Since 1964, when Congress wrote the Wilderness Act, there has been an increasing amount of controversy between opponents and advocates of wilderness. Wilderness areas in Utah are not immune to this controversy. Public policy makers and land managers are in the middle of this debate. They have the responsibility to assess the resource and estimate the benefits and costs associated with creating policy. This thesis focusses on helping policy makers and land managers recognize a benefit currently not being assessed. Nonuse values are values other than in situ use, where individuals have a value for existence of wilderness or a bequesting value for future generations. If these values exist, current policy would underestimate the benefits. The results of this thesis revealed Utah citizens have a value for wilderness designation other than in situ use value, with estimation by contingent valuation.

A contingent valuation study was done to investigate the value of Fijian reefs by households in the Metro Atlanta area. Individuals were surveyed and asked questions about their Willingness-to-Pay for coral reef conservation, personal views on the scope/magnitude of coral reef problems, and experience around ocean related activities as well as knowledge. Results from this data, find individuals would donate on average $0.18 taking into account sample and response bias. Less conservative estimates calculated contributions per person to equal $13.9 for the conservation of Fijian reefs. These results imply Atlanta, which is very distant from Fiji, has the potential to contribute to Fijian coral reef conservation programs. Although little empirical work exists on valuation measure for reefs of non-users and groups distant to reefs, this study suggests nonprofits and developing countries could benefit from the inclusion or previously excluded (due to distance to reefs) participants. The study discusses donor characteristics as well as possible market strategies these organizations could utilize to maximize revenue. Findings from this work highlight two important issues rarely discussed in the policy literature: 1-the use of non-market valuation methods to identify stakeholders and 2-the effects of distance on use and non-use value ultimately impacting conservation.

The philosophical and empirical study reported here developed from the observation that information science has had no comprehensive understanding of nonuse of information. Without such an understanding, information workers may use the words "nonuse of information" while referring to very different phenomena. This lack of understanding makes the job of the information professional difficult. For example, the model presented here reduces hundreds of theories of information behavior to a conceptually manageable taxonomy of six conditions that lead to nonuse of information. The six conditions include: 1) intrinsic somatic conditions, 2) socio-environmental barriers, 3) authoritarian controls, 4) threshold knowledge shortfall, 5) attention shortfall, and 6) information filtering. This dissertation explains and provides examples of each condition. The study of a novel area that had no prior theory or model required a novel methodology. Thus, for this study, I adopted the pragmatism formulated by Charles Sanders Peirce, a method of evaluating concepts by their practical consequences. This pragmatism applied in two ways to the study of nonuse of information. First, because nonuse of information is a behavior, pragmatism helped me to limit the psychologic implications of the study to behavior, rather than to expand the discussion to psychodynamics or cognition, for example. I justified this limiting on the basis that behavior reflects the use or nonuse of information, and behavior is more observable than other aspects of psychology, such as cognition. Second, Peirce's concept of pragmatism supported another of his contributions to philosophical inquiry, retroduction, sometimes referred to as abduction. To study nonuse of information through retroduction, I created a fivestep "definition heuristic," based on the writings of Spradley and McCurdy. I then created a nine-step "retroduction heuristic" based on the system of logic identified and termed "retroductive" or "abductive" by Peirce. I used this heuristic to identify examples of nonuse of information and applied the examples to a second corpus of research reports that contained examples of compelled nonuse of information. The taxonomy of this study resulted from this second application and represents a descriptive model of compelled nonuse of information. / text