How To Charge Developers For The Environmental Destruction They Cause
(Page 3 of 3)
May/June 1971
By Robert W. Ramsey
Red Salmon Creek: As a landscape scape feature it is worth $100 a front foot, or a total of $250.000. Its flow of 10 cubic feet per second is worth about $12 per day, or $219,000 over the project life. Thus frontage and water together add $469,000 to the destruction value of the creek.
RELATED CONTENT
Birdlife: About 20.000 hunter days are supported from the Delta at $5.75 per hunter-day, or a total of $115,000. About 125,000 waterfowl use the flats as a flyway stop per year, about 75,000 of them new birds. If we consider these 75,000 as the annual crop log, per year after a superport is built, can compute the 50-year loss (at $5 per duck) ar
$18,750,000.
Combining all these anticipated losses due to development over the 50-year life of the project produces the total destruction payment due of $40,617,000.
How often do the promoters of large developments consider such losses? Hardly ever. It remains for landscape architects, conservationists, and all others dedicated to sound ecosystem preservation to do their studies on their own time, figure the losses as accurately as possible, and thereby put these valuable resources beyond the reach of development, hopefully.
In the long run, this will help establish an accurate measure of value of landscape resources; it could produce large sums for public-landscape purchase and conservation; and divert the forces of necessary development into sites where they do the least harm to our future environment.
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 | 3 |
