ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to develop a conceptual view of the choice process central to the way in which humans interact with the natural environment. It focuses on particular resource-human interactions. The economic problem becomes one of weighing the benefits and costs of certain levels of discharge into the natural environment. Resource management is the manipulation of the ecosystem via control centers such that a certain output bundle is achieved. The highest and most abstract level is concerned with matters of ultimate social control and the means for arbitrating disputes among competing claimants. A system of control that had operated with a modest degree of "success" over a very long period of time in the most fragile of ecosystems was broken by colonialism and external markets. In conclusion, a thoroughgoing economic perspective on man and the ecosystem would, of necessity, focus on several levels of institutional arrangements.
