Ecosystems, landscapes, and social values: A scalar approach
While it may seem obvious that changes in the conditions of large-scale ecological systems will impact human welfare, there exist no accepted methods for correlating those changes with measurable changes in social welfare. This lack poses a serious dilemma for attempts to place valuations on changes in these large-scale ecological conditions, including attempts to assess ecological risks. Either these large-scale ecological conditions, including attempts to assess ecological risks. Either these large-scale impacts will be ignored in any economic/utilitarian analysis of policy, or the public will be asked to indicate through a contingent valuation method, their willingness to pay to protect landscape-scale systems with virtually no detailed guidance regarding what benefits can be expected from efforts at protection. An alternative, scale-sensitive approach is offered in which social values are sorted and associated with different physical dynamics operating at various scales. Whereas human values that are manifest at short scales of time are associated with individual welfare (changes in economic systems), longer-term impacts are associated with landscape dynamics (the {open_quotes}ecological{close_quotes} scale). This method employs {open_quotes}risk decision squares{close_quotes}, which plot the time of reversibility of an impact against the physical scale over which the impact occurs. Decisions with impacts which require long times to reverse and which are pervasive at larger scales raise moral issues of intergenerational equity and require a criterion of sustainability that measures changes in physical states of ecological systems. This approach yields a two-tiered process of decision analysis in which multiple value criteria (cost-benefit criteria and intergenerational equity criteria, for example) are applied in different situations depending on the scale at which impacts of a proposed decision are expected.
- OSTI ID:
- 549150
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-950264-; TRN: 95:006094-0019
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting and science innovation exposition, Atlanta, GA (United States), 16-21 Feb 1995; Other Information: PBD: 1995; Related Information: Is Part Of 1995 AAAS annual meeting and science innovation exposition: Unity in diversity; Strauss, M.S. [ed.]; Heasley, C.; PB: 337 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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