Beluga – Isn't that caviar?

Belugas (Dean Rocky Barrick) http://www.rockybarrick.com/

No, that's the other beluga. We're talking whales here.

First right whales (http://environmentalvalues.blogspot.com/2008/04/those-goddamn-whales.html). Now belugas.

Beluga whales are animals that occur in disjoint populations at Arctic and sub-Arctic latitudes. It's a "small", toothed, whale, sans a dorsal fin – an adult immediately recognizable for its uniform, creamy white color. We use the modern definition of "small", which is "weighs less than your SUV, and is typically shorter than one, too". Unlike your SUV, the beluga has the misfortune of liking to congregate in river estuaries, fjords, bays, and other shallow waters right off the coast and near busy ports such as Anchorage, Alaska.

On January 14, 2009, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin announced that she would sue to have the endangered Cook Inlet population of belugas delisted (http://greennewstoday.org/?p=23). Cook Inlet is an area where exploding gas and oil development has spurred planning to expand the port of Anchorage and possibly build a new bridge (presumably this time, to somewhere). The beluga swims – at a typically unhurried 3-9 kph – squarely in the way of this increase in economic welfare. Whatever small economic benefit the little white whale contributes derives mainly from the amusement it affords people in marine "parks". So far as Palin is concerned, the whales should stay there and stay clear of the development of vastly greater economic goods in the Cook Inlet. There it is just a natural liability.

Ironically, Ms. Palin's previous move (in August 2008) to remove federal protection for the polar bear might well have been in the beluga's interests: Aside from humans and orcas, the polar bear is the beluga's primary predator.

We dedicate this limerick to Ms. Palin's zealous dedication to keep the caviar on her plate.

Damn nuisance – that slug-like white whale:
Obstructs us wherever we sail.
    So sue 'em we must
    Or surely go bust!
God's will is for us to prevail.

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And the great president said...

Deadly Embrace: Cypress and strangling fig

On the eve of his presidency, No. 44 is channeling No. 16. The earlier great president's unifying vision – his embrace of diversity and diverse interests – brings to mind the broad and inclusive vision of The Natural Capital Project and the new environmentalism that it inspires.

This new environmentalism – embodied in the work of The Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund – also embraces inclusiveness and unification. It rightfully boasts astounding success in attracting corporate funders. See, for example: Goldman, R.L., Tallis, H., Kareiva, P., and Daily, G.C., "Field evidence that ecosystem service projects support biodiversity and diversify options", Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 105:27 (July 8, 2008), pp. 9445-94448 (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/06/27/0800208105.abstract). It is truly awe-inspiring to find such a tight partnership between the wealthiest and most powerful multi-national corporations and the environmental movement, that Rio Tinto, among others, is literally setting The Nature Conservancy's agenda – http://www.nature.org/joinanddonate/corporatepartnerships/files/ilc_agenda_june.pdf.

Biodiversity offsets, habitat banking, mitigation banking – are all innovations that have put new life into Rio Tinto's resource-extraction business. (For some of its handiwork, see http://environmentalvalues.blogspot.com/2008/05/toontown-guide-to-economic-value.html.) These innovations affix the environmentalist imprimatur on activities that were previously seen by less broad-minded environmentalists as simply beating the crap out of the natural world. Of course, Rio Tinto still does that – but now in exchange for not beating the crap out of real estate worthless to it, or manufacturing a facsimile of the crap-beaten-out land on real estate worthless to it, or (the finest innovation of all), the mere promise to do one of these things. This is the magic of offsets and banking – a magic which spikes the rejuvenating elixir of the new environmentalism.

Skeptics of this approach may be unaware of one of the 16th president's most powerful nation-unifying speeches. This ignorance is forgivable. For obscure reasons, this speech was scrapped and all but a few rarely seen and never-heard excerpts are lost to history. But the few extant passages are truly inspiring – in no small part because we can see in them the clear inspiration for The Natural Capital Project and The Nature Conservancy.

