Jon Lovett is an internationally recognized expert on Natural Resource Management and professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Twente in Holland. Invited to Jalisco by his Ph.D. student, Arturo Balderes Torres, Lovett has spent the last few weeks studying the Primavera Forest and culminated his visit with a talk at the headquarters of the Mexican Association of Forest Professionals in Guadalajara.
In an exclusive interview with the Reporter, Lovett discussed the relationship between the city and the woods.
“I think this situation can best be understood by applying something called Coasian Bargaining,” he began. “This was developed in the 1960’s by a man called Ron Coase, a British-born economist. He wrote a paper called ‘The Problem of Social Cost,’ which won him the Nobel Prize. Coase said that whenever you find a person living in one place who affects somebody in another place, you have a social cost, a price that must be paid.”
In his paper, Coase gives the example of a doctor living close to a candy factory. The factory produces considerable noise while the doctor next door needs quiet so he can see his patients. Coase discusses the process of possible reconciliation between the two.
“They could resort to courts and the law,” said Lovett, “but that involves a lot of expense and is economically inefficient and if one side comes out better off, the other side ends up worse off.”
Lovett suggested that a far more efficient way of settling the dispute is Coasian Bargaining. In the case of Guadalajara and the forest, he points out that Bosque La Primavera produces goods and services that are of benefit to the big city. It absorbs carbon dioxide and reduces the pollution of the city’s energy emissions. It’s also the source of several rivers, which fill three dams and supply water to places like Colomos Park in Zapopan. On top of that, the park doubles as a recreational area, sports facility and even a spa.
Coasian Bargaining, said Lovett, should be initiated between citizens and industry in Guadalajara and the management of La Primavera. “How much are the people of Guadalajara willing to pay for the provision of these environmental goods and services?” he asked.
“These days it’s easiest to focus on carbon because it’s a global good, and a focal point of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change. My student Arturo Balderes is looking not only at the willingness of the people of Guadalajara to offer payment for the forest’s services, but also the willingness of the landowners in the forest to accept payment. We want to link the producers of natural goods with the consumers and establish economic efficiency, moving closer to what’s called urban metabolism. We need to look at the city as a living organism with wants and needs, inputs and outputs. If you start thinking of the city as that kind of integrated whole, then you become much more aware of what you need to do in terms of planning and organizing.”
Developing the concept of the city as a metabolism, Lovett referred to an ever more common problem in and around Guadalajara: highways and boulevards filled with barely moving traffic.
“You could say the organism’s arteries are clogged, and if you think about the people sitting in those unmoving cars, they are like the cells of the organism: they can’t move around and do their job. If they’re stuck in a traffic jam for four hours and can’t get to their offices, in terms of economic productivity, the cell is not doing its function within the body as a whole. If they were red and white blood cells, they would be depriving the body of oxygen, of the ability to heal itself, because the arteries are blocked.
“If you think of the city as a whole you can remedy this by establishing either institutional arrangements or infrastructure to unblock the arteries. If you do this, you get all sorts of additional economic productivity and benefits going on, leaving the organism much better. So, what we are doing with La Primavera is just a small part of something which could potentially grow into a much better way of managing Guadalajara as a whole.”
Lovett’s ideas may sound theoretical or abstract, but the theory is being turned into practice by Balderes, who is working with the Selva Negra Foundation, which finances and supports environmental projects.
Selva Negra was started by Guadalajara’s Grammy-winning pop-rock band Maná, whose members have tried to calculate just how much carbon they produce while flying around the world on tour. This they have converted into a sum of money which is now being used to finance one of the Forest Commission’s most urgent projects: to create corridors that will give the animals of Bosque La Primavera access to adjacent wildernesses. These corridors will be in the form of bridges and underpasses allowing animals to cross the four-lane highways which are slowly isolating the forest. Because the roads are outside the limits of the forest, Balderes and his team are working with landowners and ejidos in a practical demonstration of Coasian Bargaining.
In summary, Jon Lovett concluded: “We must think of the city and its surroundings as an integrated, living organism that we want to function well. We want the people living both in the city and in the country to be happy, content and economically productive.”