0.14 Related issues in sustainable development and the environment  (Page 4/7)

Consider the Aral Sea. The massive wastage of this resource resulting from this exercise in Soviet Central Planning. The waters of the Aral Sea were used to irrigate cotton crops in arid areas has sharply reduced the area of this freshwater body, once larger than West Virginia, over the past five decades. The water was provided to cotton farms at near zero costs. The economic costs of the resultant steep loss of biological productivity of the sea has included the disappearance both of the commercial fish catch as well as 60,000 jobs in the area. Environmental consequences have included powerful dust storms arising from overdried areas of land surface, as well as distinct alterations in temperature and moisture conditions over a wide area adjacent to the area. For the future, the sea could dry to a residual brine lake . Sadly, virtually none of the dozen or so schemes discussed in publications by western and Soviet scientist to preserve the Aral Sea make any mention of the role that higher prices for irrigation water might play in water conservation.

Both in case of publicly-owned rangelands in the U.S. and in that the Aral Sea, higher prices for grazing fees and water respectively could have forestalled much of the environmental damages that have already occurred.

These examples suggest that before we mount a search for a different kind of economics to deal with ecological questions in their ethical setting, it behooves us to consider whether we are properly using the economics we already have. In turn, this requires efforts to mend the broken circle between economics, ecology and ethics. The first step calls for substitutions of good economics for the not-so-good economics that have formed the basis for much of the policies that have encouraged environmental degradation.

We illustrate by turning once again to the problem of tropical deforestation.

Green backfires

Things are not always what they seem to be in economics. See Robert Repetto and Malcolm Gillis, Public Policies and the Misuse of Forest Resources , Cambridge University Press, 1988.

We have reviewed policies toward forestry endownment that have had unintended destructive effects. If one examines carefully at government policies worldwide, one would be shocked at how many others have large unintended effects. And the unintended effects are almost never positive. But even worse there are numerous examples of policies affecting the environment that not only have unintended effects, but absolutely perverse effects.

That is, the policies intended to achieve a good end actually make the problem worse . In this volume, we label such policies as “Green Backfires”. These are policies that purport to protect the environment by either reducing CO ² emissions or by attaining some other environmental goal.

The first two Green Backfires are subsidies intended to curb CO ² emissions to reduce global warming or to protect forests. These are indirect subsidies, because they do not involve direct government spending. Rather the subsidies result from other incentives contained in the policies.