Here is the longest surviving contiguous fragment:

We need to bring everyone with an interest in slavery into our house and to our table, including those with a direct economic stake in it. We cannot arbitrarily ignore any interest if we hope to forge an effective agreement, which must be one acceptable to all. By respecting all interests, there is no doubt that we can reach consensus on a new, gentler, more humane kind of slavery that can sustain the unity, harmony, and welfare of this great nation of ours.

One can imagine that at this point, had this speech been delivered, everyone in attendance cheers and waves their 34-star American flags. No. 16 goes on:

Of course, we must honestly acknowledge the undeniable economic cost of more humane treatment. And so undeniably, we cannot expect our fellow citizens, those who happen to be slave owners and who have contributed so much to the greatness of our nation, to bear the cost without gentle encouragement to lighten their brutality.

The way forward is together. It is one in which we appeal to the better nature of those of us who own slaves. We must offer just compensation which coaxes from that nature an understanding that a slave owner's best interests are served when his most brutal acts are abandoned. And we must give the slave owner a way to offset and bank whatever brutal acts he cannot, despite his best and most sincere efforts, abandon for fear of economic ruin. The greater good will be served by asking of the slave holders among us that they set aside places where no slave can be flogged without cause and where slave families are permitted to stay together, unless they attempt to flee this just and humane compact.

This, I believe, is at the core of an effective healing of this nation's deeply dividing wound.

So the great 16th president might have spoken.

It was our good fortune, as the election of No. 44 has made more clear than ever, that we instead got the 13th Amendment.

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Climate change limerick

With reference to http://environmentalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/10/intentional-climate-change-again-again.html:

Were climate Caldeira's own toy,
Away he would play for his joy.
    Spray sulfates up there!
    It's easy, I swear –
So easy, the earth to destroy.

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Walking and Flying with Pelicans

It is a late autumn afternoon at the Baylands.

American Avocet (winter plumage) plying the mudflats

This is an avian paradise whose denizens have no apparent complaint about the place's recent history as a complex of man-made levees, landfill, salt-evaporation ponds. Only my non-avian eyes smart when touched by the plain evidence of this. The full moon, not yet risen in the eastern sky, has tugged away tidal waters to expose a vast expanse of mudflats. For many birds, the veil has been removed from a table bearing a great banquet. I walk out from the trailhead expecting that a riot of birds will have come to the feast.

Instead, I find a normal-sized congregation of some of the usual suspects. Blackbirds in the reeds on the bay's periphery. Gadwalls, shovelers, mallards, and coots voluntarily corralled together, looking for dinner in isolated islands of water. Avocets, whimbrels, willets, dowitchers, and western sandpipers, trawling through the mud for tasty treasures. California and ring-billed gulls flying overhead. A single cormorant on the wing. But other of the usual suspects are conspicuous by their absence. Where are the stilts that keep the avocets company, the terns that dive and plunge for their repast, the herons that discretely wade, watch, wait, then spear theirs? These are no-shows, as are the often seen swallows, teals, ruddy ducks, pintails, canada geese, herons, pelicans. On a day like this, the hope for a rare appearance of a rail or white-faced ibis quickly fades.

Watching creatures that are here today plying their trade and thinking about those that aren't, it is not hard to feel that "there is somebody there behind the ... feathers", as Holmes Rolston III puts it (Rolston, H., "Value in Nature and the Nature of Value", from Philosophy and Natural Environment, ed. Attfield, R, and Belsey, A, Cambridge University Press, 1994). That "somebody" is an animal that, like me, needs to work for a living. I can appreciate that effort and relate it to mine. I can even imagine myself living their life, finding food the way they do. Philosophers wrap themselves in knots trying to unravel the meaning of counterfactual statements. The rest of us find straightforward meaning in "if I were a pelican..." Those feathered "somebodies" are, in some significant sense, one of "us".

White pelicans. In warmer weather months, they can be seen together in a great flock, swimming together and flying in formations so impossibly low over the water that their huge, powerfully flapping wings must inevitably drown; but never do. Sometime every fall, the pelicans suddenly vanish to I-know-not-where. Apparently, I have arrived after their departure.

