I am reminded of an organization I read about years ago with the tag line "Seeing like a mountain." It was founded by someone who noticed that excess deer were stripping the mountain of vegetation and they concluded that reintroducing wolves was important for creating a sustainable environment.
In the US, deer-vehicle collisions make deer the deadliest animal for people that we have in this country.
Part of my incomplete BS in Environmental Studies was a class in quantifying the economic value of natural resources. I did a case study on wetlands in the San Francisco Bay Area that are currently quietly being threatened by the county rail plan.
The US used to pay people to fill in swamps and create "productive" land and then learned that swamps do useful and valuable things of various sorts. We updated the name from swamp to wetlands, overhauled their public image and reversed policy. We now protect and restore such areas.
Quantifying the economic value to humans of a natural resource is a good means to convince people it needs protecting and it is in your best interest to protect it. This is not "charity" and shouldn't be viewed as a sacrifice.
We are cutting our own throats when we ruin the world because of fixation on some overly simplified idea that it needs to put money directly into our pockets for humans to care about it. One of the best ways to fight such entrenched ideas is to quantify just how much it costs us to think that way.
The name of the organization is probably based on an essay called "Thinking like a mountain" by Aldo Leopold. Writing in 1949, Leopold is considered to be one of the first ecologists. It's a beautifully poetic and prophetic text.
I happen to be living on a mountain in southern Tuscany. A place where wolf where hunted to the brink of extinction and the deer population is exploding. This essay resonates with me in profound ways.
Thanks. It's possible the tagline was Thinking like a mountain rather than seeing like a mountain.
I want to say the organization was called Denali but that is now the name of a mountain in Alaska that was formerly known as Mt. McKinley. That change occurred in 2015. So searching for Denali gets me results for that specific mountain and things related to it, not for an environmentally oriented charity.
I am failing to find verification that there ever was such an organization. So I don't know if I am misremembering the name.
Denali is the original name of the mountain. Given by the indigenous people living there. Some dude just started calling it Mt McKinley for political reasons and everyone just accepted that, this decision was simply reversed.
Well, some of them called it something kinda-sorta close to that. Other groups of indigenous people called it by other names. Alaska Natives aren't one homogeneous group, by any means.
It's quite large, so it was visible to many different groups (on a good day I can see it from here, and it's about 130 miles/200 km away).
But Denali is definitely better than McKinley, no question about that.
According to Wikipedia, the name was officially changed back in 1975 by the Alaskan Government. However it wasn’t recognized by the federal government until 2015. Apparently the state of Ohio (which does not contain the mountain) opposed the name correction and successfully resisted for 40 years.
Since Alaska was already a state in 1975 I would say that the mountain’s name was officially recognized as Denali in some states from 1975. However it took until 2015 for the rest of the country to officially adopt it.
FYI: Ohio's interest stemmed from the fact that William McKinley, for whom the mountain was renamed, was born in Ohio and served as its governor before becoming presidents.
As you have written before, most of us who have worked with environmental issues in the real world, have long tried to 'value ' the environment. Forests, wetlands, waterfronts, etc.
Common scenario, let's say there is a beautiful bay. Many tourists visit to see the view. Condos are built around the bay. Now there is no view. There are no tourists. Water quality in and around the bay degraded.
But when trying to stop the development, the only arguable economic value, is the amount of the taxable value of condo, and 'housing starts' .
There is no present way, (still - after 50 years of talking about this) to place a value on the view, waterfront, water quality, etc.
There is no present way, (still - after 50 years of talking about this) to place a value on the view, waterfront, water quality, etc.
It's been a lot of years since I took the class, but those things can be valued. One of the things I did in my case study of Suisun Marsh was quantified how much the marsh cleans up the water and what it would cost if humans did it with a water treatment plant.
Suisun Marsh is also a historic birding area and the rails go through there for that reason. It brought tourism.
You can place dollar values on tourism, water quality and other things. It doesn't get done a lot but can be done.
A lot of places with such assets are small town or rural. Planning jobs tend to pay better in the big city so your best talent tends to end up designing cities and planners often hate their jobs because they don't get to do what they wanted to do.
Planning something good for people and the environment that makes economic sense and gets buy in from enough pertinent stakeholders is hard. So, all too often, "money talks" instead.
Why would the water quality have to degrade when there is residential development around a coastline? The views are still there and the tourists still come. Many are skeptical about "enivornmental" issues being used to prevent housing development, because it's most often used to stop it in heavily developed areas, replacing parking lots and single family houses. It's more environmentally friendly to have density than the alternative SFH sprawl. If you want to keep nature nature, make it a park.
Residential developments around coastlines typically drain directly into the bodies of water the coastlines are on.
Eutrophication can occur from lawn maintenance runoff alone. For coastlines around larger bodies of water, chemicals and heavy metals can deposit near the coast, and concentrate in filter feeders and animals higher up in the food chain to the point that it is unsafe to eat things that are caught off the coast.
I know you couldn't find it, but what was even the basic principle? It's hard for me to imagine that dramatically increasing land use, transportation and infrastructure costs could be environmentally beneficial.
They looked at total land use required to support cities and other areas and found that while the city footprint is small, the supportive infrastructure for the city is large. They found that when accounting for this, land use per capita is about the same regardless of density. Wish I could find it but there are a lot of Nature papers submitted every week.
That study doesn’t address your argument. The land use of a city isn’t simply the physical land taken up by that city. Per capita energy expenditures significantly drop as city density increases, even if we moved to solar power that would still represent land use.
The actual study is filled with it’s own problems such as ignoring land covered by water etc, but that’s largely irrelevant here. However the real issue is it’s looking at land use around cities which are rarely independent. The area around London for example isn’t a single city it’s a cluster of different cities of various densities that all bleed into each other. Is to use a US example is Patterson part of NYC? How about Stamford and or Newark? If not where exactly do you place the borders between each of them?
Looking at population in the heart of NYC vs the surrounding areas over time and they are fairly independent.
They didn't go into US cities in this analysis as far as I can see right, just chinese and european ones? Also do they focus on total ecological footprint or just land use equivalent, such as more energy usage from suburban housing, more emissions from car ownership and driving vs. things like every human needs this much farm land to feed them?
Stormwater run-off, anything that goes onto the ground (and especially paved surfaces) eventually ends up into the water cycle. Let's say 10 cars are leaking oil in their parking spot. That oil gets washed away by the rain and ends up in the local waterways.
