Citation:

Campbell, Dan, C. Wigand, AND N. Schuetz. The Real Wealth Purchased in a Fish Dinner. In Proceedings, Emergy Synthesis 8, Proceedings of the 8th Biennial Emergy Conference, Gainesville, FL, January 15 - 18, 2014. Center for Environmental Policy, University of Florida, Gainsville, FL, 61-81, (2015).

Impact/Purpose:

The purpose of this paper was to give a practical example of an emergy evaluation that would connect with everyday people on a practical level. We evaluated the surplus value due to the work of the environment received by consumers who purchased a fish dinner purchased in a restaurant located in Newport RI. We relate this new measure of environmental value to economic measures and to existing emergy indices.

Description:

There is a growing realization within the scientific community and in the public at large that the environment makes real contributions to wealth that are not adequately valued by markets. In addition, almost everyone recognizes when they are getting a “good deal” on a purchase. In some people,this perception may be illicited by the fact that there is a surplus of real wealth (emergy) obtained in the consumption of an item. In other words, the real wealth in the item was purchased at a price less than that which the consumer would have paid, if the free work of nature had been included in the price. We hypothesize that there is “surplus value” in products taken from the environment and that it can be quantified through emergy accounting. Emergy quantifies real wealth or the amount of quality-adjusted work that is required to create an item and that the item can do when it is used for its intended purpose. Emergy evaluation allows us to attribute a fair and objective value to both the work of the environment and the work of people. In this study, we used emergy evaluation to determine the real wealth in Rhode Island (RI) fishery and farm products that might be used by restaurateurs in creating a fish dinner of local ingredients. The final estimate of the real wealth in the fish dinner was expressed in emdollars (Em$), a combined emergy-money unit that represents value based on distributing the buying power (money flow) in an economy in proportion to the emergy flows supporting that economy. Our study includes emergy evaluations of the State of RI, the Narragansett Bay (NB) and RI Sound, the winter flounder fishery in RI during the 1970s and 1980s, a RI organic farm, and a restaurant located in Newport, RI. The emergy of the portions of fish and vegetables served with a fish dinner at the restaurant was compared with the emergy that could be purchased by spending the dollar cost of the dinner on an average product in the RI and in the national economies. The difference shows the additional real wealth or emergy “surplus value” purchased by the consumer in buying a RI fish dinner. For example, tourists dining at the restaurant receive 1.54 times the real wealth (Em$26.17) in purchasing the fish dinner compared to the real wealth that they could purchase by spending the $16.95 cost of the fish dinner on a product for which the emergy purchased reflects the average U.S. emergy to money ratio. In this study, we demonstrate that emergy evaluation can be used as a practical method for quantifying the work contributions of the environment and for revealing the surplus emergy in farm and fishery products.

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