Why aren't more birds here? Didn't the word get out? "GOOD EATS". I imagine that the message was somehow sent, but was then swallowed up by the hum of traffic on nearby Route 101; or knocked down to the ground by the single engine planes that drone overhead from and to a nearby municipal airport; or scrambled into gibberish by the electromagnetic fields around the power transmission lines strung along erector-set towers that line the bay.

My habit is to walk out a few miles on a dirt road atop a levee; then retrace my steps. Almost at my turnaround point, I spot a solitary white pelican – incapable of disappearing amidst a dense congregation of of gadwalls and shovelers. What is he doing here alone? Did he miss a cue while deep in pelican thought? Does he suffer from not having his companions for flying in tight pelican formation? Could he be a pelican iconoclast and just not care about such things? I reach the slatted bench which marks my turnaround. Affixed to an upper slat is a small metal plaque. I hope that I accurately recall the inscription: "Libby Dutton (1948-1998) Her spirit now flies with the pelicans that she loved."

I arrive back at the trailhead at sundown and look back at the sky across the bay to the east. Until this time, it has born the brownish tint of nitrous oxide. But the setting sun now has repainted the eastern sky in rose colors, and the nitrous oxide is evident only in a sepia deepening and intensification of the roseate hues. The birds, just moments ago chattering, twittering, calling, are now hushed.

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Existential Truths about Pollution

Perhaps not since Meursault's struggles to cobble together new values from the crumbled remains of the old (Albert Camus, The Stranger), have we had such an existential outpouring of Weltschmerz as we see in Stanley Fish's August 3, 2008 New York Times commentary "I Am, Therefore I Pollute" (http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/i-am-therefore-i-pollute/). The world-weary heaviness of his words testifies to the heaviness of the burden that Mr. Fish perceives himself to carry. "Forgive me, father, but I have not the will to consume the environmentally right things."

The burden of green consumption

Mr. Fish's angst registers with us because we see in him at least a partial reflection of ourselves. Many of us are convinced that many environmental goals – centered around trying not to transform the nature (quite literally) of our planetary home into something utterly alien and unrecognizable – are justified, even noble. But when it comes to specific deeds to achieve them, we find a hollow emptiness in lieu of the expected resolve. We truly do will the environmental ends, but we have no will for the means.

In some of the most environmentally committed persons I know – including (or especially) world-leading environmental and ecological scientists – horror replaces Mr. Fish's angst. Unlike Fish, these elite environmental cognoscenti seem to have a still-intact, even laser-focused determination to adopt "environmentally enlightened" lifestyles. Their formidable resolve is bolstered by epistemic resources well beyond that of ordinary and even most extraordinary citizens. If anyone can know what do do, it is these people. Yet with efforts that can soberly be characterized as heroic, they still find themselves among the polluters – still contributing to the growth of pollution problems, just at a rate modestly below the average. Astonishment turns to embarrassment. And then, horror. It would be sad, but no surprise if the will of these people began to flag, eventually reaching Mr. Fish's nadir. Others, not so painfully well informed and not so acutely aware of the minimal effect of their efforts, nevertheless suspect it. They live with this gnawing suspicion.

What is going on here? We try to buy biodegradable or recyclable products. We recycle the recyclable items. We try to turn off lights and appliances when not using them. We try to buy things that don't take an enormous amount of pollution to make and whose use doesn't excessively pollute, either. (See, for example, Kevin Coyle, "Environmental Literacy in America", The National environmental Education and Training Foundation, 2005, Chapter 3 (http://www.neefusa.org/pdf/ELR2005.pdf).) We know in our hearts that these are right things to do. We also know in our hearts that doing them, or really trying to do them – even en masse – is not enough.

Part of the reason has to do with the "trying to do them" part. It is hard, and it quickly comes to seem truly impossible, to fully assess the environmental impact involved in something as basic as toilet paper or napkins or diapers. Scientific analysts with Ph.D.'s have difficultly coming to a common understanding of the environmental impact of the resources used, their transportation to the factory, the energy and processes and waste produced in the manufacture, the transportation (again) to the store, the transportation (again) to your home, your use, the processes involved in your reuse, your disposal, or your recycling. When they do reach agreement, the consensus can be ephemeral – later found to be shot through with mistaken assumptions or facts. The impenetrable inscrutability of something so apparently simple as diapers torpedos any hope of making informed environmental choices for all the things that touch on and flow through the course of a normal human life.