Think of all the paving that prevents natural runoff.
The increased human loading due to higher population living pressures = waste water, waste fuels, oils, particulates (dust, tires.)
There is still ample view in the Bay Area, while we're in the midst of a severe housing shortage. The marginal loss to the view / waterfront / water quality from a new development is more than outweighed by the marginal gain in housing availability.
In an adversarial legal system, no one represents "externalities".
Parts of Australia have a deer problem, but despite cultivating a reputation for deadly animals, most of it lacks large terrestrial predators, so introducing wolves is an even harder sell than in the US.
It also has prior historical experience with introducing a species to address a previously introduced species, which then becomes a problem itself: foxes for rabbits; cane toads for cane beetles. cue Simpsons
Foxes were introduced to Australia for sport hunting, not to control the rabbit population. The presence of rabbits likely helped foxes spread across Australia.
Unrelated to your point, I have a friend who was a wildlife biologist / game warden for a US state. At one point, at least one insurance company was trying to pressure the department of game and fish to issue many more deer hunting licenses, to reduce the number of deer-vehicle collisions.
Just a clarification, the thing that the insurance company wanted the department in charge to do was issue (make available) more deer tags, not licenses. Hard to say more without knowing which state.
First, yes I'm for reintroduction of wolves. However, "In the US: Deer–vehicle collisions lead to about 200 human deaths and $1.1 billion in property damage every year." Really is a poor argument for it.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
USA annual number of deaths: 2,854,838.
So, deer kill about .007% of USA population annually. I don't want to downplay the tragedy, but I wouldn't recommend spending a large amount of the budget on this.
In most deer / vehicle collisions, both are in motion so who hit whom is kinda moot. Deer are red-green colour blind and consequently there are certain scenarios where neither party sees the other until the last second.
Thank you for your good nature on this topic. Driving is a fraught issue, in that we have all sorts of social attitudes around it that prevent us thinking critically about the necessity and costs of driving.
I've always been skeptical of driving, since I lost my best friend to it in high school, and saw others lose their friends. But. Since I've had children, I've been completely radicalized, and find it hard to even discuss the issue with a lot of people because my views have diverged so much from the mainstream. I unintentionally offend people all the time, and seeing your attitude gives me hope for finding more productive ways to express my views, like danny_codes did here.
Great points. Most people don’t understand the dangers of deer.
I grew up in a rural area of New York - from age 16-20, I hit or was hit by 5 deer in vehicles, including one that jumped off an embankment and landed on and went through my roof.
That wasn’t a uniquely unlucky track record either. If I recall correctly NY State Troopers were involved in ~500 collisions with deer annually at that time (mid 90s)
Really cool article. They show that Wolves create a “landscape of fear” which reduces deer engagement with roads. So wolves do what hunters can’t; not just reducing populations but also changing behavior. Kind of creepy, if you are a deer!
joking aside the Yellowstone phenomenon gets often cited. We have a long way to go in Europe (cough cough Switzerland, Austria) where the wolf by the rural community is still seen as a huge problem to the way of life (hunting and farming). I wonder if some modern solutions where wolves that are tagged anyway can be combined with trackers on cows/sheep/goats that subscribe to this data, so that the shepherd knows that a wolf is about to approach the herd. The bigger problem in these communities is that hunters have been doing this for generations, I myself come from such a family, my gramps, even my mother my uncle everyone was a hunter. They all believe that the hunter plays an important role in keeping a check on population of deer etc. As Yellowstone has shown reintroducing the wolf hasn't just solved that issue but also brought back types of trees, flowers and biodiversity that was previously lost. All because they allowed apex-predators back to where they were. But try to convince somebody in the countryside about this ... going to be a tough sell.
i'm swiss, i can confirm there is a long way to go here. for instance a nature photographer got arrested by police, got his material confiscated, on sole speculation that he was doing diffamation against hunters. literally treated worse than a terrorist just for just saying wolves and nature are important.
here wolves are highly political fights, to kill or not to kill.
usually they get killed.
i think wolves are just part of the political apparatus here, i have no idea how deep the hunter lobby goes..., but it is a fact that for every government, be it green or far right, the trigger is easy. we don't like wolves here, keep your paw out of our peaceful country.
(if you are a wolf that specializes in oil / food / ore trading, please be welcome in our country! did you know we are famous for chocolate?! you're
office is waiting for you , it has a nice view on Zürich's iconic Bahnhofstrasse.)
> joking aside the Yellowstone phenomenon gets often cited. We have a long way to go in Europe (cough cough Switzerland, Austria) where the wolf by the rural community is still seen as a huge problem to the way of life (hunting and farming).
100% the same situation in Scandinavia. Wolves would also probably help with the wild Boar problem in Sweden.
> Many Swedish farmers are affected by wild boar that cultivate arable land and eat crops.
> According to an action plan from the Swedish Farmers' Association, LRF, this involves
And to the southeast, to Croatia and Serbia where for example the beginning and the end of winter in the Orthodox calendar are marked by saints that are called the "wolf apostles".
All traditions related to wolf cults and werewolf stories are more or less related to local people having to deal with wolves as animals on a daily basis.
Guardian dogs. In other parts of the world shepherds have been living with wolves and bears since forever with the help of their companions. These are huge dogs, intelligent but independent. They roam and fend off bears, jackals and wolves and from my own experience, unfortunate hikers and cyclists.
There are many projects currently underway, introducing these dogs to America, Europe and Africa, as an alternative to killing on sight.
It's a really tough sell in Montana, and there are constantly fighting any wolf populations allowed at all. I'm pretty sure the controlling state government parting is working towards taking the population back to 0 because they believe the only good wolf is a dead wolf.
Quite simply, no wolves aren’t dangerous. There were 12 wolf attacks from 2002-2020 in Europe and North America: [1]
“In Europe and North America we only found evidence for 12 attacks (with 14 victims), of which 2 (both in North America) were fatal, across a period of 18 years. Considering that there are close to 60.000 wolves in North America and 15.000 in Europe, all sharing space with hun- dreds of millions of people it is apparent that the risks associated with a wolf attack are above zero, but far too low to calculate”
Steven Rinella talks with Dr. Kevin Monteith, Dr. Matt Kaufmann, Jared Oakleaf, and Janis Putelis.
Subjects discussed: genetics that rewrite our understanding of animals; big game guts; learning how to migrate; who pays for wildlife research?; brain scrambling, extreme sports, and wildlife capture; advancing modern wildlife management; etc.
