Bates environmental economist Lynne Lewis. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

“Desperate Alewives,” a Maine Public Broadcasting Network documentary featuring Bates environmental economist Lynne Lewis among others, has been nominated for a New England Emmy in the category of Outstanding Environmental Program. The program is part of the MPBN series Sustainable Maine.

The 35th Annual Boston/New England Emmy Awards, sponsored by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Boston/New England chapter, will be presented June 2 in Boston.

A river herring called the alewife — aka sawbelly, mooneye, gaspereau and big-eyed or spring herring — is an essential component in the fresh- and saltwater food chain along much of the Eastern Seaboard. In Maine, alewife populations have plummeted, prompting research by a group whose members include scholars from Bates, Bowdoin College and the University of Southern Maine, many of whom are featured in the MPBN segment.

Watch Desperate Alewives.

“I think if we don’t care, it’ll be too late,” Lewis says. “Policymakers always want to know the costs and benefits — and the costs of these decisions always tend to be very localized, the politics very intense, about taking out a dam or putting in a fish ladder.

“But the benefits accrue to so many different people: to the anglers, to the property owners, to the codfishery, to the lobster fishery.”

Associate Professor of Geology Beverly Johnson.

Lewis and her Bates colleague Beverly Johnson, a geology professor depicted in the documentary, are collaborating with faculty from Bowdoin and USM on the project “Maine Rivers, Estuaries and Coastal Fisheries,” funded by the National Science Foundation’s Office of Experimental Programs to Stimulate Competitive Research (ESPCoR) through a grant to the University of Maine’s Sustainability Solutions Initiative.

That initiative is designed to connect research with concrete action that promotes the economy, vibrant communities and healthy ecosystems in and beyond Maine.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the collaboration will weigh the costs and benefits of river rehabilitation in Maine and the effects of rehabilitation efforts on fisheries and economies.

Chair of Bates’ economics department, Lewis’ own research explores the potential benefits and costs of river rehabilitation and, specifically, dam removal.

Johnson’s research seeks to reconstruct the Gulf of Maine’s ancient nearshore ecosystem in order to help scientists predict current responses to natural and human influences. Funded by a $393,000 NSF grant, that interdisciplinary project also includes biologist Will Ambrose and archeologist Bruce Bourque of Bates and Robert Steneck of UMaine’s School of Marine Sciences.

Lynne Lewis stands on the Auburn side of the Androscoggin River with the former Cowan Mill, in Lewiston, in the background.

Shortly after a press release announced Lynne Lewis’ scholarly article on dam removal, the Bates environmental economist learned where her academic research really hits home.

“Someone called from Augusta, Ga., wanting to talk about dam removal on the Savannah River,” Lewis recalls. “A guy on the Snake River in Idaho e-mailed me, and so did a guy from Oregon where a dam is coming out on the Sandy River.”

For people in scores of U.S. communities, Lewis’ research is news they can use. “Hundreds of small dams around the country will come up for relicensing over the next decade,” she says. “It is a contentious topic, and people who are considering dam removal want some numbers.”

The numbers that Lewis and her coauthors produced in their article show that when a small hydroelectric dam is removed — in this case, a dam on the Kennebec River in Augusta — the value of nearby homes goes up. It’s a landmark study because it’s the first such hedonic analysis, one that tries to estimate what people are willing to pay for “various attributes of housing choice, including environmental quality,” says Lewis. In this case, the question is what people will pay to be near a free-flowing river.

Looking back, Mainers living in river cities like Waterville, Augusta, or Lewiston historically would pay to live quite far from the water, which was seen as a sometimes stinky part of the cities’ industrial landscape. But in her complex examination of three Kennebec River hydropower sites, including the site of the former Edwards Dam in Augusta, Lewis found a changing reality. While property values near the river are still lower than those farther away, riverfront values have increased.