There are well known and highly discouraging cases of highly touted "solutions" that well-meaning and conscientious environmentalists have enthusiastic embraced, only later to be served notice that the initial analysis was mistaken. Biofuel is one. Some still believe that biofuel is the only morally responsible way to run a private vehicle. There certainly are huge corporations with a huge amounts of influence that have every interest in promoting that belief. But it is mistaken, and on a very general scale for some very broadly applicable reasons. We have come to know that the incorrect view of biofuel's advantages relied on two mistakes. First was omitting the impact of biofuel plantations on the environment – including the production and use of fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides; as well as the plantations' appropriation of land and primary plant production. (See Foley, J., Monfreda, C., Ramankutty, N. and Zaks, D., "Our share of the planetary pie", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 101:31 (July 31, 2007), pp. 12585-12586 (http://www.pnas.org/content/104/31/12585.full.pdf+html).) Second was overlooking the basic thermodynamic fact that biological organisms in general, including photosynthesizing ones, are terribly inefficient energy transducers. A leaf, that most common of photosynthesizing parts, manages to extract and store only about 5% of the incident sunlight's energy. (That figure plummets to about 0.2% for the efficiency of all photosynthesizing organisms in converting available sunlight to sugars, when taking into account the relatively small surface area of the planet that such organisms occupy.) Such small margins are easily swamped by the energy expended to produce fertilizer, seeds, herbicides, insecticides, and farm machinery; to do the farming; and for transportation. By way of comparison, photovoltaic cells with 30% efficiencies are now produced commercially, with laboratory experiments hovering around 40%. Of course, we also need to look at what kind of pollution their production involves.

Trying to choose is hard when you know that you're ill-equipped to make the right call; even harder when you realize that having a Ph.D. in the subject doesn't yield much better success. But several other currents may run deeper. We surely must feel some significant malaise about the fact that our principle instrument of environmental action seems to be consumption and consumptive choices. We are urged to consume our way out of our environmental woes. Yet we know, or are at least vaguely aware, that our desire for more, bigger, cheaper, easier-to-use things (cars, refrigerators, air-conditioned houses, and food that requires industrial production, etc.) combined with the eager willingness and astonishing efficiency of companies in satisfying those desires in return for our wallets, is primarily responsible for the environmental mess in the first place. How could we not feel some bitter irony in this? At least some cognitive dissonance?

For most of us, there is also a great existential remove from both the causes and the most terrible consequences of our environmental destruction. The causes are diffuse in space, in time, and agency – in the multitude of seemingly minuscule and insignificant individual contributions. Diffuse too are the effects – again in space, but especially in time. Descendants of ours – persons whom we don't and will never know and with whom we have no apparent relation other than as ancestors of distant progeny – will endure the full brunt of a wasted planet. We currently respiring heaps of protoplasm will not. Compounding this diffuseness of cause and effect are enormous uncertainties surrounding both. This multi-faceted remove of both cause and effect makes them hard for human beings to feel viscerally. We are the kinds of creatures whose focus beyond the relative certainties of next week and beyond the familiar spatial compass of our daily routine becomes quite fuzzy.

Mr. Fish elicits another, very important element. The mere attempt to do the things we are told might be helpful, for example to change what we buy, generates a palpable and grating friction in our psyche – even when the changes are truly trivial. We feel this friction in parting with our customary and comfortable ways of thinking and doing things. Conceivably the other, previously mentioned elements of doubt enter into this – doubt about whether we can make the right choice, doubt that even the right choice makes a difference, doubt that the differences, so distant from our experience here and now, are real. But the feeling of friction may well be an independent phenomenon worth considering on its own, however intermixed it might be with others.