The same is true for humans, though - the presence of wolves adds to human fear of the wilderness.
I only read the abstract but I wonder if this was accounted for in the article. Sure, it’s plausible that wolves lead to fewer deer-vehicle collisions, and that is a economic benefit. But what is the cost of decreasing humans’ willingness to enter the woods?
I live about 20 miles from ground zero of the original Yellowstone wolf reintroduction. I am an avid outdoorsperson and have never had an on-foot encounter with a wolf. They are exceedingly shy around humans; in the 25 years since the reintroduction there hasn't been a single attack on a human in Yellowstone despite both humans and wolves being literally everywhere in the area.
I'm not saying no one is afraid of going outdoors because of the wolves, but that fear would be completely irrational. Your chances of twisting your ankle badly enough that you get caught out and die of exposure are many orders of magnitude greater.
Edit to add: as an additional anecdote, we get a ton of tourists coming here to head outdoors because of their interest in the wolves and hopes of seeing one.
Not to mention grizzly bears and bison(bison mostly due to idiots thinking they are tame) are both a far greater threat than the wolves. If you're worried about wolves in Yellowstone you're worried about the wrong thing.
You are basing the statement "fear of wolves is completely irrational" on your experience as an outdoorsperson and 25 years of yellowstone. This is not a good basis. Wolves had lived in huge populations and had been in conflict with humans for thousands of years, with human casualties. Humans were very much afraid of wolves, and rightly so. Physically weak and isolated humans such as children and elderly are prime targets of wolf attacks.
Are you arguing for or against? A mythology is not a good argument. A wikipedia entry of about 184 attacks within a decade (apologies if I miscounted) argues for wolves being a non-existant threat. I'm more afraid of riding in a car thank you.
Significant dog bites affect tens of millions of people globally each year. It is estimated that 2% of the U.S. population, 4.5–4.7 million people, are bitten by dogs each year. Most bites occur in children. Between 2005 and 2018 approximately 471 people were killed by dog bites in the United States, averaging 37 deaths per year.
I'm afraid of running into bears by accident while trail-running in areas with lots of black bears (not even brown! I'm a sissy), and meanwhile I had a run-in with a bull moose on a narrow mountain ledge and had to scramble up the mountain and hide behind a tree.... but I'm still not as afraid of moose as I am bears, even though I know moose are much more dangerous! So fear is weird and often irrational. We should probably assume that just telling people rational things about their fears won't assuage them.
- A black bear suddenly charge toward me around a blind bend, stopping maybe 15-20 feet away, staring for a while before it took off down the side of the mountain
- A moose walk calmly by me, not much more than an arm’s length away
Both were absolutely terrifying experiences. Objectively, the bear encounter was probably the more dangerous (it was clearly startled so potentially unpredictable), but both the proximity and the casualness of the moose’s approach scared me much more.
That video of a moose running through waist deep snow is my canonical example of impressive feats of moose. I would not want to anger one. https://youtu.be/6GEhM2Byk7w?t=1m
probably because we have alot more neural wiring the recognizes bears as a threat while ruminant have long history as food thus less of a embedded fear reaction.
Is there any evidence that there is a sustained decrease in human outdoor activities in areas where wolves have been reintroduced? I kind of doubt it.
Wolves are really shy around humans so I don’t think there is any real threat to humans or our pets (as long as we keep our pets close to us). There is only the perception of threat but humans tend to adopt, and I don’t think this perception would last longer then a year or two and soon enough outdoor activities would resume to previous levels.
Wolves are not a serious threat to outdoor recreation. The presence of wolves in an area will have little effect on my willingness to hike there. I hike in mountain lion country, so what? I'd be a bit leery of being out there alone after dark, but during the day I don't care.
Very curious what was the conditions behind human hunting in the article. Did the area have unlimited deer hunting w/ no license renewals required? When I tried deer hunting once I noticed that the deer were not in the areas where we were allowed to hunt, and were very plentiful in areas we were not allowed to hunt.
Deer are pretty smart like that. Where I live there are deer all over about 2 weeks before hunting season. Then they dissapear into the hills. They just started coming back now that the hunt is over.
Humans are kind of stinky so I'm sure they just need to be upwind from them to realize "oh lord the humans are back again, time to head deeper into the woods for a while"
How long till deer hunters decide they need to hunt wolf to remotivate deer hunting? (I thought of this immediately as some hunters I know have absurd justifications for it being useful for ecosystems)
We were driving on a semi-wilderness highway when a medium-sized deer staggered up from a deep drainage ditch on the same side of the road, about 50 yards ahead. Managed to slow from 65-70 to 50 mph before hitting the animal, which slid along the highway and into the deep ditch on the other side.
The slowdown helped limit the van's damage to $10,000, but it was undriveable. Even if we somehow removed the hood (bent in two over the unbroken windshield), all the fluid had ran out of the crushed radiator and into the semi-wilderness ditch.
Luckily it was a hot July afternoon, and a truck going the opposite way came along in 15 minutes. The driver put the deer out of its misery. Had it been in the winter, after sundown, it might have taken hours just to be found.
Happened in the 1990s (no mobiles), so we waited for a vehicle heading toward the nearest little town to find a tow -truck. With the van towed to that town (no repair shop), it was another hour before relatives arrived from the bigger town (that tow-truck had a repair shop).
The insurance company paid for the repair, then dropped the policy. I never drove that route after noon again.
Its happened to me too. I've heard of deer coming through the windshield.
Deer are the second most deadly animal in North America. Thats because about 100K of them throw themselves into the paths of cars, trucks, motorcycles and bicycles every year.
The most deadly animal is the honey bee. After these two come the usual suspects: snakes, bears, mountain lions, spiders, etc.
Your question reminded me of a first responder that I knew. He was in a rural Wisconsin area where collisions with deer were common. He kept a spear in his truck to put deer out of their misery. He preferred using the spear to using his firearm since the use of a firearm came with extra paperwork.
Contrary to movie magic/political posturing, these devices only decrease the report by about 10 decibels, generally just under the hearing damage threshold, but still very loud.
Interesting. What is a "silencer" then? Is it a different device or the same device used on guns that are less noisy to begin with? Or is the movie silencer a complete fiction?
Silencer is the marketing name Maxim gave to the suppressors he designed and sold. Its a valid but contentious name for them. The term does get seriously used in the modern day for example, SilencerCo is one of the larger suppressor makers. But you will get people correcting you from time to time because its a misnomer. They don't make a gun silent.
