ABSTRACT
The origin of this volume dates to 1987, when V. Kerry Smith, one of its editors and authors, was serving on an advisory panel for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's assessment of the damages to New Bedford harbor, Massachusetts, caused by releases of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Also on the panel were Gardner M. Brown, Jr., and A. Myrick Freeman III, authors of other chapters in this volume. This assessment was part of the first federal suit brought for natural resource damages under Superfund, known formally as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) of 1980. The research team conducting that assessment included Kenneth E. McConnell and Robert Mendelsohn, also among our authors. At about the same time, under state laws Colorado was pursuing a natural resource damage case for injuries to land and to surface and ground waters from mining waste. Lawyers for the defendant in that case organized a simulated trial, allowing their experts and Kerry Smith to present each side's assessment of the natural resource damages. Both the Massachusetts and Colorado activities served to highlight important research issues that were emerging from the interactions among the intentions of the legislation establishing natural resource damage liability, their realization through the rulemaking and litigation processes, and the corresponding demands imposed on natural science and economics. While the questions being raised appeared to be central to economic analyses of the nonmarketed services of natural assets, we did not imagine that damage assessment would emerge five years later as a major influence on economic research associated with the nonmarket valuation of environmental resources.