Pondering the origin of this impedance, some of its independent significance emerges. It may be due partly to a blind inertia of personal attitudes, dispositions, habits, or ways of doing things. But this doesn't tell some deeper stories. One story has something to do with what we view as the primary "goods" in our lives – the things that we buy and consume, the means by which we acquire them, and the attribution and feeling of "success" that is largely defined in terms of the possession of such goods.

"What we consume are the 'goods' that are most central to our well being." To some of us, that last sentence may even appear tautological – so strange may it seem to conceive of "goods" other than "what we buy". No wonder we tend to couch our environmental problems in terms of consumer choices. These goods are so central in our life that there is no question about whether we should consume them, let alone whether they should be produced. The only question has to do with which ones to consume. This explains something about why we find ourselves stuck agonizing over which toilet paper or which car to buy. Even if these decisions may be of relatively minor consequence in getting to the root cause of environmental destruction, we perceive them to be of enormous consequence because even small adjustments in enormously important goods are inevitably perceived as enormous.

Another story has to do with those aforementioned inertial forces. The narrow channels in which our personal choices run are excavated primarily by our economic and political institutions. The goods that we embrace are largely the goods that those institutions are concerned to create, propagate, and sustain. The same institutions define the rules for, and dictate the terms of our public and private discourse. Those terms dictate a narrow focus on human interactions in the marketplace. They say nothing about the interactions most meaningful to humans and that have nothing to do with trade. Lost is any consideration of how humans interact with the environment and natural world.

Our discourse confines attention to time frames comprising small fractions of a human lifetime, which are inappropriately minuscule for any kind of rational accounting for environmental value. The logic of their use has prevailed long enough that they have influenced fundamental decisions about how to organize our society both physically and socially. What industries we have and that people depend on for employment; where we build houses (far away from our workplaces), how big they are, and their frequent siting in places that were formerly undisturbed – physical and social constructs such as these have become preconditions of subsequent discourse and further constrain it.

When we agonize over our choice of a car, it is likely that we are oblivious to these preconditions. That makes it enormously difficult to ask more unconditioned questions: What are our real needs to get from one place to another? Are there other needs or values at stake with essentially free and unrestricted travel? What about the consequences of sealing the earth's surface beneath impermeable materials that form our roadways? Or the fragmentation of habitats that make it impossible for many of our fellow creature to continue their run on the planet alongside us? If we look beyond the range of a car, what about the planetary homogenization of species that accompany us on our travels? Or the sudden effective increases – sometimes beyond a critical threshold – of populations susceptible to infectious diseases? In light of all these considerations, what amount and manner of travel makes sense and does it even make sense for all of us to have even one private vehicle, let alone the two or three or more in many individual households?

These are questions that break free from institutional constraints. That, by definition, makes them "radical". But they are not haunted by the doubts that burden the usual, suffocatingly narrow questions to which we now ordinarily confine ourselves. As a result, they have at least the potential to be as energizing as the usual questions are enervating. Energy is certainly required. Not only are the needed questions radical, but the needed responses are likely to be radical, too. They are likely to require, not just an easy shift from one product to another, but a much tougher reexamination of character, attitudes, and habitual behaviors, and how these act on our life situation and well-being taking into account "goods" beyond "the stuff we buy". Which in turn feeds back on and influences our character and attitudes.

Is it worth the expenditure of energy? Is it worth wrestling with questions that require a tough reassessment of character? An answer to these questions may come down to an answer to the question: Is it worth struggling for an expansion of value and an expansion of how people can lead good and flourishing lives by having healthy relationships with the environment? The alternative is well voiced by Mr. Fish. It is a kind of anomie and a constriction and diminution of values available to us all.

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Future Persons, Future Values: Ignorance, Non-Identity, and Sustainability

0 Introduction

0.1 Change

Wealth (Stanley Donwood, poster, 2006)

Questions about human relationships with the natural world are inextricably entangled with questions about the future. This is not a startling claim. More startling is that it is rarely stated so plainly and with such generality. Perhaps it's so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, except by philosophers who are reluctant to leave anything unsaid.

