.

The Origin of this Book

In 1991 Resources for the Future published America's Renewable Resources: Historical Trends and Current Challenges, edited by Kenneth D. Frederick and Roger A. Sedjo. That book provided a collection of chapters by eminent researchers who focused on understanding long-term trends in the condition and capacity of renewable resource systems in America. The current volume can be viewed as a sequel. As in the earlier volume, the approach here involves an examination of the nature and characteristics of an important set of renewable resources, as well as some resource uses. But there are changes: chapters on outdoor recreation and rangeland are not included, for example, while biodiversity is included.

Although this book is intended to present an integrated investigation of selected American resource sectors, each chapter stands alone and can be read independently. Thus, of necessity, there is a certain degree of overlap of concepts and sometimes history in the various chapters. However, the reader will also observe that the authors often approach similar problems differently; no attempt has been made to impose a rigid intellectual structure. Differences in perspective exist among the chapter authors, as indeed they do among resource experts more generally.

New to this volume is a chapter that introduces concepts of resource sustainability. The term has historical antecedents, and unanimity in definitions and applications has not yet been achieved, but the concept has been refined and has gained ascendancy in the past two decades. Sustainability now commonly implies management for a continuous flow of ecosystem services and public goods, as well as private commodity goods and services. Nevertheless, it will become clear in the chapters that the authors do not accept a single, unified concept of sustainability. Some of these differences reflect values; others reflect unique aspects of the different resources.

This book updates the reader on the current situation of some of America's most important renewable natural resources, including biodiversity. Biodiversity is increasingly being viewed as a separate natural resource, and its maintenance and uses have attracted considerable attention (see Simpson et al. 1996). As with the earlier volume, the historical experiences of these resources and resource uses are considered.Topics examined include the evolving concepts of sustainability, the introduction of policies and legislation, and how the resource has been perceived and the way it is managed. Current challenges in resource management are identified.

The earlier book focused on the productivity of a resource's commodity outputs and the renewability of these outputs. By contrast, this volume gives increased emphasis to a broader array of outputs, many of them public goods, including ecosystem services. Even though the production of many of these noncommodity goods and services is often poorly measured and/or documented and many of these values are not well estimated, there now appears to be widespread recognition and acceptance in the United States that the management of natural resources should consider these outputs.

This volume focuses on the U.S. experience from the past to the present; it is not futuristic and makes no attempt to extrapolate into the future. The future may follow past trends, but trends change and the future may present challenges quite different from those of the past. The impact of humans on earth and resource systems today is different in some ways from that of earlier periods. For example, as the chapter on forests shows, although the area of American forests declined for the first several hundred years after European settlement, the experience of the past hundred years has been quite different. More generally, in much of the world, the earlier trend toward deforestation has been reversed (Kauppi et al. 2006).

An example of an emerging challenge is that of global warming. How will global warming or other future natural or human perturbations increase the challenges to natural resource sustainable management? Almost certainly global warming and other new challenges will occur and the sustainability of many of these systems may be severely tested. However, this volume confines itself to the past and the present and does not try to forecast the effects of new disturbances nor suggest how humans might adapt to prospective future conditions of the resources examined.

Overview

To early European explorers and many later colonists and settlers, the land, forests, wildlife, and water resources of the New World appeared to be wild and essentially unlimited.¹ Until roughly 1800, subduing and harnessing the vast resources of the continent were the concern, not resource sustainability. The importance of food and fiber production made agricultural land a highly desired resource. Some lands were likely more attractive than others by virtue of their location, topography, soils, climate, absence of trees and other impediments to agriculture, access to water and other transport, and so on. From the perspective of farmers, the bountiful forests were more an impediment to cropping and transport than an asset for timber, water flows, or habitat. Wildlife, too, was plentiful throughout much of the country and provided food for both Native Americans and settlers. The area of the continent was so vast that even as land was taken up by the early waves of settlers, others could still homestead sites that were desirable, albeit more remote. Water, plentiful in the East, was less so in the arid West, and indeed the difference in availability resulted in a different basis for water laws (see Chapter 5, this volume).

Even as natural resource scarcity gradually appeared in some regions, the continuing opening of the frontier relieved these pressures on resources generally. Well into the 19th century, in many places forests continued to be viewed largely as an obstruction to development. Water and wildlife had primarily utilitarian value. Particularly before the advent of the railroads in the 1840s, water was used for transport through the early development of canals that complemented river travel. Later, water was dammed and diverted to provide for irrigation and power. Wildlife continued to be a major source of food. Agricultural soils, too, tended to be taken for granted. Soils leached of their fertility or otherwise depleted were often abandoned, particularly in the South, where demanding crops such as tobacco and cotton reduced soil fertility. Indeed, it is the abandonment of these lands by agriculture that allowed the renewal of forests on these lands, largely through natural processes (USDA 1988).

Interestingly, one of the last terrestrial natural resources to come into short supply in the United States was cropland. According to Hayami and Rattan (1985), agricultural land availability did not become a constraint on production until the 1930s. Before that time, all of the agricultural production increases could be attributed to increases in cropping areas. It was at that time that the constraint on new lands for cropping necessitated biological technology—plant improvements via breeding—to allow crop harvests to continue to rise.

Chapter 2, by Sandra Batie, Roger Sedjo, and John Fedkiw, examines the concept of sustainability as it applies to natural resources. Earlier concepts, such as “wise use,” are discussed, as is the evolution to modern concepts. The focus is on the sustainability paradigms of resource sufficiency and functional integrity.

