Economic Feasibility of Conservation
Conservation is cheap. Most of us are accustomed to working on what are essentially shoestring budgets—on the order of $100,000, $10,000, or even $1,000 per year. When we hear of a million dollars as the cost of doing something, we tend to think of it as a lot of money. H. Boyd mentioned a situation on Baffin Island, where it would cost about a million dollars to dispose of mine tailings on shore instead of dumping them into the ocean under a fulmar colony. I do not think a million dollars is very much—certainly not in comparison with the cost of restoring a colony of half a million fulmars.
We heard this morning about the acquisition of Protection Island at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars. It was pointed out that it could have been acquired much more cheaply only a few years ago. Acquisition of habitat is cheap if we do it now compared with what it will cost in a few years or a few decades. Management is cheap. None of us gets paid very much, but each of us could manage several colonies with a couple of students to help us. Wardens are cheap. Surveys are cheap. The cost of conserving seabirds is minuscule in comparison with the amount spent on the exploitation of resources that threatens them, and it is minuscule in relation to the cost of restoring a seabird population after it has been depleted.
It is far cheaper to avoid oiling birds than it is to rehabilitate them and to reestablish them in breeding colonies in the wild. It costs nothing at all to award leases to companies that have a good safety record and to refuse leases to companies with bad records. It costs a little more to maintain good safety practices in drilling and transportation. It does cost more to transport oil in small, double-bottomed tankers with well-trained crews than to transport it in big ships flying flags of convenience, but the cost differential is very small compared to the value of the shipment.
In considering the economics of conservation, we have to weigh the costs of conservation against the value of the resource being exploited. Full-scale development of oil reserves on the Alaskan continental shelf would generate economic values on the order of ten billion dollars per year. Of this total, 0.1% would support a reasonably sized management program for the threatened resources. About 1% of the total, or 12¢ per barrel of oil, would not only support an ample management program but also permit management of many other coastal zone resources. Yet the experience of the last few years has shown that an increase in oil prices of 1% is barely noticed by consumers.
The point I am trying to make is that extracting oil carefully does not cost significantly more than extracting it carelessly. If we can solve the institutional problems—and I do not underestimate the difficulty of doing so—we are not talking about an irrational use of resources. Conservation is feasible; it is worthwhile; it is not expensive; and there is a public demand for it.
Conclusions
Practical conservation is an adaptive process. It is not at present a process that is firmly based in ecological theory. It is one in which we have to start by doing something, see whether it works, and then change our program in accordance with our early experience. I do not believe that we can wait for detailed knowledge of population sizes, or ecology, or demography, or trophic importance, or any other biological attribute of these birds before we start conservation and management. As scientists we do, of course, find it interesting and important to study these things. We should do so; we need to do so; but we should not use our ignorance of detail as an excuse for delaying action. If this seabird resource is worth conserving, we should start now.
Summary
The marine birds of the northern North Pacific Ocean, Bering Sea, and adjacent seas constitute one of the great neglected biological resources of the world.