We nonetheless risk stating the obvious: How we currently live from the natural world, how we live in it, and how we live with and within it – the behaviors that flow from our current attitudes and dispositions toward the natural world – certainly affect currently living persons. But it seems abundantly clear that their affect on future persons will be far greater.

Certainly this point has been made in the context of some specific discussions. It has received particular emphasis in the context of climate change, a topic that dominates much of today's environmental discourse. A 0.76° C increase in global yearly average surface temperature during the 20th century already dramatically affects a small number of contemporaneous human lives. But the effects on most of us currently respiring organisms are modest – a mere warm-up, so to speak – compared to the effects of the further 1.1° C to 6.4° C increase on living creatures that enter the 22nd century – after most of us have recycled our carbon. (Temperature figures are from the IPCC 2007 report: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis/Summary for Policymakers, pp. 4, 11.)

The arena of climate change is not the only one within the environmental realm whose discourse is heavily invested in future concerns. Other areas include the progressive elimination of species in the Sixth Great Extinction of planet earth, and the progressive elimination of places that are not largely artifactual or at least not largely reflections of human tastes, skills, destruction (intentional or mindless), development, management, domination, and consumption. In these other cases, too, some changes are noticeable right now. Many of us already notice that formerly near-deafening fortississimo amphibian choruses are subito pianissimo. Many of us find it increasingly difficult to find places that do not mostly "speak" of human attitudes and activities. But I who am writing this piece and you who are reading it won't be alive in a world totally devoid of amphibian serenades. Nor with sufficient effort, will we be completely unable to find some place that is recognizably part of a natural history rather than mostly or only a part of human or just human industrial history.

In these various special (and important) contexts, environmental discourse has shown a sense that some significant part of the value we place in our relationship with nature has to do with the future. That sense combines with a sense that our current behavior in this relationship is changing what we are relating to. And it is changing it in a way deleterious to that value.

We will return to the "deleterious" part shortly. But that our behavior is changing the natural world is not a matter of serious question. Moreover, we have recently come to realize that the changes that we have precipitated are not imperceptible, not trivial, not incremental, not modest, but dramatic. And they are dramatic not just in how our world looks and feels to us in myriad small or confined particulars, but also in systematic ways at systemic levels of observable behavior and function. Scientists say that these sorts of systemic changes have already yielded wholesale and dramatic transformations of our home planet that may be the relatively minor initial stages or precursors of incalculably greater transformations.

Yet change in the natural world is natural. Earth's climate has changed before. In its 4.5 billion year history, it has on the whole been warmer than it is now. Mass extinctions have previously occurred. Trilobites came. Trilobites went – in the Permian-Triassic Extinction. With the trilobites went perhaps 96% of all marine species and 70% of all terrestrial vertebrates. The current great extinction hasn't wreaked nearly that much havoc. Not yet, at least. And it is just the sixth in a series of extinctions that we have no convincing reason not to expect to continue until either volcanism stalls or the sun engulfs the earth, thus making our planet entirely uninhabitable. Not just the inhabitants but the places they inhabit have continually been transformed in ways that make them unrecognizable as the places they previously were. The Himalayas were once a plain. The Grand Canyon was once a seabed.

Of course, the nearly unprecedented nature of some changes we have wrought (unlike the "mere" change in climate and species) and the absolutely unprecedented pace may give pause. One such nearly unprecedented change – or really set of changes – at an unprecedented pace has to do with the chemistry of air, land, and water. Even leaving aside our deposition of fossilized carbon in the atmosphere, we have reconfigured how much and where the atmosphere's ozone resides – more in the troposphere, less in the stratosphere. Along with our injection of CFC's into the atmosphere, this is due to our enormous amplification of the flux of chemically active nitrogen. The same, vastly increased flux of nitrogen has fundamentally altered the chemistry of soils and the waterways and oceans into which they eventually make their way. Heavy metals such as lead and mercury, but also other heavy and some light metals and metalloids such as uranium, plutonium, cadmium, copper, nickel, cobalt, vanadium, arsenic, molybdenum, niobium, chromium, zinc, and aluminum – hitherto rarely found anywhere in significant concentrations – also make their way into soil, water, and the living tissues of organisms worldwide. We have introduced chemical compounds such as dioxins and PAH's – chemicals that radically alter the biochemistry of most carbon-based life-forms – in quantities that took them from barely noticeable natural background to center stage. We have even concocted and introduced into the natural world chemicals such as plastic resins and PCB's, previously entirely unknown to nature. These compounds, nearly indestructible, also have a durability previously almost unknown. They are our permanent contribution to the earthly chemical mix.

