In a final installment (for now) on Wantrup's work [prior posts], I bring your attention to his 1961 paper on water quality [pdf]. In it, he argues that the socially-optimal level of quality is unlikely to be reached when water is shared among multiple decision units and that quality interventions should be introduced before water is used, not after its discharged.
Perhaps his most interesting point, however, is his notion of a meaningful measure of water quality, i.e., can a fish live in it?*
fish life is a sensitive indicator for a wide spectrum of quality dimensions, the standards for which are not yet fully established. For example, the cumulative effect of certain pollutants on aquatic life is still uncertain.Bottom Line: Listen to Wantrup! Make sure that fish can live in the water you drink.
From the viewpoint of the economist, the minimum standard suggested here does not avoid all arbitrary elements, but it defines a point of the external cost function of pollution that is of great economic interest. External cost functions of pollution are conspicuously discontinuous. In other words, over a certain range of pollution, external costs are small. At a critical level of pollution, however, external costs become large.
...Furthermore, this minimum standard has economic relevance for other uses. Although it is too low for domestic, municipal, and some industrial uses, costs of special treatment for these uses are decreased because the supplying water resources are free of toxic and other substances that are no less harmful to fish than to humans.
* I learned about this while keeping a fish in Washington DC (a place not known for its water quality). The fish was dead within 10 hours of being put into a "nice fresh" tank of DC tap water.
5 comments:
A friend commented to me recently that the wealth generated by the agricultural sector is so much greater than that of salmon fishing and the other economically trivial concerns of environmentalists, that we should forget about the fish. What would Wantrup say to this?
I have no idea of what Wantrup would say, but your friend's logic sucks [...and the wealth generated by tap water (i.e., cities like Vegas) is much greater than ag, so let's forget about farmers?].
This is a good question -- worthy of a new post -- and my opinion will be there...
That's probably a decent indicator, but you need a more careful test than simply dropping fish in tapwater.
Chlorination has been shown (I think) to be relatively safe for drinking water (if the concentration of organics is low), but is bad for many fish.
You forgot to put chlorine remover in your fish tank water. The regular chlorine in most tap water will kill fish.
All the fish stores sell cholrine remover to fish owners.
I am sorry for your loss, I lost two Beta fish to North Pole,AK well water before resorting to bottled drinking water.
I am not sure on the economics but it seems that preserving fish habitat(riparian buffers, wetland preservation) would also preserve the ecosystem services the waterbody has to offer, like flood mitigation and filtering agricultural runoff.
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