Lewis’ findings appeared in the April 2008 issue of Contemporary Economic Policy and were co-authored by Curtis Bohlen, director of the Casco Bay Estuary Partnership at USM’s Muskie School of Public Service (and former Bates faculty member), and by Sarah Wilson ’06, now a research analyst with the Washington state Department of Ecology.

“This is real pioneering work,” says David Hart, director of the Sen. George J. Mitchell Center for Environmental and Watershed Research at the University of Maine. While most people agreed on other improvements since the dam removal — the return of striped bass and Atlantic salmon and a spike in recreational use — “only in the last decade has there been any movement to understand the economic consequences of dam removal,” Hart says.

“Lynne has provided a model for how to do it. Without studies like this, we’re really flying blind.”

Lewis grew up in water-rich New England, but her interest in water management was piqued out West at the University of Colorado, where she earned a Ph.D. in economics. She studied under Charles Howe, perhaps the best-known water economist in a region where water issues are historically and notoriously politicized. Says Lewis, “Here I was in the high-plains desert asking, ‘Where’s the water?’” In 1995, her dissertation on water-sharing across state lines and how to resolve disputes received the Universities Council on Water Resources Dissertation Award.

Since returning to New England, Lewis, an associate professor of economics, has applied her knowledge and skills to the East’s wetter environment. Here, she says, “water is a very contentious topic as well, though the issues are more quality-related than quantity-related.” Maine, in particular, is a living laboratory of environmental economic issues that can test an academic’s skill at communicating new knowledge with multiple audiences, from Bates students to lay people outside the College.

“It is important to me to be working on local issues,” says Lewis. “I want to make a difference where I live, and it is important to me to convey to the public the knowledge created at an institution like Bates. And I want to be studying current issues. I couldn’t be an academic without doing something real.”

The Edwards Dam, which had blocked the lower reaches of the Kennebec River for 162 years, was the first dam in U.S. history to have its hydropower license renewal refused by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. “Typically when dams came up for relicensing, they would do a cost-benefit analysis, but it was superficial,” Lewis says. “It was always power versus no power and, of course, power wins.”

In the case of the Edwards, however, an alliance known as the Kennebec Coalition convinced FERC that it needed to do a better job at estimating the potential environmental, social, and economic benefits of removing the dam — from allowing migratory fish to return to the river to increasing recreational opportunities. And in 1997, FERC recommended “complete removal of the dam,” which was breached on July 1, 1999.

Lewis joined the Bates faculty in 2000, and as the years went by she became “intrigued that no one had investigated whether the predictions about the good things that would happen as a result of the dam’s removal were right.” The hedonic study, however, is just a start.

In a forthcoming issue of the Journal of the American Water Resources Association, Lewis and Jesse Lance Robbins ’06 will present survey findings that indicate that anglers are spending more money and visiting more spots on the Kennebec. Meanwhile, she and her students are surveying Lewiston-Auburn residents about the Androscoggin River’s role in their decision to purchase property.

It’s all groundbreaking work, says Nick Bennett, watershed project director for the Natural Resources Council of Maine. The NRCM is a member of the Penobscot River Restoration Trust, which has purchased three dams from an energy company with the aim of demolishing two and constructing a fish bypass on the third.

“Maine law requires dam projects to have economic benefits, but mostly we’ve had to make that determination qualitatively,” Bennett says. “All of us who care about these things believe fishing has gotten better on the Kennebec, but Lynne is getting the numbers that give rigor to those qualitative judgments. That’s pretty cool.”

By Virginia Wright, photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen

Freelance writer Virginia Wright wrote about the Harward Center’s collaboration with Museum L-A in the Summer issue of Bates Magazine.

When a hydropower dam on Maine’s Kennebec River was taken out in 1999, not everyone agreed that was a good thing.

But recent research by Bates environmental economist Lynne Lewis shows just how good a thing it was.

Removing the Edwards Dam restored 17 miles of this important river to a more natural condition. Those miles once again became home to such migratory fish as striped bass and Atlantic salmon, as well as the birds that prey on them and nature lovers eager to experience the river’s transformation.