0.2 The ethics of change in a "fixed firmament" of values

Still, in and of themselves, these are just changes – precedented or not, huge or small, friendly to carbon life forms, or not. They, their causes, and the resulting new conditions are themselves neither good nor bad. But we perceive that our nature-affecting behaviors are effecting changes that are bad in some ways – and bad primarily, if not overwhelmingly, for the lives of future persons. That together with the fact that humans are principle agents of this change transforms this into an ethical issue.

These two simple and basic thoughts lead much discourse about human behavior and the natural world to fix on a canonical, tripartite characterization of our troubled moral relationship with nature: 1) Humans are ethical agents who 2) act on the natural world to dramatically change it 3) in ways that are bad principally for future persons. Of course, not all thinkers share this formulation or focus. There are biocentrists such as Paul Taylor, intrinsic value theorists such as Holmes Rolston III, and those, such as Peter Singer, who take the interests of non-human animals seriously. These and others find ample ethical handholds in current states of affairs. They do not require support from considerations that are fundamentally future-regarding. They, among others, would maintain that there would be something bad about what humans are doing to their planet, even if all future generations of humanity were whisked away to live on a unaltered twin earth. But the majority of thinkers start by staring out into the future to look for the value proposition in the changes we are working. Specifically, they look to the future of future persons in the future world that we are making very different from anything previously known by us and all past persons.

Various thinkers take various paths leading out from the canonical starting point. In subsequent sections, we survey a representative sample. We consider those who view the ethical problem as one primarily of intergenerational justice. We consider too the economists who view the heart of the ethical matter as a matter of sustaining economic welfare – the allocation of resources over time in a way that prevents any permanent decline in economic welfare, roughly defined as the satisfaction of human preferences. (A more precise formulation is presented in that discussion.) And finally, there are those who reject economists' specific notion of sustainability, but who try to rehabilitate it in some way. One approach latches onto the notion that if some kinds of changes are bad, we should be preventing them by sustaining the relevant states of affairs – despite the absence of economic justification. Another approach urges that, at least, we should have a satisfying story about whatever changes that we make or allow to happen.

These three approaches take paths that lead to varying conclusions about what we owe future persons. But our principal concern is not so much with the differences in their conclusions about future-regarding value, but in some significant similarities in the metaphysics of morals that leads up to those conclusions. One common thread in those metaphysics is some form of an assumption that we can talk about values – including moral values and natural values that are moral values – as though these were permanently ensconced in a "fixed firmament" of values. While this thread takes on various and sometimes not-so-obvious colors, there is a recognizably fixed core. Values are just "out there" – now, before now, and for all time. They are removed from the world of causation and particularly, human agency. Embedded like Anaximenes' stars in a rotating crystalline sphere, they are there to be found and embraced ... or not – as different past, current, and future persons, with differing sensibilities and capacities for discernment happen upon them; or as the sphere rotates different stars of the value-firmament into human view.

The picture that emerges is not unlike that of different astronomers with telescopes of different resolving power that are, in any case, trained on different parts of the sky to satisfy the astronomers' different interests. This picture depicts a universe of values that may be held by contemporaneous persons. Under the permanently installed firmament of values, one person may well find and embrace certain constellations – that is, different categories – of value and ignore others embraced by other, contemporaneous persons. But because of its timeless quality, the picture has no trouble spanning generational differences, too. It is entirely possible that future persons may tend to find and hold onto constellations of value that we now tend to ignore; while those values held by us, the currently respiring representatives of the human species, may be unhesitatingly overlooked, dismissed, or ignored by those future persons. But while we may focus on some part of the "fixed firmament" and future persons may focus on another – we all are living under the one and the same unchanging firmament. The values in it are static; and they do not change because there is nothing – no causal force – to change them.

