After the deluge: the changing worldview.

• Author: Durning, Alan Thein
• Position: Containing the effects of the Pacific Northwest's 'extractive' industries

In the November/December WORLD*WATCH, Alan Durning described six waves of "extractive" industry that swept through the Pacific Northwest region of North America over the past two centuries. The Northwest's history, we noted, has been a microcosm of the world's. Those industries brought great short-term wealth to the region's human populations, but the cost of that wealth was a dangerous drawing-down of the region's natural capital. The fur trade brought profits to colonial traders and luxury to European aristocrats, but it decimated populations of mammals in the Columbia River basin. Similar patterns followed with the industries of high-volume salmon fishing, irrigation-intensive farming, industrial logging, hydroelectric power, and mining.

Those industries aren't inherently destructive, of course; but the enormous scale on which they were practiced couldn't be sustained without courting calamity. When the Chinook Indians extracted small quantities of fish, furs, or wood for the sustenance of small, stable communities, natural balances were sustained. But when the human population surged along with the quantity of resources consumed by each person, the demand for products grew exponentially and the natural balances crashed. It is these two forces - population growth and consumption - that are the "horses pulling the Northwest economy off the track of sustainability," says Durning.

How to rein in these horses? While stabilizing population growth is essential and has become an overriding concern in most regions, Durning argues that the goal of cutting excess consumption is equally essential. In the following sequel to his account of the Six Waves, Durning offers a strategy for achieving that goal. This strategy requires two key changes: first, to reform the prices of natural resources and the products made from them (prices that are now fundamentally dishonest because they avoid covering many of the real costs of production); and second, to reform the dominant "world view" that drives modern economies - a view that subordinates the natures and needs of local communities to abstract "national" and "global" economic demands such as the demand for incessant economic "growth." The two changes are connected, of course, since that demand for unfettered growth is one of the reasons prices have become so dishonest in the first place; it's easier to show profits when a lot of the true costs are not paid.

In his discussion of prices, Durning begins by relating a conversation he had with Carolyn Alkire, a resource economist for the Wilderness Society, who came to the Yakima Basin of the Cascade Mountains to assess the condition of one of the region's chief natural assets - its salmon.

- The Editors

Prices That Don't Lie

Wild salmon are natural capital," says Carolyn, sitting on a rock beside Lake Keechelus.

"They're just like financial capital or physical capital. The fish that aren't harvested or killed go off and reproduce and produce new wild salmon in the same way that if you have stocks, you get dividends. In the case of wild salmon, however, we have dipped into our capital; we have harvested and killed many more fish than we should have to maintain a constant stock."

"A wild chinook salmon in the Columbia basin is natural capital worth $2,148. A wild coho is worth $488. But on the market, they go for $49 and $10 respectively."

"As natural capital, you are looking at each fish as what the potential earning value is," she explains: how much income a fish's offspring would provide over the next century if people allowed the fish to spawn rather than killing it with cattle grazing, clear cuts, fishing nets, hydroelectric dams, irrigation...