Historically, in states like Maine where rivers were treated as part of the industrial infrastructure, pollution and other industrial effects depressed the value of property near rivers. Lewis’ Kennebec research offers proof that the opposite effect holds true as well: Restoring a river to a more natural state raises those values.

To compare the worth of properties before and after the dam was removed, her innovative model combined geographic information systems (GIS) technology, home sales in the region, and the results of surveys asking recreational users how they felt about the river.

GIS allows Lewis and the Bates students who work with her to relate their data precisely to locations around the river. The before-and-after data from both the real estate market and the surveys shed light on a property’s “hedonic” value — the extent to which property pleases the people who use it.

“We can ask people what something’s worth to them, and that’s the survey work,” she explains. For example, how much do people say they’re willing to pay for better air quality?

On the other hand, the property value component shows how people actually spend their money, as opposed to how they say they would spend it.

“Everything about water resources fascinates me,” says Lewis, who is now doing similar work involving the Penobscot and Androscoggin rivers, and has become a go-to authority on dam removal.

“It’s the life blood of the universe, and we can’t live without it — and we fight over it and put our garbage in it.”

This year, in one fell swoop, the 49 students in Econ 222 quadrupled the amount of sulfur dioxide (SO2) that Bates is keeping out of the nation’s air. A $1,200 challenge grant from an environmental organization in Colorado spurred the students to submit winning bids for nine permits in the annual U.S. Environmental Protection Agency SO2-allowance auction.

Thanks to the Community Office for Resource Efficiency, in Aspen, and matching funds from supporters on campus, the students boosted Bates into the top ranks of colleges and universities successfully participating in the EPA auction. By retiring the SO2 permits, the 49 students will prevent the emission of an additional nine tons of this pollutant created by coal-burning power plants.

“This equals the amount of SO2 that would be emitted if you were to leave 3,600 100-watt light bulbs burning for one year straight,” says Lynne Lewis, associate professor of economics and the originator of the college’s annual bidding effort.

Under the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, coal-burning utilities are required to have emissions permits. These permits are tradable, and the emissions-allowance auction held each March by the Chicago Board of Trade disposes of some 250,000 allowances.

The Bates students bid $292 for each of the permits in this year’s auction, held March 22. The bid brought to 12 tons the amount of SO2 that the two sections of Lewis’ “Environmental Economics” have retired since 2001.

Since the auctions began, in 1993, dozens of educational institutions from grade school through graduate school have bought and retired permits. The University of Maryland School of Law and affiliated organizations have accumulated by far the most, at 75. Bates is in second place, with 12, and the University of Michigan Law School and affiliates third, with 9.

The challenge grant that quadrupled the students’ total appeared after CORE Executive Director Randy Udall read about Bates’ success in the auction process.

“He asked if our class could match his $1,200 and buy a total of eight permits, as well as educate others about the program,” Lewis explains. “My students designed informational fliers, sold T-shirts that they designed and had a booth in Commons,” the college’s dining hall.

Several campus organizations and many individuals at Bates contributed to the grant-matching drive. “We sold SO2 by the pound,” Lewis says. “Five pounds for a buck — you can’t beat that!” In the end, the students even came up with enough money to top Udall’s challenge by one permit.

Every year, Lewis’ students study past auctions and current markets, and then try to estimate what the price will be. She says, “I believe in learning by doing. We spend a lot of time learning about economic incentives for pollution control — what they are, how they work, when they are most effective, and so on. To tie this exercise in with what we’re learning in the classroom is a phenomenal experience.”

“It’s really exciting to be able to participate in an actual auction,” and the CORE challenge took the excitement to a new level, she says. “I’m really proud of my students. They worked hard on this and bid smart — and we are making a difference, too.”

Because of both its soil chemistry and its location downwind of the nation’s dirtiest utilities, Maine is particularly vulnerable to the effects of sulfur dioxide released by the burning of coal (mercury from the same source is another environmental threat).