eLearning

Scientific inquiry, at least in its ideal form, comes
from a community of scholars interacting with their
best arguments and evidence. Scientific consensus is
achieved not through an expression of willingness
to pay, but by an advancement of credible reasons
for changing beliefs. No one would argue that
science does this perfectly, or even uniformly well.
Science is prone to overconservatism and even to
fads and bandwagons. But likewise, no one argues
that science should retreat to a system of markets or
voting; rather, it is clear that more-or-less enlight-
ened deliberation of a community of participant-
scholars is the best hope for scientific advances
(Williams andMatheny 1995).Why should it be less
so in the case of environmental valuation?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This article benefited from our conversations with
Steve Carpenter and Fikret Berkes. Our interaction
was facilitated by the Resilience Network, supported
by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation to the
Beijer International Institute of Ecological Econom-
ics and the University of Florida for research on
ecological resilience.
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