摘要：The Forest Service of the United States' Department of Agriculture has recently adopted anew philosophy for managing its lands. One way to characterize the goal of this philosophy,Ecosystem Management (EM), is that it seeks to maximize the value of multiple forest resourcesover time, subject to the constraints of achieving given levels of ecosystem health and quality. Swallow (1996) has summarized the economic issues that EM raises. Despite his and others'characterization of EM as ". . . one of the vaguest ideas or mandates of the decade," he hasidentified several contributions that economists can make. Foremost among these is identifyingand quantifying unavoidable tradeoffs that the application of EM would entail.