A suppressor does the same thing that a muffler does on a car. It takes what would be an awfully loud noise and makes it bearable. Its a safety device. Are cars stealth and silent? Of course not. Neither are suppressed guns.
But yeah Hollywood quiet is mostly a myth. It is possible to achieve a very quiet gun but you have to take some heavy compromises to do so. Two such guns were developed by the British in WW2 for commandos. The Welrod and Delisle. They have both been featured in media. Some key aspects are the use of sub sonic ammunition, massively oversized suppressors that not only have baffles but also consumable rubber wipes, and also using repeating actions instead of semi auto. They are very quiet by gun standards but even they aren't Hollywood quiet.
It depends a little on caliber but you're broadly on the right track. Suppressed 22LR is 110-120-ish db, which is just barely hearing safe. Suppressed 556 (typical AR) is 135+db even with top-tier cans (qdc, rc2, saker), which is firmly in eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee territory. Similar story for 762 and friends. With the exception of 22LR, you really do want to be using proper earpro when shooting suppressed.
The other aspect of them that's usually less broadly appreciated (and part of why "suppressor" is preferred to "silencer") is that they're also effective at reducing muzzle flash, which is sometimes relevant, especially with short barrels.
The closest to movie silencer requires using sub-sonic ammunition in addition to the "silencer".
That will remove the crack from the bullet passing trough the sonic barrier and some of the gas explosion noises.
But even then it won't be "movie silencer" levels of silent, as the action of the firearms mechanic are usually also still quite loud if the weapon is not specifically designed to prevent that.
You can get close with a suppressed bolt-action 22lr shooting subsonic ammo. But that takes an already underpowered round and makes it even slower, so it comes with a lot of compromises. Good for squirrels, bad for anything much larger.
First responder who needs to deal with deer probably has a pair of earmuffs, might not have enough pairs for everyone standing around looking at the deer.
I'm assuming you meant to ask me since EamonnMR didn't say anything that you could reasonably be skeptical of.
Yes, I personally knew him.
Yes, he was a first responder and I saw him leave a number of times to respond to calls for first responders. Given the area we were in, some of these calls certainly would have been for cars hitting deer.
Yes, I saw the spear in the vehicle he took to those calls.
I do know from others in his family that he sometimes acquired a roadkill permit & brought back a deer carcass.
I do concede that this guy was fond of telling tall tales so he might have embellished a bit, but nothing seemed terribly implausible about this story to me at the time. As nothing of import hinges on its veracity, I think it's fine to categorize this under "quite probably true" and let it be. =)
A highschool teacher of mine once told a story: They hit a deer, knocking it down but not killing it. Someone else pulled up, saw the deer was still alive, and called whoever the authority is to get permission to give the deer a merciful end. After getting permission, the deer chose that moment to remember it was ok, jumped up, and ran off into the woods. The person who now had permission to hunt this deer promptly ran off into the woods after it.
Never go up to a deer you're not 100% sure is dead. They're big, hurt, and can decide any moment to flee or attack.
I would like to suggest we cede more of our land to nature, and increasing the amount of uninterrupted wilderness.
But that's going to not be popular with a lot of people because it means deciding what area we get to live in or don't. Some towns are going to be removed for lack of sustainability.
For this to work, we would need to also improve our land use policies in the towns and cities we currently live in.
I suggest you look into the American Prairie Reserve! It's a really interesting non-profit located in Montana, which is dedicated to creating one of the largest uninterrupted pristine North American grassland biomes in the country. They do this through the strategic purchase of private tracts of land that connect public space (national parks, forests, BLM land, etc.) and remove all fences and other migration impediments, while still allowing recreational use by people. They even own and manage their own herd of American bison!
1. Only something like 6% of the US is urban. The majority is pasture and forests, which arguably is almost entirely natural. The second largest use is crop land.
2. Deciding where people can live is extremely tyrannical. Many people own this land, what’s the plan, take their ancestral home? That didn’t work out well any time in history.
Every time I see comments like this I come to the same conclusion. My bet: you’re from a city, young, white collar, perhaps grew up in suburbs on a coast?
Nothing wrong with that, but there’s a disconnect between those living in urban environments vs the country.
2. Deciding where people can live is extremely tyrannical. Many people own this land, what’s the plan, take their ancestral home? That didn’t work out well any time in history.
We are already deciding where people can live. It's called zoning, and zoning laws restrict how we can build our homes, where we live, and what transportation options we can use.
My proposal seem tyrannical, yes, but I paired it with improving human welfare in the land we didn't cede to nature, and probably more freedom to build and live overall.
Crazy talk, what if we started tightening regulation so small communities stayed small, and were increasingly built and revitalized in ways that benefited both the community and the surrounding wildlife?
you would create a horrible housing market where at first very few living in rural areas could aford a home there. killing the middle class in those towns, which would in turn cause the high earners (doctors lawers business owners)to leave as there would be no one that could afford their services, that would then drop the market after they left but all that would be left are the poor now with no jobs.
essentially you would be creating a inverse-gentresizing where the middle class leaves then upperclass leaves creating a ghetto.
I’m not sure where the leap from “create regulation” to “run-away housing prices” happens. That’ll happen in a growing city, but the effect tends to be a little lower in rural communities, particularly if regulation is tightened around expansion and lowered around densification.
> We are already deciding where people can live. It's called zoning
Zoning is done in higher density areas, because it has to be. It's one of the tradeoffs you make when you choose to live in a higher density area.
In rural areas, or even in smaller towns, you won't find much zoning. And people who choose to live in such areas are making different tradeoffs (for example, lack of easy access to many kinds of services that are easily available in higher density areas).
Trying to command people who want to live in either kind of area to live in the other kind does not work out well. It's much better to just make sure that people who choose to live in each kind of area bear their share of the costs, and get their share of the benefits.
> My proposal seem tyrannical, yes, but I paired it with improving human welfare in the land we didn't cede to nature, and probably more freedom to build and live overall.
Your proposal is upside down.
We turn the suburbs into sprawl and take over nature because of restrictive zoning. People want to build a ten story building near the city, can't because it's illegal, so then they build ten one story buildings and use up ten times more land/nature.
> We are already deciding where people can live. It's called zoning, and zoning laws restrict how we can build our homes, where we live, and what transportation options we can use.
