Abstract:
An important subset of natural resource management addresses preserving and/or harvesting biological resources.
Examples are policies that derive from the Endangered Species Act including habitat conservation plans, the U.S. Forest Service’s
logging practices, and fishery management councils’ decisions regarding catches. To understand the effectiveness of management
policies requires an understanding of the interactions between the natural world and the human economy, because economies and
ecosystems are inextricably linked. Common economic variables such as incomes and prices affect and are affected by common
ecosystem variables such as resiliency and species populations. In spite of the linkages between the two systems, models of
economies and ecosystems usually disregard one another.
