In 1934, Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds became famous for a reason: little arrows. These marks on his stylized paintings of warblers, ducks, and other hard-to-identify feathered critters help bewildered birdwatchers know what to look for. In other words, instead of giving you every detail, the book highlights what’s important.

The modern field guide was born, and now amateur naturalists and professional conservationists alike are familiar with pocket-sized guides that quickly help them make sense of what they’re seeing, whether it’s birds, butterflies, tropical fish, or economics. Wait, did you say…economics?

Taylor Ricketts points to a bookshelf behind his desk. “I have 25 field guides, and none of them are about economics,” says the UVM conservation biologist who directs the University of Vermont's Gund Institute for Ecological Economics. “Economics is just as important to conservation as knowing warblers from finches.” But many conservationists treat economics like a tiger with rabies.

Which is why Ricketts joined forces with Brendan Fisher, an economist at UVM's Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, and Robin Naidoo, a World Wildlife Fund conservation scientist, to write A Field Guide to Economics for Conservationists (Roberts & Company, 2015, $45).  At 208 pages and 5x7 inches it will fit easily in a backpack, and sends a different market signal, so to speak, than the traditional economics textbook.

Basics and beards

 “The forces that have caused conservation problems are economic ones — and it's going to be economic forces that get us out,” Ricketts says. “But most conservationists do not have a firm grasp of economic principles that matter.”

In truth, much of the Dismal Science is dismally obscure.  “So this book targets what conservationists need to know — and not what they don't need to know,” Ricketts says. Chapters draw on the direct experience of conservation practitioners — from the coast of Ghana to Canadian wilderness parks — to explain bedrock aspects of traditional microeconomics: opportunity costs, supply and demand, markets and market failures, price incentives, ecosystem services, institutions and regulations — and how these can interact in complex landscapes with multiple goals.

It’s also a funny book — not the usual argot of economists. Sure, you’ll find sentences that might terrify anyone who doesn’t have a PhD in economics, like “the early theoretical foundation for CBA comes from the economic concept of Pareto efficiency.” But the next sentence makes you reconsider your decision to stuff the book into the woodstove: “this idea is named after Vilfredo Pareto, probably the most famous economist with a rhyming name, and who like other famous economists (think Marx) had a great beard.”

Coffee with tigers

The book also involves beer, coffee and the imaginary land called Arden. The authors crack jokes about their competing preferences for Budweiser vs. Guinness, and cheap joe vs. $5 pumpkin-mocha macchiatos — to explain utility, consumer choice and demand curves. Arden begins as a highly simplified landscape with three parcels owned by a farmer named Isabella and three by a bushmeat hunter, Xavi.  As the chapters progress, watersheds and surrounding forests are added, new concepts are introduced — like pollination services and revealed preferences — while Isabella and Xavi’s economic situations are analyzed. The scenario builds in complexity until, indeed, a tiger appears.

The final chapter “Scaling Up and Getting Real,” explores the demand for tiger body parts, the demand for living tigers, and the costs and benefits of tigers to Isabella and Xavi — and what economic forces, beyond the ardent hopes of animal lovers, might allow Arden’s “apex predator” to be protected in a land that is also being used for growing coffee.

“We care deeply about conservation outcomes on the ground, and we hope the book helps people get there,” Fisher says, over a modestly priced coffee at UVM's Davis Center. “It's not about getting better at tracking endangered tigers, for instance; it's about understanding what is driving the fragility of the landscape in the first place.”