13) Public managers and environmental planners must engage the public even when they know the public's knowledge is limited about the science of an environmental issue. No one knows everything about everything. If we as public managers start to take it upon ourselves to make decisions because we perceive that the public is not knowledgeable, we are not much better than a monarchial government handing down decisions without representative discussion. The people deserve the right to be educated and understand an issue, then have an opportunity to speak out about it. To teach the public, an agency could hold public seminars, offer open meetings and distribute pamphlets and the like to educate the public. Then in later stages, hold stakeholder meetings where the public can come and listen in an open forum to the opinions of environmental groups and the regulated community. These options are critical to assisting the public to understand critical issues in environmental science which may be unknown to the average citizen.
14) Contingent Valuation ("CV") could be used when 1) a company damages the wildlife and ocean with an oil spill similar to the Exxon Valdez. or 2) When a company's toxic waste destroys wildlife, rivers and plant life. CV would be appropriate in both these cases because sometimes simply assessing the cost of clean up is not costly enough to the polluter to make an impression upon them that nature holds a higher value than simple clean up. In other words, sometimes you have to hit the deep pocket hard with punitive damages to discourage this kind of behavior from happening again. The punitive nature of the CV will make the company want to take greater safeguards and possibly improve practices to avoid such damages in the future.
15) CV could not be effectively used when 1) a person burns down part of a forest with a campfire or 2) a person damages a natural spring with dumping their discarded oil from a car there. While I think there should be fines and some sort of punishment that follows such careless acts, I don't think it warrants CV assessments. Generally individuals that find themselves in these kind of scenarios meant no harm, are not profiting from the destruction and the assessment of CV is not going to be a deterrent but could create a hardship which may create some unintended consequence, like loss of employment, loss of home because of the cost of the assessment, etc.
I agree with you. I especially like your examples of when not to use CV. I think it is important to note that any environmental "issue" which causes an impact to the public’s health and safety should be used as CV. In those instances it is important for the persons responsible to be held accountable to discourage the mistake from happening again.
ReplyDeleteI really liked your examples for when to use CV and when not to use CV...they were very easy to understand and I completely agree with you!
I wonder if anyone will say you shouldn't engage the public in environmental issues???? I'd be interested to know why they think that, because (so far) it seems like everyone is in agreement that the public should be engaged. It would also be interesting to see at what point in the bureaucratic process the willingness to engage the public is slowed down.
Would you use CV if a person intentionally set a forest fire? How about if they negligently left a campfire unattended or if they threw a burning cigarette from a car? Human caused forest fires are seldom true accidents. There is usually a negligence factor.
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