Mostly in urban areas. You go to the rural places we're talking about, you might find the zoning is minimal to non-existent. Implementing zoning would absolutely be a new restriction on where people can live, what they can build on their property. People in those areas are often used to doing nearly whatever they like on their own property - short of things that'd be illegal wherever they did them. You're proposing to take that away?
> 1. Only something like 6% of the US is urban. The majority is pasture and forests, which arguably is almost entirely natural. The second largest use is crop land.
You have got to be joking, right? Just open Google Maps, switch to satellite mode, turn off labels and look at the US midwest, particularly Illinois. Any zoom level. Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, pretty much everywhere. It's a patchwork of farms. Basically all flat parts of the US look like this, except for extremely arid areas.
Combining pasture with range seems wrong, if "range" is open grazing land. That is wilderness, just with livestock on it keeping flammable undergrowth down.
> The majority is pasture and forests, which arguably is almost entirely natural. The second largest use is crop land.
"Natural" is a black hole for the purpose of debate. Pasture is natural if the number of livestock are controlled, otherwise look out. Monoculture forests (have you driven through the western mountains and seen the beetle damage) have issues. Crop land- a massive issue to consider, if you want to see the impact just surf the satellite views of the US on Google maps, huge swaths of land with not enough "natural" in between. It would take very little proportionally, but significant (impossible?) effort to build in true swaths of "natural" habitat throughout impacted areas.
Over 40% of land in the US is public owned. The federal government owns almost half off all land in the western US.
You don’t even need to turf people off the land they own - just choose to manage more of the land we already own as wilderness versus as a resource to be leased to ranchers and loggers.
Have you seen ranching and logging land? In general it’s actually very well managed. I for one like lumber prices on the down low so a single digit percentages of managed forest land being clear cut per year in a sustainable growth cycle doesn’t concern me. And while I’m not one for beef myself, I love to watch cows graze and when cows are held at reasonable density the look and feel of the grazed land isn’t all that different from nearby “untouched” land (keep in mind animals are also grazing that “untouched” land!)
Ranching is horrible for wildlife. The cows eat everything the deer, elk, and antelope eat, and the fences prevent natural migration. I hate hunting ranched land. It's straight up ruined.
Loggers prefer to clearcut or cut down larger trees, which doesn't help with wildfires. Logging can be useful as forest management but it has to be properly regulated to achieve that.
"2. Deciding where people can live is extremely tyrannical. Many people own this land, what’s the plan, take their ancestral home? That didn’t work out well any time in history."
I mean, most of the land ownership in the US was obtained by ethnically cleansing the native inhabitants from their ancestral lands just a couple centuries ago, so...
There are several initiatives in the hunting and fishing community doing this, aka buying land, managing the wilderness, and making it available to the public.
* The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, or TRCP, is a non-profit 501(c)(3) coalition of conservation organizations, grassroots partners and outdoor related businesses, the main goal of which is increased federal funding for conservation while preserving access for hunters and fishers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt_Conservatio...
* MeatEater’s Land Access Initiative (designed to raise money so we can find properties that will provide more access for regular folks to hunt and fish) https://www.themeateater.com/pages/land-access
But random towns in the middle of nowhere are not connected by such highways.
Speaking as someone who ran over a deer a few months back on a smaller road that connects these community. All kinds of animals cross these roads regularly and usually without impediments, can't be said for an interstate.
You could just have dirt roads. The problem isn't the road per se it's the crazy fast cars on the road. If cars rode at 12mph like they do on dirt roads, at about the speed a deer can gallop, that's like 25x less kinetic energy and if you hit a deer it'll bump and keep going.
There is now an effort to provide passage for animals across highways using overpasses/underpasses. Though not feasible everywhere, they are usually placed near known migration routes.
I think this is one of the main division in the US Red Tribe/Blue Tribe division.
To Blue Tribe nature is a beautiful park we need to preserve and keep untouched. Work is done in an office, producing documents.
To Red Tribe nature is a source of raw materials to produce food, metals, power, etc. Work is taming and harvesting the resources of nature.
Blue Tribe keeps adding wilderness restrictions, which keeps taking away ways for Red Tribe to make a living, increasing rural poverty, and feeding resentment.
I think this is badly oversimplified and is maybe showing your own bias a bit -- though I'm probably going to struggle to address it without showing mine in turn (and maybe it's just mine reading it in your comment).
Your "Blue wilderness restrictions", writ large, are exactly based on a recognition that
> nature is a source of raw materials to produce food, metals, power, etc.
I think the policy differences arise downstream from that. Questions like, how to handle competing resource needs; how to manage current or future scarcity; and ultimately some disagreement about whether these questions even need to be asked (i.e. is scarcity of X actually a problem?)
The "Blue wilderness restrictions" I think of are banning logging, banning mining, banning new farming, banning dams, etc.
The "competing resource needs" are balanced in favor of keeping rural areas pristine, so city people can go hiking there and marvel at the untouched nature.
Most people live in cities, so when legislators decide these things, the city people priorities win.
I was reading the other day about how wolves can help reduce Lyme's carrying tick populations as well, which could be considered another positive economic impact. They of course keep deer in check, but they also keep coyotes in check while not preying on the smaller animals that eat ticks and mice like coyotes do.
Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He’s not breathing and his eyes are glazed, so his friend calls 911. “My friend is dead! What should I do?” The operator replies, “Calm down, sir. I can help. First make sure he’s dead.” There’s a silence, then a loud bang. Back on the phone, the guy says, “OK, now what?"
The thing they estimate is reduction of deer collisions, according to the abstract. So that’s a rather limited scope in comparison to the title.
What surprises me more (I guess I’m a bit jaded), is that the title suggests that nature is there to be economically exploited. Does a species run up a loss? Extinction is its fate.
> that nature is there to be economically exploited. Does a species run up a loss? Extinction is its fate.
Nature will do what it wants, so I can't speak for the wolves. Humans on the other hand, at least in US and Canada, operate under North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, whose core principles are elaborated upon in the seven major tenets:
* Wildlife as Public Trust Resources
* Elimination of Markets for Game
* Allocation of Wildlife by Law
* Wildlife Should Only be Killed for a Legitimate Purpose
* Wildlife is Considered an International Resource
* Science is the Proper Tool for Discharge of Wildlife Policy
IOW, humans in US and Canada are less likely than ever to hunt animals to extinction, mostly because `Elimination of Markets for Game` makes it illegal to sell wild game.
