On Nature and Number:
Counting our Blessings
 
a talk delivered by John Harte, University of California, Berleley
at The First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday October 23th, 2005
 

 

“In terms of conventional physics, the grouse represents only a millionth of either the mass or the energy of an acre. Yet subtract the grouse and the whole thing is dead.” - Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac

“We cannot count the wild. We can count fig trees and we can count sheep because the orchard and the farm are bounded. The essence of orchard tree and farm sheep is number. Our commerce with the wild is a tireless enterprise of turning it into orchard and farm. When we cannot fence it, we reduce it to number by other means. Every wild creature I kill crosses the boundary between wilderness and number. I am a hunter, a domesticator of the wilderness, a hero of enumeration.” - J. M. Coatzee, Dusklands

“An acre of land, here, that bears twenty bushels of wheat and another in America which, with the same husbandry would do the like, are without doubt of the same natural intrinsic value. But yet the benefit mankind receives from one in a year is worth five pounds, and the other possibly not worth a penny.” - John Locke, The Second Treatise of Civil Government

“Nature does nothing; man does it all.” - Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

“Natural ecosystem services are worth $30 trillion dollars per year to humanity.” - Robert Costanza, article in the journal Nature

 

 

Economics has been called the dismal profession, and for a glimpse of one reason why that label may be deserved I offer a quote from the founder of economics, Adam Smith: “Nature does nothing; man does it all”. Ecologists takes a different view of the world, but ecology is also an increasingly dismal profession. Indeed, Aldo Leopold, in his classic work A Sand County Almanac, observed that ecologists are condemned to live in a world of wounds.

There are a host of numbers that characterize the current dismal state of nature, and yet others that provide a measure of how ecology and economics, in tandem, can shed their dismal mantle. My talk this morning is about both kinds of numbers; I will begin with the depressing ones but primarily talk about those that offer hope.

In the US we have lost 98% of native prairie, over 90% of old growth forest, and over 80% of coastal dune habitat. Over 90% of the length of rivers in the US is no longer wild and free-flowing. Each year we lose an area of tropical forest equal to that of the state of Pennsylvania. And rates of species extinction are 100 to 1000 times pre-historic rates of natural extinction. Expressed differently, human land use practices are leading to an extinction episode that will, within 50 or 100 years, be comparable to one that occurred at the cretaceous-tertiary boundary when an asteroid impact resulted in the demise of dinosaurs and roughly half of all species on earth. As if this weren’t enough, global warming will exacerbate the damage.

I’m sure you would all agree that this represents an unmeasurably huge aesthetic and spiritual loss to our grandchildren. Moreover, you probably share my view that this destruction of wild habitats and the life they sustain is unethical and immoral.

Market forces propel this destruction, for they currently prevail over the counterforce of our indignation. And so some ecologists, including myself, have argued that our indignation must be supplemented with hard economic numbers. Others, however, say that we will never win the economic argument, and by trying to do so, we will dilute the moral outrage and debase the intrinsic and unquantifiable value of nature. They believe that casting the argument in economic terms just plays into the hands of desecrators of the environment, who for any particular development project will always come up with a balance sheet of benefits from development that exceeds the benefits of natural ecosystem services.

I think the dichotomy is a foolish one, however. If nature really does provide enormous economic value to humankind, then we need not choose between monetary value and moral indignation. Indeed, I find the dichotomy evaporates when I consider that I get intrinsic value from knowing that in a practical, economic sense I am dependent upon ecosystems! And that it is unethical to deprive future generations of the economic value provided by natural ecosystems.

So let’s return to the question of whether we CAN place economic value on wilderness, above and beyond its aesthetic value as reflected in receipts for tourism. Interestingly, this is a question that has been asked for centuries. The quotes I have compiled for you are all about nature and number. They capture some historical and current perspectives on the issue of placing monetary value on wild nature.

Adam Smith totally ignores nature: Nature does nothing .. Man does it all.

The South African novelist, J. M. Coatzee, and John Locke (two people who one might think have little in common) seem to acknowledge wilderness but suggest that it is only when nature is tamed that she can be counted or valued.

The lovely quote by Aldo Leopold suggests that there will always be something unquantifiable about nature, but it and the remainder of Sand County Almanac are agnostic with respect to the issue of whether there are economic values associated with wilderness.

The last one, by Robert Costanza, is unabashedly utilitarian but in a very different sense than by that of John Locke. It refers to something called ecosystem services, so let me explain what that means. In doing so I hope to convince you that the human economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of natural ecosystems.

These services are what Costanza was talking about.

Is this all just academic? Oversimplifying somewhat, two alternative visions of a possible sustainable future are in competition today. The first is that of a wired, highly managed relation between humanity and nature. By the end of this century, in this vision, the human population is nearly 12 billion, having continued its current growth rate. Except for a few protected nature reserves, people have preempted virtually all of the world’s land area for agriculture, timber, grazing, housing, and industry. To attempt to compensate for the loss of ecosystem services provided by the former wild lands, a host of technologies are in the process of being developed, such as exotic chemical binding agents that will be aerially sprayed on soil to prevent erosion. Water limitations due to population growth and degradation of natural hydrologic regimes are being overcome by desalination plants that dot the coastlines of many nations. Gigantic fans are being designed to stir the summer air above large metropolitan areas where the combination of the urban heat island and greenhouse effects is causing inhabitants to swelter. Molecular biologists are seeking ways to bypass the old-fashioned method of deriving new genetic possibilities from living templates, a necessity given that over half the genetic diversity on the planet was eliminated during the first half of the 21st century. Energy from controlled fusion is increasingly replacing conventional sources to meet the six-fold increase in world energy demand.

In the other future, the human population levels out in the mid 21st century at around 8 billion as a result of a successful world-wide effort to supply all women with the equipment and knowledge they need to exercise reproductive choice. Over half the world’s land area is either set aside or restored for natural habitat protection and to permit natural ecosystem services a chance to function. Energy conservation technologies that were available but ignored at the beginning of the twenty first century are finally fully adopted by mid century, leading, in combination with solar energy, to a world in which total world energy consumption is about the same as in the year 2000, but is more equitably distributed across the world’s population; this provides a perfectly comfortable and acceptable standard of living for all, even though US per-capita energy consumption is less than a third of that today. The university curricula in schools of agriculture, engineering, and economics focus around organic farming, industrial ecology, and demand-side management of consumption.

Both visions are all about stewardship, but of very different types. In the first, nature is the ward of humanity while in the second nature has the role of steward. Proponents of the first vision are inspired by its boldness, while they view the second as retrogressive, even boring -- a denial of human destiny. They view barriers to the realization of their favored vision as largely technological and therefore capable of being overcome. The nature-is-steward vision is actually no less dependent on technology than the first, its proponents generally view barriers to it as largely a lack of political will, not of science and technology.

Confronting these two choices, most of us fail to confront some essential issues, perhaps because they are too difficult to talk about. In which future will people have more dignity and most actively participate in their own governance? Which will best promote equality of opportunity for all the world’s people? And how is the technical feasibility of each vision ultimately dependent upon dignity and equality?

The commonsense values underlying the nature-is-steward vision are not being communicated adequately to the public. We are losing the educational battle because the science underlying the nature-is-steward vision does not appear to be as convincing, let alone as dazzling, as is the science underlying the people-are-stewards vision of continuing growth and of conversion of wild habitat to manacled rivers and manicured forests. The science I practice, ecology, is critical to blueprinting workable ways to achieve the goals I have laid out. In the end, however, it is all of us who must sound the message that humanity’s dependence on healthy ecosystems is as much a source of wonder as are the technologies of the competing vision?

 

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