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13 ECONOMICS ~ Do Economists Know About Lupines? Donald Snow The Thoreauvian philosopher who dwelt within the breast of AIdo Leopold composed these lines in the early summer of 1946: "Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew hung on every lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands. On solvent farmlands lupines do not even grow, much less collect a daily rainbow ofjewels. If they did, the weed-control officer, who seldom sees a dewy dawn, would doubtless insist that they be cut. Do economists know about lupines?"! It might as well have been Henry David himselfspeaking of the impoverished vision of the men who tend toward riches. Only a refined impertinence would ask such a question of economists, of anyone, really, who viewed nature only in terms ofwhat can be extracted from her. By the time Leopold wrote those lines at age 59, he had made his views on economics clear enough. Economics mayor may not have been a science, but to him it was surely dismal. The pecuniary motive had wrecked the great white pine forests of Michigan and the upper Mississippi Valley when the Iowa-born Leopold was still in diapers. And though he knew of that legacy, and issued from a family that supported early conservation measures, Leopold himself had once embraced what he later called "economic biology."2 As a young forester he eagerly absorbed the utilitarian ideals of Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the U.S. Forest Service-and that meant intensified timber management on every national forest and making room for grazing and mining, too. It is well known that in his early career with the Forest Service, Leopold eagerly organized a coalition of agency colleagues, stockmen, and sportsmen to eradicate predators. "The last one must be caught before the job can be called fully successful," he declared.3 He understood that Americans' unthinking embrace of economic growth had created a juggernaut, and because of that, arguments for the conservation of nature would have to be couched in terms favorable to commerce. Leopold's concise way of saying it: "one must speak in the 190 Economics 191 language of compound interest to get a hearing."4 Yet all along in his essays and public addresses, he wrote lines that displayed a profound mistrust of what he called "economic determinism" and revealed his contempt for the fact that it could never fully take into account the value of "things natural, wild, and free."5 Dewdrops on the lupines. His views prefigured an era of ecological economics when some economists and a great many environmental advocacy groups, following the juggernaut, would adopt the lexicon of commerce for the sake of protecting nature. When the Army Corps of Engineers came up with a plan to dam the Flambeau River for flood control, Leopold pointed out the hypocrisy in "the semi-honest doctrine that conservation is only good economics." He went on: "The defenders of the Flambeau tried to prove that the river in its wild state would produce more fish and tourists than the impounded river would produce butterfat, but this is not true."6 The quantity argument is a trap set by obedience to convention, Leopold seemed to be saying. What we should be articulating instead is a defense of nature based on principles of quality: the world is simply better, and we are better off in the long run, with wildness left intact. Had Leopold lived to be a hundred, he might have been pleased to see a rising corps ofeconomists, business leaders, and economic philosophers making precisely the same point. Like the science of ecology, the science of economics has migrated in directions that could not have been predicted in the post-Depression era. It is now clear that when Leopold said "economics" he meant mainly "commerce," and it is equally clear that many contemporary economists would agree with him right down the line-but perhaps with a few substitutions of terms. Commercial determinism is narrow and foolish and fails to take other values into account. The finest things in life-love, honor, spirituality, a sense of belonging, wildness, music-simply cannot be given price tags. Trying to hang numbers on them violates the very essence we seek to protect. Leopold wrote that "one basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value."7 Many economists would now agree, but might substitute the term...

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