The use of economics is less about exploiting the wolves, or deer, and more about countering the widely held, and very personal belief (if you are a rancher), that wolves introduction has high costs from livestock predation. A rancher losing a steer has experienced a substantial economic loss.
Put another way: if wolves are reintroduced and ranchers are compensated generously for lost animals, the rest of society still comes out ahead.
I sometimes think many environmental issues could be resolved with sufficient bribery. And if the benefit of the policy is really that large, the bribes are affordable.
While this is very true and we should absolutely consider the emotional cost others bear from our actions. I wonder how much we should really be valuing the emotional cost of industrial barons which is the modern farmer. Especially as we consider that other humans also have emotional attachments to wildlife. When we see a healthy ecosystem we are happy, and when we hear about a wolf that was killed we are sad.
The economic term for this is Coasean bargaining. The Coase theorem is that this can in principle be solved privately; in practice, transaction costs and imperfect information usually make government involvement necessary.
Not being killed in a car accident and not losing your car should compensate for any economic damage. Ranchers have -one- job, and is to watch and care for their cattle. If they do it well they earn money. If not, they lose money, exactly as any other.
Paying them a lot of public money for not doing their job well, would be like Apple having a bad year an asking Microsoft to cover for their loses. Ranchers are private companies.
Devils advocate: the ranchers did their job a century ago when they exerminated the wolves. They are now again asked to accept wolves near their cattle, but this time they can't shoot at them. To make this a fair deal for them we should compensate them for any cattle lost to wolves.
They do this in Europe in many countries. For example: farmers are paid for damage to crops by boars. money is collected by hunting organizations to reimburse the farmers. Depending on the individual system, the boar meat is sold in government or private butcher shops.
Times change. What was seen as "correct" a thousand years ago, may be unacceptable with the technology and knowledge of today. We have some terrific new tools in nature management that weren't available at that time.
After the new data coming day, after day, after day... it seems that people commit a few really suicidal moves a century ago. We still are trying to fix the industrial revolution effects.
Paying some people a bribe with money from other people, so they agree to respect the laws... it never ends well. Is blackmail. The concept is stupid and a magnet for troubles.
Bribe and blackmail, quite harsh words I would say. The government is essetially making use of the ranchers land to the general good of the overall ecosystem by (re)introducing wolves. Fair compensation for lost income is not a bribe.
If we remove Russia (that is huge and a special case), Spain is the European country with a highest wolf population. We have much more wolves than countries like Norway or Sweden. The Spanish government pays around 1.5 million euro each year to farmers for covering damages
With sexy results. Lets see some curious discoveries in the biology of Spanish wolves:
1) Wolves start eating its preys by the most delicious part of the cattle: the livestock ear tag. A plastic piece that grants that the animal has been legally breed and registered, (and is often missing in the corpses). Having in mind that tag remains don't appear in the wolf scats, It seems that wolves love to collect them for the cubs.
2) Some cows were killed by wolves three times in three different places. The cow remains teleport mysteriously each time to another location.
3) Some farmers act as black holes for cattle. There is a strong suspicion that their entire business model consist into buying cheap foals and decrepit old goats in another province, let them alone and unprotected in the national park and wait for the corpse to be found. Some of this professionals of producing meat haven't sold a single animal or put a single sausage in the market... in decades.
4) It is suspected that scabies killing the endangered Pyrenean Chamois in the national park was introduced with those diseased goats.
5) Statistics about cattle dying by natural causes drop when government start paying wolf damages. Suddenly there is not more cows dying after giving birth, or from old age, or falling from a cliff. Is a well known secret that when you have an animal that needs an expensive veterinary procedure, borrowing a mastiff from a friend will fix the problem... and then you cry wolf, of course.
6) After introducing saliva analysis in Pyrenees looking for wolf DNA in the attacked cattle, the number of wolf attacks dropped from 100 to 7 in the next year. The analysis found that shepherd dogs owned by farmers were the real culprits in practically all attacks. Shepherd dogs had being videotaped feasting on cows and sheep. They respect its own herd, but will attack other herds. Everybody knows this.
7) Some farmers manage somehow to lost 600 sheep year after year without a trace, by the attack of magical wolves driving a van. We pay them up to 24.000 euro/year with tax money so they can be happy again. But they aren't, and ask for more.
And well, "You know how flammable is the forest, do you?, Everything could start burning some of those days if you don't allow us to put cattle here..."
Bribe and blackmail seem a little more reasonable in that context. However, it seems that you are talking about free ranging goats in the actual national park. In that case I think no compensation should be paid since the rancher is already making use of a public good. Then the ranger should assume the risk by himself.
And of course, claims of wolf attacks outside of those national lands should be supported by physical evidence. DNA testing is quite cheap, it sounds that Spain i simply doing the compensation payouts wrong.
For a lot of time it was a problem of politicians willing to keep the social peace, buying local vote, and choosing not to act. Is not so easy money as it was, but still happens. More examples:
In Jun 2021 a team of six farmers in the North of Spain were accused of scamming 60.000 euro of public funds. They claimed to have lost 170 animals between 2019 and 2020 but were caught putting food for attracting wolves and then removing small foals from its mothers and abandoning them in the same place so the wolves do their thing. They also killed 6 wolves that are a protected species.
In a classic 'The Goodfather' style, head wolves and wolf corpses have been found hanging from road signs in several parts of the Cantabric mountains.
... and after a farmers protest in Infiesto, somebody trow a decapitated wolf head in the public pool (2018).
Politicians in environmental positions, have been harassed and pressed to gimme-more also.
In 2014, more than 300 farmers were accused of scam after being caught billing twice for each animal to insurance (that was paid in part with public founds) and then to the government.
Some forest guards had being accused to turning a blind eye when filling the reports of attacks and report all as wolf attacks to benefit farmers from their own family. Other guards received death threats and found their cars scratched for not willing to bend and do the same.
etc, etc, etc...
In resume, free money leads to bad apples gaming the system. If USA follows the same path there is a strong possibility that will end facing exactly the same problems.
I think that economical aspects play an important role in suggesting how far we go with certain conservation efforts. I think few people will suggest that we should hunt wolves to extinction. So I would assume that most are okay with having wolves in national parks. The question is now: what about everywhere else? And this publication suggests that we might want to have wolves (almost) everywhere. While with, for example, bears or bison we might be better of having them mostly limited to selected regions. At that point, its not a question of conservation anymore, but of economic viability.
