Volume 2, number 8, August 2000 For What It's Worth The letter that made it all seem clear was yet another complaint about the powerline route across the Tanana Flats. The complainants make up a determined group; I share their view (or, rather, I share what they’d like not to have in their view), have written my own protests, voted in the proper polls, and so forth, but never had much hope that the line would take any route but the one chosen. I knew it was a done deal, but didn’t know why I was so sure. Then, right there in the News-Minus, was the revelatory phrase: Doesn’t Golden Valley realize, said the letter, that the view across the flats is a priceless asset for Fairbanks and all of the Interior? Sure it is, I said to myself. Absolutely priceless. Which means you can’t put a dollar value on it. Which means GVEA can judge it to be worthless. No, really, this isn’t the voice of cynicism you’re hearing. It’s flat acknowledgment of reality. This is how our society judges value: What is that worth in dollars? Consider a hypothetical horror story: Your dog Fido, a Heinz-57 mutt rescued from the pound, runs off with the neighbor’s purebred malemute Spot to play doggie games on the Richardson Highway, where they are turned into road pizza by an inattentive driver from Des Moines in a forty-foot Winnebago. Now, never mind that Fido is a much-loved family member whose loss will leave your little girl weeping into her pillow for months of nights to come, while Spot was just another fluffy face in the dog yard soon to be forgotten—the Des Moines driver will be laying greenbacks on your neighbor as fast as his insurance company can print them. Spot had a dollar value; other malemute breeders could pretty well put a price on her. Fido was priceless, and so his assigned dollar value would be simply the pound’s adoption fee, if that. It isn’t fair, but it’s what the global society has decided. Money is what truly matters. We may not worship Mammon, but we do play by His rules. Once upon a time, I had a peculiar task: establish the value of an undersea meadow, a seagrass bed lying off one of the Middle Atlantic states. Right away, I started in with the agency person who’d given me the assignment, talking about how priceless all underwater habitats were—Don’t tell me that, he said. What you have to do is put a price on it. Give me the cost, in dollars, that a developer would have to pony up if he dredged out that seagrass bed. Good grief. Well, the task proved to be possible, sort of. The process was pretty much as described in that old free-verse aphorism that begins, "For want of a nail, the shoe was lost," and goes on through a lost horse, knight, battle, war, kingdom. If the seagrass was lost, then so was the fish that lived there, which was the most popular species with local and visiting sportfishermen; so with the seagrass also would go the cash for fishing licenses, motel room and charter boat rentals, six-pack sales, and so forth. Furthermore, the underwater weeds protected the shore from storm-wave erosion; it would take an expensive (and less effective) seawall to save the beach if the seagrass went. Blue crab, an expensive edible, needed the seagrasses for food and shelter; to replace them on local menus, fresh crab would have to be shipped in from elsewhere. All these items could be quantified, associated convincingly enough with lots of real dollars. But how could that sort of equivalent-value exercise be applied to the Tanana Flats? Increased access to moose, for example, might lead to more dollars dumped into the local economy, not fewer. Tourists might not have as high-quality an experience—they can’t imagine they’re seeing capital-W Wilderness when power towers ornamented with red balls on swooping cables march across the landscape—but they’d probably come anyhow. Screwing up a landscape isn’t as easy to quantify as destroying one. I propose that we who loathe the planned powerline route turn to those people who brought us the multimillion-dollar price on serving a cup of coffee ten degrees too hot: liability lawyers. These people have vast collective experience on putting dollar values on the unpriced and ineffable. We could start with mental suffering. I propose further that we look into the cost of imposed ugliness—for example, settlements made to children scarred in automobile accidents or young people disfigured beyond the reach of plastic surgery by malicious action. (I emphasize youthful victims here because, after all, in terms of landscape, the Flats has a long life yet to go—certainly centuries, and probably as long as the human species itself). Surely, liability lawyers could put a price on scarring the beautiful face of the Flats. It’s the cost Golden Valley and the state should expect to pay for pretending that the priceless really is the same as the worthless. | ||
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