A Simple Method to Show the Economic and Educational Value of Wildlife and Wildlands

摘要

Pressure of increased human population and its need for development increases the pressure to utilizepreserves, wilderness, and other wild lands. Arguments that developers make to City, County, State andFederal councils, and Legislatures are that the proposed project will bring in X number of jobs, and Xamount of tax dollars, often ignoring pollution, destruction of habitat, traffc congestion, demand onschools, etc. They present dollar fgures to back up their proposal. Environmentalists working throughEnvironmental Impact Reports and political action groups may point out that the locality has rare andendangered species, is important to the ecosystem, watershed, recreation (Hohensee et al. 2017) etc.Sometimes projects can be required to do an adequate amount of mitigation. Some simple experimentsmay affect the project and policy (Brattstrom and Bondello 1983). Developers and destroyers also tryto get around impacts and mitigations (Brattstrom 1996). Ecologists come before deciding bodies anddescribe the Ecological Services of the site (Zheng et al. 2016). While these arguments and descriptionsof services of the project site are clear to ecologists, they are just “pie in the sky” goodies presented by“bird watchers” to politicians. Politicians see numbers and votes (and perhaps a little money under thetable), not energy ?ows, oxygen/carbon dioxide ratios, soil retention, and water quality.