Maybe. I'm not sure how you'd measure the benefit otherwise though. If you're going to compare apples to oranges (or deer road collisions to wolf predation of livestock), dollars is one of the ways you can.
As somebody who grew up one state over, I can totally believe this. Deer collision featured importantly driver's ed and my thoughts for highway driving, especially in twilight and dark. Anybody who has ever had a squirrel run out in front of you knows the feeling, except here the squirrel can do 30 mph and weighs as much as a person.
As much as a person!? A big deer can get to 300 lbs. And in some parts of the country Elk and Moose are a large concern. I'll never forget seeing my 16 year old friends truck after he hit an elk.
You're not wrong, but since it's not really made explicit in the paper, I'll mention that since they are measuring these weights at the check-in stations, these are almost certainly the "field dressed weights". After killing a deer, the hunter usually removes the internal organs from the chest cavity before moving the deer. The actual live weight of the deer is will be about 1/3 higher. A 55 kg (120 lb) deer at the check in station will thus actually weigh closer to 70 kg (150 lb) when live: https://www.pgc.pa.gov/Wildlife/WildlifeSpecies/White-tailed....
Thanks for the correction. I assumed this was full body weight because of the inclusion of fauns. I never was a deer hunter but grew up around them and I had no idea some people shoot fauns! Maybe it wasn't legal where I was at the time? Or maybe it just wasn't done? But now that I look further I see otherwise.
According to English’s ordering of adjectives[1], the friend is sixteen years old. If the truck were 16 years old the phrase would have been “my friend’s 16 year old truck”.
It makes me sad that laying out the economic benefits of wildlife conservation is even necessary. This is interesting. But why can’t we conserve wolves just because? Why do we need to point to the economics of it? Are they not worth conserving unless they help the bottom line?
Because that isn't how [highly polarized] democracies work. The fact that environmentalists are aghast is a bonus for those in favor of wolf culls. But, even those politicians think with their wallets. Wolves aren't going to get out the vote. In reality, this is going to come down to how politicians personally feel about wolves, and how persuasive rancher, livestock insurance and car insurance lobbies are in making their respective cases.
Because wolves are assholes. Following the reintroduction of wolves to the area numerous people, including my neighbors, reported lost dogs. The state DNR takes forever to investigate and always concludes that it wasn't a wolf, of course, it is a mere coincidence.
Coyotes have become much more brazen in the last 40 years, as the suburbs have expanded so much, creating lucrative hunting grounds for them. Same with trash pandas. Some biologists actually think that wolves would help keep coyotes in check, but the odds of their populations reaching a size where they could have an effect is slim.
Considering your comment is greyed out (or at least was), I supposed the answer to your last question, for some people, must be yes. I suspect it legitimately doesn't occur to some people that conservation need not be an economic activity.
Multiple positive outcomes never hurt a case. In general, conservation often has other supporting factors - the failure to preserve ecosystems can have numerous knock-on negative effects for human populations.
I dunno. More and more it strikes me that people "moved by economic arguments" are in truth having already decided their position and work backwards to justify it.
It's a mix for sure. Rich sociopaths and would-be rich sociopaths definitely love econ-style arguments for a whole bunch of reasons. But for people who are more technocratic, it can be handy. "X is better and cheaper" can be powerful.
Of course, we live in an age where the nominally "fiscally responsible" people show declining interest in intellectual consistency and coherence, so maybe this argument is moving into the "elegant weapon for a more civilized age" category.
Lots of people talking who never had to deal with wolves here. Bottom line to remember about any wolf studies is this: they don't transfer to other wolf locations. This paper is relevant for Wisconsin only. Secondarily, since this topic inevitably comes up as people say stuff like "it's silly to be afraid of wolves", all the claims that wolves don't attack people are lies, using almost exclusively US based data where the wolves were killed until under control for that very reason. For a less ideological understanding of the real danger of wolves look at the statistics in Siberia, etc. My saying for those who harp on this is "It's easy to claim refuge in statistics until you are in the middle of nothing and hear a pack a ridge or two over. Or hear them circle and yip your camp at night. Then statistics don't offer nearly the same comfort." ... Things I have experienced first hand. Slightly off topic but one of the most visually exhilarating things ever for me was to stumble across a wild pack feasting on a fresh kill...
I grew up in a wolf re-intro zone and have had to deal with all the changes to the forest that came with it, many, if not most, of them bad. It wasn't until I was older I went back and re-read the justification papers and they were absolutely horrid science. There is quite a history of wolf related papers being used to justify political actions far outside what the papers support. Please don't fall into that same trap here. This is an interesting paper about the Wisconsin wolf population from a particular angle of study (not a holistic study), that's it.
> Bottom line to remember about any wolf studies is this: they don't transfer to other wolf locations. This paper is relevant for Wisconsin only.
How and why? Are Wisconsin wolves somehow fundamentally different than other wolves; a different species or something? I find your thesis hard to swallow. Occam's razor suggests that since they're wolves, they behave like other wolves.
Different wolf breeds and different environments (for example, elk heavy animal pops are different to hunt than deer, variations in forest type, elevation, water sources, human pop within radius, etc) combined make for too many variables.
So they react like most wolves to most of those variables, and therefore the sum total of their behaviour is about the same as other populations of wolves in areas where the variables have similar values?
Not sure about terrain and population density in Wisconsin, but at a guess, they probably behave much like wolves in central Sweden or Finland then.
I read something before how they change the flow of rivers. Basically predation by wolves changes the feeding behaviour of deer and other animals, which changes the type of vegetations that grows along river banks and creeks, and that can change the shape of a river.
I would speculate that road, which due to cars have elevated noise levels, render them intrinsically a good cloaking mechanism to wolves stalking prey.
Or at least, deer feel unable to register sounds there and thus avoid it
The presence of predators causes prey to avoid areas that favor the predator. In this situation the issue is open space. Roads are open, wolves are a bigger threat to the deer with long sight lines.
(Simple example in our own backyard. Some plants in pots, some plants in the ground with vegetation around them. The birds completely stripped the ones in the pots but didn't touch the ones in the ground. There was no cover near the pots, a cat would have no cover. With the ones in the ground a cat would have lots of cover. While we do not have a cat multiple cats sometimes come around.)
Deer don't generally hang out on busy roads at the best of times. I suspect it has more to do with the roadway being an open area which makes the deer more visible and thus more vulnerable to wolves.
> Deer don't generally hang out on busy roads at the best of times.
Deer hang out wherever they find food and cover. If there happen to be busy roads in the vicinity then you find them on busy roads.
