ABSTRACT
It has been claimed that an economist is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Presumably, an economist would maintain that a commodity which has no price will therefore have no value. I cite this cynical observation not to be unkind to economists – who are only too aware of the difficulties involved in attempting to represent our intangible notion of value with the quantifiable measure of price – but to raise a fundamental environmental issue: how do we manage the exploitation of a natural resource which is “free”?
