Table Of ContentWhen
Values
Conflict
Essays on
Environmental Analysis,
Discourse, and Decision
Published for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
a companion volume to When Values Conflict
Feiverson, H.A., F.W. Sinden, R.H. SocQloweds.
Boundaries of Analysis: An Inquiry Into the Tocks Island
Dam Controversy
When
Values
Conflict
Essays on Envi ron mental
Analysis, Discourse, and Decision
Edited by:
Laurence H. Tribe
Corinne S. Schelling
John Voss
Published for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Ballinger Publishing Company. Cambridge, Massachusetts
A Subsidiary of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.
til
Tlili book j, print,d on ,,,ydod papor.
"This book was prepared with the support of National Science
Foundation Grant No. ESR 72-03540. However, any opinions,
findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed herein are those
of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF."
Copyright © 1976 by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic mechanical photocopy, recording or otherwise,
without the prior written consent of the publisher.
International Standard Book Number: 0-88410-431-1
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-45448
Printed in the United States of America
When Values Conflict.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Environmental policy-United States-Addresses, essays, lectures.
2. Sbcialvalues-Addresses, essays, lectures.
HCllO.E5W5 333.7 75-45448
ISBN 0-88410-431-1
*
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Preface ix
Chapter One
Failures of Discourse: Obstacles to the
Integration of Environmental Values
into Natural Resource Policy 1
Robert H. Socolow
Chapter Two
The Tocks Island Dam Controvers'y 35
Irene Taviss Thomson
Chapter Three
Ways Not to Think About
Plastic Trees 61
Laurence H. Tribe
Chapter Four
The Rights of Nature 93
Charles Frankel
Chapter Five
Environmental Decision Making:
Analysis and Values 115
Harvey Brooks
Chapter Six
Policy Analysis as Heuristic Aid:
The Design of Means, Ends, and Institutions 137
Henry S. Rowen
Chapter Seven
An Afterword: Humane Values and
Environmental Decisions 153
Robert Dorfman
v
vi Contents
Index 175
About the Contributors 179
*
Acknowledgments
This book and the companion volume, Boundaries of
Analysis: An Inquiry into the Tocks Island Dam Contro
versy, are the products of a several-year study which the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences was able to carry out in
part because of a grant from the National Science Foundation, under
its Research Applied to National Needs (RANN) program. On behalf
of the Academy, we want in particular to express our gratitude to
Dr. Larry W. Tombaugh, Division of Advanced Environmental Re
search and Technology, NSF, whose broad experience in environ
mental problems, continuing interest in our project, and perceptive
criticisms of our efforts as they developed were major factors in
shaping this study.
We want also to express appreciation to the many people who par
ticipated at one stage or another in the series of meetings at which the
ideas for the essays in this volume and the companion volume germi
nated and gradually took shape. Although we cannot mention all of
them here, we must make an exception in the case of several who were
particularly helpful to the editors and authors. Special acknowledgment
is due to Bruce Ackerman, Raymond Bauer, Alvin Enthoven, Leo
Marx, Guy Pauker, Wallace Stegner, Lynn White, Jr., and Richard
Zeckhauser, each of whom in his own way made a unique
contribution to the contents of this and the companion volume.
And, as all of those involved in this study know, it was Murray
Gell-Mann of the California Institute of Technology who started us
on our way by asking some very difficult questions. Finally, had it
not been for the generosity of the Committees on Research Funds of
the American Academy we could not have accepted the challenge
that Professor Gell-Mann's questions posed and undertaken the
essential exploratory stages of this project to the point where a
coherent study plan emerged.
The Editors
vii
*
Preface
This collection of essays is an outgrowth of discussions
that began nearly five years ago. Although the formal pro
cess in which those discussions were embedded terminates
with the pUblication of this volume, concern over the issues raised
seems unlikely to end in the near future. Neither a reflection of
consensus nor even a representation of the individual authors' final
views, the essays collected here can be understood only as interim
statements of the conclusions each author has reached thus far with
respect to an elusive and enormously complex set of questions.
To define those questions properly is itself no mean task; if this
preface begins obliquely, it does so precisely because the questions
addressed by the volume it introduces are not easily formulated
perhaps the only conclusions to which every author represented here
could subscribe without reservation.
Our inquiry began in late 1970 with an initial question posed by
Murray Gell-Mann of the California Institute of Technology: If, as
then seemed likely, a new national environmental research institute
were to be established to provide analysis and guidance for policy
makers, how should it go about its work? By what methods, with
what institutional arrangements, and with what kinds of intellectual
resources might such an institute hope to perform its analyses with
adequate sensitivity to "fragile" values, such as those of preserving
wilderness and endangered species? How might such an institute then
hope to influence public decision making in directions consistent
with such sensitivity? Professor Gell-Mann asked the American
Academy of Arts and· Sciences to sponsor several exploratory
;x
x Preface
meetings to address these questions. The group organized by the
Academy included individuals from many intellectual traditions,
representing a range of disciplines from the natural and social
sciences to the humanities, each of which we felt might contribute
special insights into a complex problem.
What united the members of this initial planning group was not
simply a fascination with Gell-Mann's question and a sense of its
importance in dealing with a rapidly growing number of disputes at
the local, regional, and national level involving the environment;
there was also the recognition that the difficulty of dealing with
"fragile" values was critical for analysis and decision making in many
other areas of national policy, areas as diverse as highway safety and
medical ethics.
Quite early in our conversations, we came to realize that the
problem under discussion was at once conceptual and institutional:
the analytic techniques on which an environmental institute could
draw-like the legal, bureaucratic and political frameworks into
which its advice would have to fit - were likely to be biased against
the adequate representation of some sorts of interests, values, or
concerns, and in favor of others. Thus "hard" values, such as
short-term economic efficiency, would be likely to swamp "soft"
values, such as ecological balance, and even "softer" ones, such as the
love of natural beauty. Regretting that prospect, we tried both to
understand its causes and to project possible remedies-to discover
ways of doing, and of effectively implementing, what Gell-Mann
provocatively described as "systems analysis with heart."
As our sessions progressed, and as we exchanged memoranda on
the themes defined by our first discussions, our sense of the problem
itself underwent a subtle transformation. Some of us at first (and
later all of us) began to wonder just what were the "fragile" values
that we feared technological and economic. analysis and political
bargaining would dwarf. What, for example, was the common factor
among the following interests that made the values they represented
difficult to incorporate into traditional modes of analysis and
political decision: the preservation of a dying species of whale, the
love of wilderness and natural beauty in the northern Cascades, the
desire for privacy and retreat in the Maine woods, the maintenance
of ecological balance in the Everglades, the energy needs of future
generations, even the call of national pride in a monumental
engineering venture like the SST? Were such concerns being properly
addressed by techniques originally designed to evaluate water
quality, employment and recreation needs, or the need for mass
transportation? Were professionals originally trained to consider such