Busy roads also have lights; deer make use of available illumination. The frequency of deer collisions increases with the full moon because of this[1].
I have a light pole on my property and deer hang out near this. Almost every night I step outside I startle a few; there were two does under it last night.
I own 100 acres of woodland in south-central Wisconsin. The deer are extremely abundant and cause extensive damage to the ecosystem. We have bow hunters on the property each fall who take maybe a dozen or so deer (no guns, too many houses in the vicinity). Even with that the herd seems to get larger each year (and the deer are getting smaller in size). We're in a heavily farmed area, so a wolf pack might be unpopular, but looks like it would help on my side of the equation!
After reading the headline it took me a second, then I went "Of course, less deer!"
I hate driving country roads because I've had way too many close calls with deer that seem hell-bent on appearing suddenly from off to the side directly in front of you. I once had three separate deer crossing in front of my car incidents in just 48 hours before. 2 extremely close, one I'm surprised I didn't hit and I swerved in a dumb and potentially dangerous way to miss it (probably shouldn't have, but that's what happened in the moment, thankfully I was the only person on the road then).
So yeah, bring on the wolves. I don't want deer to go extinct or anything, but I wouldn't mind being able to loosen my vice grip on the steering wheel and having total vigilance whenever I drive down country roads (especially at night).
Wolves just aren't that dangerous in North America. You should be far more concerned about bears, but dogs, mountains lions, even moose are more likely to attack and kill a human.
You might want to look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_bear_attacks_in_... then. Note that the bear article is limited by region and only to fatal attacks because a list of broad in scope as the wolf attacks article would be never-ending.
Lots of predators are far more dangerous to people than wolves but wolves provoke a visceral reaction because they've been demonized in a way bears, etc haven't.
Many of those attacks would be entirely preventable vaccinating the cubs or adults once against rabies. Is a management problem that is fixable and relatively cheap.
Whenever I read about people concerned with wolves threatening humans, it reminds me of how sharks are treated. Both have been vilified in book and film, yet are rarely a threat to humans.
The "bio-economy" and "bio-services" are coming. You'll start to hear these buzz-words more and more in following years, watch for the emphasis in federal science funding initiatives etc. When arguments based on economic impact are translated into laws and rules for how we do things, and we start to tie things like the paper mentions into the picture, then the logical outcome is more "reverence" for the natural world, wrapped in the veneer of capitalism. There is ample precedent, see protection of fishing grounds, biological control saving billions of $ and millions of lives [1], etc. etc.
This could not be the title, because it is not what they found. They found that in addition to predation, the threat of wolves changes the deers’ behavior, which has a much larger role in reducing accidents.
If it’s not wolves, it’ll be something else, at least for a lot of areas in the western U. S. Just the other day I saw a bobcat while I was out running. The dog and I would see coyotes on our morning run, so a bobcat isn’t surprising. There allegedly are cougars around here, but I’ve never seen one. You won’t either, until it’s too late. :-) And then there’s the bears. They’re not grizzlies, though, so not a huge deal. They do occasionally wander through the elementary school yard behind our house, though (as does the bobcat).
Oh, yeah, forgot to mention the Alaskan frontier town that I call home: Redmond, WA. It’s not Australia, but there are a few things around here that will give thought to killing you and eating you, even in town.
We need to put our emotions aside while managing our wildlife populations. Wolves are not a serious threat to humans and even so, the wilderness is a scary place even without wolves, take appropriate precautions.
I live in England, and the scariest thing you'll find in the countryside is a badger. Our badgers aren't even scary. Well - besides other humans and their dogs.
And I like the idea of having a lower chance of dying in a road accident.
Or isn't that the idea of what we are discussing here, putting actual numbers to (ir)rational fears?
If children are allowed near dogs then I think children can live in a city where wolves are tens of miles away in the forest and actively avoid anything that sounds of people.
In Nordic countries the opposition comes from rural areas where more wolves means more yard visits by wolves. People are used to keeping dogs outside and allowing kids to go to school unsupervised (say, by bike or just waiting alone outside for a school taxi).
I think that's the price of living close to the nature, but it may be a hard pill to swallow after several generations growing up in rural areas barren of wolves.
Children small enough to be at threat from most of our apex predators shouldn't be alone in the wilderness in the first place. The only apex predator that considers humans prey is the polar bear. The others normally only attack defensively--don't put them in a situation where they feel the need to defend themselves and the threat is minimal. (I would make an exception for going into the area of an apex predator in late winter--there might be a desperate animal that would go for something wrong.)
Coyotes are known to attack children and pets. When I lived in the High Desert I didn't hesitate to go out alone after dark but my children weren't allowed to do so. IIRC, there had been two or three attacks on children in the previous five years (edit: in the area I was living).
Isn't that the point? You don't hear about it because there aren't any wolves, and where there are wolves, you change your behavior ( let kids out on their own much less).
Wolf attacks on people are pretty much proportional to the amount of other food they have available and how many people they come into contact with, just like any other predator.
> You don't hear about it because there aren't any wolves
That's a big assumption.
> here there are wolves, you change your behavior ( let kids out on their own much less).
Kids are already let out so much less than they used to be, so that might not be necessary.
> Wolf attacks on people are pretty much proportional to the amount of other food they have available and how many people they come into contact with, just like any other predator.
The constant you multiply the proportion by matters a lot.
In the US, deer-vehicle collisions make deer the deadliest animal for people that we have in this country.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/10-deadliest-animals-in-...
In the US: Deer–vehicle collisions lead to about 200 human deaths and $1.1 billion in property damage every year.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer%E2%80%93vehicle_collisi...
Part of my incomplete BS in Environmental Studies was a class in quantifying the economic value of natural resources. I did a case study on wetlands in the San Francisco Bay Area that are currently quietly being threatened by the county rail plan.
The US used to pay people to fill in swamps and create "productive" land and then learned that swamps do useful and valuable things of various sorts. We updated the name from swamp to wetlands, overhauled their public image and reversed policy. We now protect and restore such areas.
Quantifying the economic value to humans of a natural resource is a good means to convince people it needs protecting and it is in your best interest to protect it. This is not "charity" and shouldn't be viewed as a sacrifice.
We are cutting our own throats when we ruin the world because of fixation on some overly simplified idea that it needs to put money directly into our pockets for humans to care about it. One of the best ways to fight such entrenched ideas is to quantify just how much it costs us to think that way.