Valuing Nature

. During the 1970s, Congress created a new statutory foundation for public land management by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. The stated goal was to establish a rational administrative process for resolving the demands of competing users. Economists argued that public land decisions therefore must be made through comprehensive application of benefit‐cost and other economic methods. The hopes to ground public land management in economic analysis, however, were not realized. It would have required a radical change in the politics of the public lands, including a large loss of influence among historically dominant groups, and there was no powerful constituency to make that happen. By the 1980s, moreover, the environmental movement was promoting ecosystem management as a replacement for traditional multiple‐use management. In place of economic benefits, ecosystem management substituted biological goals that could not effectively be captured by economic methods. This article offers a case study of the failure of professional economic analysis to have much impact in many real‐world government settings.