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Pity the sand skink. The florida home of this small lizard has been rapidly paved over or developed; its numbers are dwindling and 12 years ago it was placed on a list of endangered species.
But perhaps worse, from the sand skink's perspective, is its relative ranking in a more subjective popularity contest. The skink is not large, furry, or feathered--characteristics of the endangered species that seem to attract most of the attention and funding from government agencies and conservationists, according to Andrew Metrick, Ph.D. '94, associate professor of economics, and Monrad professor of economics Martin Weitzman. Their research shows that even though the sand skink and such unfortunate relations as the Texas blind salamander and the Alabama cave fish face extinction, they do not benefit from the expensive recovery programs lavished on less endangered but more attractive birds and mammals.
Metrick and Weitzman have examined how society grapples with what they call the "Noah's Ark problem": how to decide which creatures to save and which to let sink in the flood of extinctions now sweeping the planet. Using a simple statistical analysis, the economists found that the government's spending choices apparently are not driven by the hard data of diversity loss. Taxpayers are willing to spend tens of millions of dollars to save "charismatic megafauna": large animals with (in the popular mind, at least) engaging "personalities"--such as the bald eagle, gray wolf, and other poster children of endangered-species recovery programs. We seem to like saving species that remind us of ourselves.
For example, state and local governments spent $12.6 million from 1989 to 1991 to help the grizzly bear recover in several western states. Yet the species overall is in little danger of going extinct, since viable populations exist in Alaska and Canada. Meanwhile, the sand skink--a genetically distinct representative of an entire genus that is truly in danger of vanishing--had less than $10,000 spent on its behalf.
"What pops out is that we're not paying enough attention to unique or truly endangered species," says Metrick. "My interest in this was to say, 'Let's make sure this is what we want to do.'"
The earth is now undergoing what biologists call the sixth wave of mass extinction, this one caused by human activity. (The first five waves occurred in prehistoric epochs and were triggered by climatic upheavals or cataclysmic events like asteroids hitting the earth.) Yet Weitzman discovered that there were no reliable measurements of biological diversity, and no accurate way to assess whether government spending was working to save the most endangered species.
Weitzman and Metrick tried to rank relative "endangerment" by looking at whether a threatened species represents a unique piece of the planetary gene pool, or is a subspecies or geographically separate population of creatures that are relatively safe. The Northern spotted owl, whose dwindling numbers led to controls on logging in the Pacific Northwest, attracted $26.4 million in government assistance over a three-year period. Yet it is a subspecies whose near-twins are in little danger of extinction. "The evidence suggests that our actual behavior may not reflect a reasoned cost-benefit calculation," the economists wrote in the Journal of Economic Perspectives a year ago. "If this is true, then we should fix it. If it is not, then we should be honest about our desire to have 'charismatic megafauna' effects dominate our decisions."
Weitzman says that even in the highly charged field of health economics, researchers have come up with a common currency--the cost of lives saved--to evaluate spending decisions. He thinks biologists and economists need to devise a similar measurement to judge the effectiveness of endangered species programs. "That's a most pertinent question," he argues. "No one can say what is the unit by which these things are measured. It means we don't know how to judge whether the policies are good or bad, a waste of money or a very effective use of it."
~ John Dillon