Note that the data published in the 2002 State of the Nation’s Ecosystems Report as well as the 2003 and 2005 Web-Only Updates have been superseded by the 2008 Report and thus should be used with caution. For the most recent data, purchase the 2008 Report from Island Press.

A Clear Need

Americans’ support for sound environmental policy is strong, nonpartisan, and consistent,¹ reflecting recognition of the high cost—both monetary and otherwise—of a damaged environment. But the costs of ensuring a clean, safe, and healthy environment are also significant. In 1994, the last year for which government estimates are available, the United States spent more than $120 billion on pollution abatement and control—nearly 2% of the nation’s gross domestic product²—and this amount is only a part of the total cost of ensuring a clean, healthy, and vibrant environment.³

Each year, the federal government alone spends more than $600 million collecting environmental data and, through regulatory requirements, imposes additional costs on the private sector, for monitoring of emissions and effluents.⁴ State and local government and environmental organizations also devote considerable resources to environmental monitoring, as does the private sector, above and beyond what is required for simple compliance. These efforts, reported in a host of individual documents and Web sites, provide crucial information without which this project would not have been possible. They do not, however, provide the high-level, comprehensive account on the state of the nation’s ecosystems that is the goal of this project.

Given the importance and cost of environmental protection, it is hardly surprising that the need for a periodic report on “how we are doing” in our environmental management efforts has been recognized for at least three decades. In 1970, the Council on Environmental Quality noted in its first annual report to Congress that the efforts of that time did “not provide the type of information or coverage necessary to evaluate the condition of the Nation’s environment or to chart changes in its quality and trace their causes.”⁵ Since then, virtually every comprehensive study of national environmental protection has called for more coherent and comprehensive information on the state of our environment. The National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Public Administration are among the many organizations that have recognized this need.⁶

But despite some excellent syntheses of data on specific problems and places, there is no periodic, comprehensive, and reliable compilation of essential information about the overall state of the nation’s environment.⁷ As a result, policymakers and other stakeholders are swamped by increasing volumes of data that nonetheless seem to neglect important issues. Society all too often ends up arguing not about the issues, but about the relevance and validity of the data on which the prospects for a substantive policy debate depend.

For a nation deeply committed to protecting the environment, this is an unacceptable state of affairs. It is as though we would seek to develop sound economic policy without having reliable measures of the nation’s GDP, unemployment, or inflation rate, relying instead on idiosyncratic reports from individual firms, sectors, unions, and local chambers of commerce. We cannot know whether our current environmental policies and practices are sound, and we cannot make new policy with confidence, without a similar set of generally accepted measures of fundamental properties of the environment.