How Do You Value National Parks?

What value do you place on watching the surf flip over seashells as it runs up the beach at Cape Lookout National Seashore, or a pine marten peering at you from behind the trunk of a Ponderosa pine in Yosemite National Park, or being awestruck as an osprey plucks a fat trout out of Lake McDonald at Glacier National Park?

Can you place a dollar value on those scenes from the National Park System? Emotionally, it's probably not too difficult. But can you say you would pay $5 or $100 or $1,000 to protect those views?

A recent study that examined the costs and benefits of off-road vehicle travel restrictions at Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina tried to put a dollars-and-cents figure on both the values of nature and the values of ORVing at the seashore. The bottom line, the researchers concluded, was that the benefits of managing the seashore to protect endangered shorebirds and threatened sea turtles were much higher than the costs resulting from restrictions that govern where ORVs can travel.

Why? Because Cape Hatteras doesn't hold a monopoly on surf fishing.

The research was based on previous studies, in 1993 and 2012, conducted in North Carolina that found a willingness to pay, per household, between $14 and $100 a year to preserve coastal biodiversity, e.g., sea turtle and piping plover habitat. And while restrictions on ORV travel at Cape Hatteras have perhaps carried some economic costs in terms of sending surfcasters to spots outside the seashore to pursue their hobby, society's desire to continue to see plovers, loggerhead turtles, and other marine species carried, in effect, a greater economic benefit.

Dollar-wise, the costs associated with the ORV restrictions at Cape Hatteras ran between $3 million and $12 million annually, while the benefits of preserving marine biodiversity were gauged (depending on whether you rely on the 1993 or 2012 study) to be between $13 million and $48 million a year.

The reason the relative costs of the ORV restrictions were low compared to the economic benefits of wildlife preservation, explained study co-author Steven Dundas during a phone conversation Friday, was that surfcasters could head elsewhere on the North Carolina or Virginia coasts to fish if their favorite spot at Cape Hatteras was closed.

"The anglers respond and adapt to these restrictions. Maybe their most preferred site is closed, but they can make that substitution to a nearby site that remains open," he said. "So, the value associated with that trip may be slightly diminished, because it's not their favorite choice, but they're not not going because of the restrictions. They're making those substitute site choices."

Those decisions can be seen playing out across our public landscape. While crowds are overrunning some national parks, some long-time park goers are going somewhere else because they see greater value in fleeing crowds in nature.

With that in mind, and the Cape Hatteras scenario, should public land agencies, regardless of the administration in charge in Washington, be required to study society's preferences regarding, say, drill pads vs. sage grouse, and then conduct a cost-benefit ratio to determine whether to drill or not? And stick to the outcome?

We've seen studies that showed strong majorities in favor of protecting Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante and other national monuments, yet the Trump administration decided otherwise. Should it have heeded public opinion? And what about the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska? Just the other day the Army Corps of Engineers said it had received Pebble Limited Partnership's revised mine proposal, and that an environmental impact statement will need to be completed. Should that EIS include a cost-benefits analysis similar to the one conducted on ORV use at Cape Hatteras?

Now, about that case study at Cape Hatteras; moving from the theoretical to the actual shows the two don't always coincide: ORV demand is up, as is visitation to the national seashore.

“It remains an increasingly, and I stress the word 'increasingly,' an increasingly popular activity," Cape Hatteras Superintendent David Hallac said Friday of ORV use. “No matter how matter you look at the detailed economic studies, what is noteworthy to me is we have tens of thousands of visitors and local visitors who are buying (ORV) permits.”

According to the superintendent, permit sales have gone from 27,154 in 2012, when the permit program began, to more than 39,000 last year.

Furthermore, he pointed out, "(A)llowing ORVs and protecting wildlife are not inconsistent. We would be managing for these species and providing for these protective areas around them even if there weren’t off-road vehicles. In all our vehicle-free areas we end up making large closure areas and buffer areas as we do in ORV areas" to separate pedestrians from bird and turtle nests.

Overall visitation reached 2.4 million in 2016, the highest in 13 years, said Superintendent Hallac. Last year's numbers, when they're confirmed, will be about the same or slightly higher, he predicted.

“I think our visitation this last November was the highest November we’ve had in 19 years. The last time we had this many visitors, or a higher number of visitors, was 1998. A very, very strong visitation pattern," he said.

And you can value that.