Chapters 3 and 4, on forestry and soils, look at these resources from the perspective of the sustainability of the systems and their outputs, both commodity and ecosystem. Chapter 3, by Roger Sedjo and Douglas MacCleery, is historical in orientation. It discusses the history of the American forest from the pre-European period to the first decade of the 21st century. In this context it discusses the evolution of forestry and the concept of sustainability in forest management and observes that in the United States, private forestry has moved toward intensive management on productive lands, while forestry on public lands has a greater focus on nontimber values. The chapter discusses how forest management has gradually been redefined. Earlier concepts, such as the sustained timber yield concept, largely focused on the production of commodity timber; broader multiple-use approaches, developed in the latter part of the 20th century, seek to produce a selected set of outputs, many of which may be environmental goods and services. More recently, an even broader assessment of forest management, especially of public forests, is intended to maintain the “condition of the forest” through the sustainability of forest ecosystems and their provision of ecosystem services.

Chapter 4, by Sandra Batie, addresses the sustainability of U.S. cropland soils. She reviews sustainability concepts and resource sufficiency paradigms that focus on the soil's ability to sustain or enhance crop yields. She notes that in recent years the sustainability concept has been broadened to include ecosystem services, since it has become apparent to scientists that soils perform many functions, including regulation of water quality and flows, nutrient cycling, carbon storage, and other desired services. Since soils contribute to ecosystem stability and hence perform a crucial role in ecosystem functioning, a broader role needs to be assigned to them. The author notes that important research about managing soil for sustainability has been provided to farmers through technical assistance programs. However, she finds little financial incentive for farmers to undertake conservation activities.

Chapter 5, by Leonard Shabman, covers nature's role in supplying water in the form of precipitation, runoff, and storage in lakes and aquifers as well as how water availability is monitored, assessed, and allocated through human management. He notes that current thinking has eliminated the earlier sharp distinction between surface and subsurface water and replaced it with a concept that recognizes that these are often parts of the same system and should be treated in concert. The chapter discusses the development, management, and use of water resources in transportation, hydropower, irrigation, industry, and public water supply. Efforts to address flooding and other hazards through water management are discussed, as are water supply issues, water law, and environmental regulation. The chapter provides a historical perspective on water conservation, naturalness, and sustainable water use. It notes the tension between ecologically sustainable water management and a water management program for human purposes. The author points out that the conflicts among these concepts are largely value driven.

Chapter 6, by Dean Lueck, examines the concepts and conditions of wildlife in the United States, as well as wildlife sustainability since European contact. The chapter explains how wildlife management institutions have affected wildlife populations and how economic forces, in turn, have shaped these institutions. The question is raised as to what distinguishes a wild from a domestic animal, and the chapter offers some innovative suggestions, based in part on the nature of the animal, its range, and difficulties of management control.

Lueck draws from Geoff Heal's (1998, 2000) development of analytical economic rigor to the concept of sustainability. Accepting Heal's notion that the sustainability framework remains an elusive empirical concept, the chapter notes that stocks of natural resources, including wildlife, generate value by providing services beyond those simply derived from resource harvest. This suggests that important values can come from nonconsumptive uses of wildlife, including viewing, genetic information, existence value, and contributions to ecosystem services, such as seed dispersal.

In Chapter 7: Juha Siikamäki and Jeffrey Chow examine biodiversity. Though not traditionally viewed as a natural resource, biodiversity is increasingly treated as such. Also, the condition of a country's biodiversity is commonly believed to be an indicator of the condition and sustainability of its land and water resources. The chapter examines issues of species loss and extinction, which clearly indicate a lack of sustainability in parts of the ecosystem, and also the issue of species recovery, which reflects the resiliency of the system and certainly has implications for long-term sustainability. The chapter provides a comprehensive overview of biodiversity in the United States, including its history, current status, and related policies and legislation. Issues covered include extinctions, species endangerment, threats to bio-diversity, and bioprospecting. A useful review of the economics of biodiversity with a discussion of the economic values of biodiversity is included, as well as a discussion of current implementation of the Endangered Species Act.

The chapter spends little time on definitions or philosophical musings. In general, it treats preservation and sustainability as synonyms. In this context wise use implies maintaining adequate stocks of the various components of biodiversity. The chapter concludes that successful strategies to preserve biodiversity likely would examine economic and ecological systems from an integrated perspective, managing human and natural economies as jointly determined systems.

A reading of these chapters makes clear that, at the conceptual level, definitions and concepts of resources sustainability have evolved, and in many cases the details are becoming increasingly well articulated. However, the on-the-ground application of these constructs to real-world management systems can be extremely difficult. Management is directed to achieving some end, whether producing agricultural crops or creating a nature reserve. Trade-offs, however, are pervasive. There are likely to be important trade-offs not only between commodities and pristine resources, but also between different sets of desired ecosystem services flowing from the same natural resource system.

Some Limitations

A criticism of this book might be that it has segmented resources, treating each of them independently and ignoring holistic sustainability. This volume does indeed focus on the parts. Of course, land, forest, agricultural, water, wildlife, and biodiversity are not separate and distinct entities, but rather part of a whole terrestrial system...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• About Resources for the Future and RFF Press
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• 1. Are America’s Resources Sustainable?
• 2. Sustainability: From Natural Resource Sufficiency to Ecosystem Functional Integrity
• 3. Sustainable Forests in America?
• 4. The Sustainability of U.S. Cropland Soils
• 5. Water Resources Management and the Challenge of Sustainability
• 6. Wildlife: Sustainability and Management
• 7. Biodiversity in the United States
• Index