Last June Resources for the Future held a small working conference under the leadership of Allen V. Kneese and Blair T. Bower, who are, respectively, director and associate director of RFF's Quality of the Environment program. The emphasis was on social science theory and method, not because there is not still much to be learned about physical causes and counter-measures, but because of the need for a whole new way of looking at pollution problems across the board. As Kneese and Bower point out, traditional economic theory of natural resource use and allocation has little relation to many of the most pressing problems of environmental quality.
The air mantle, watercourses and oceans, landscapes, climate, and other common property resources, they point out, are becoming increasingly scarce and valuable; private property and market exchange have little applicability to their allocation, development, and conservation. "Man is not only overusing and missing these resources, but is actually starting to affect the basic supply of some of them—for example, through inadvertent modification of weather, climate, and biota. Our understanding of these resources, and of the problems of management, analytical methods, policy, and institution-building which they present, is primitive."
Brief quotations from a few of the conference participants follow. All the papers are being revised for later publication.
The ancient legal notion that the ambient air is res nullius, the property of no one, is detrimental to rational policy making. So one job that lawyers have is to find a substitute concept. One effort in this direction has been to try to define resources like air as a commodity that is held in trust for the benefit of the entire community of citizens. If the citizenry is the beneficiary of the trust, its representatives should have the right to protect the values in air for themselves and their fellows. And government, which stands in the position of trustee to implement the trust for the public benefit, has an obligation to prevent uses of the air which impair the interests of the beneficiaries.
Put in concrete terms, this approach suggests that there is someone who can speak for the interest ordinarily represented by a property owner; and access to the "property" can in practice be controlled by the issuance of court orders enjoining the discharge of deleterious substances into the air. Thus, by building a legal construct, such as public trust doctrine, we can provide a workable substitute for market forces. Judicial protection of resource values against destruction or impairment imposes a price on resources such as the ambient air, usually in the form of a requirement that a nondestructive alternative be adopted. By having a doctrine which is suggestive of traditional property law approaches, we encourage courts to implement for the benefit of the general public (the beneficiaries of the trust) the standard legal principle, sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas—use your own property in such a manner as not to injure that of another.—Joseph L. Sax, University of Michigan.
The present governmental structure which relates to environmental quality, particularly to air and water quality, bears very little relationship to representative government, the party system, or to social choices. In fact, most of the choices made consciously by governments are either made by technicians who try to "balance" the interests of the affected parties or by a small group of politicians who hide their choices behind a "technical" but meaningless benefit-cost analysis. We thus have the worst of both worlds—technical analysis that is debased by political judgments and by political deals in which only a small number, and perhaps the wrong people, may play.
In the past, technical, administrative, and executive agencies, using the devices of the public hearing and citizen or special interest advisory committees, may have been sufficient for the problems. We may be moving now to a time when representative governments, using technical and administrative advisory committees, are needed. For when true social choices are at stake, nothing less than representative governments making these choices will suffice. The spectacle of executive personnel attempting to assess the public interest through public hearings or to divine appropriate actions through committees "representing" all interests from housewives to steel mills is an outrage in the pure sense—it does violence to our system of government. In a technical sense it does not aggregate individual preferences correctly into social choices.—Edwin T. Haefele, Resources for the Future.
The processes of extraction and pollution are common characteristics of any economy, from Robinson Crusoe's upward. They are not separable entities to be studied in isolation without regard to their physical and biological interdependencies unless the economy resides in an open resource system characterized by limitless natural resources, including airsheds and algae sinks. In fact, the rational utilization of the natural environment by man requires careful planning of rates of resource extraction and pollutant emissions, where one rate is highly dependent on the other. In a growing economy, recycling, savings rates, and rates of technical or physical obsolescence are intimately connected to resource use and residuals flows, and thus cumulative short-term government policies may have a long-term impact on the environment.—Ralph d'Arge, University of California, Riverside.
A version of this article appeared in print in the September 1970 issue of Resources magazine.