Of course, there may be some values, and in fact some natural values that, while contingent on facts about human beings, are so closely tied to humans as narrowly construed biological organisms, that they never go out of value fashion – at least so long as we do not transform ourselves into cyborgs. Values that blatantly derive from the needs and dependencies of organic biological creatures may not survive into a transhuman future in which (according to the likes of Nick Bostrom and Ray Kurtzweil) human minds, uploaded into circuitry, have abandoned their biologically evolved vessels. But we need not wrestle with the possibility of a transhuman future. For nobody would contend that all or even most of the values that attach to the natural world fall into the "timeless fashion", biological needs-based category.

The future-regarding nature of the canonical starting point does not logically dictate or imply this "fixed firmament" metaphysics of values. But those at the canonical starting point immediately confront questions of enormous complexity and difficulty. If our actions bring into existence particular persons who would not have existed had we acted differently, how can we be said to harm them? Beyond that, how can we presume to know what the interests of those persons are? Is that even our business? These are thorny questions, indeed. They seem to encourage and cultivate the "fixed firmament" metaphysics as a simplifying assumption.

Simplifications of a problem that clear away marginally important and distracting tangle can make it easier to see where to plant protection and get purchase. But simplifications can also sweep from view the best available placements. I believe that the fixed firmament metaphysics of morals does the latter. In a universe of statically defined values that are eternally "out there", removed from the world of causation and human agency, there is no visible anchor for questions about how values themselves evolve, how they are sustained, and how they are propagated. Insofar as answers to these questions are critical for understanding moral value in general and natural value in particular, the "fixed firmament" universe cannot frame a satisfying account.

The "fixed firmament" necessarily looks past several critical considerations. I have already suggested that it ignores the fact that the firmament of human value is dynamic – that constellations of value can emerge, linger, fade away, or be obliterated. Secondly, it does not take into account that we human moral agents have a great deal of control over these dynamics. We may even have an obligation to exercise this control in certain ways. We make many of the choices that determine what categories of value may be available to infuse and enrich the lives of persons who are receptive to them, and which ones may become universally inaccessible or even unimaginable. Finally, it ignores the principal means by we exert this control – which is through self-imposed behavioral constraints that are woven into the fabric of moral institutions. We can, and often do jointly agree to refrain from engaging in, or (critically) even considering certain ways of pursuing the projects that give value to our lives so as to make those projects (and those of others) possible at all. Taken together, these considerations suggest that some our most important moral choices have to do with what constellations of value we wish to install or preserve in our value firmament.

This last point is crucial. It is usually ignored and the minimal attention that it does get is often confused. The point has to do with preserving attitudes and dispositions – ways of reasoning about our individual and social behavior. It has little to do with preserving "stuff", though that might be the end result.

Making a choice between a value universe with a few dimly lit stars and one containing a dense and milky galaxy of values may be a matter of far greater moral consequence than choosing between and trading off values within an already defined universe. This, I believe, goes to the heart of the moral value in general, and to the heart of human relationships to nature, in particular. Ignoring it predictably leads to truncated and ultimately unsatisfying accounts of both.

The first three non-introductory sections of this piece tease out the meta-ethical similarities that guide the three paths mentioned above. In a final section, I flesh out an alternative to the "fixed firmament" metaphysics of values – one that, I hope, provides a framework for a richer, more realistic, more profound, and more satisfying understanding of natural value.

We start from the canonical starting point, staring out into the future. We are immediately confronted by an overwhelmingly daunting characteristic of the view. We can't see much at all. We know very little about the future. We are, in effect, starting from ignorance. No matter. Much good and some great philosophy starts there.

1 Non-Identity and Being Fair to Future Persons

One profound kind of ignorance concerns the identity of future persons. That mere ignorance, in itself, is not morally confounding. What is confounding is that the actions, behaviors, and policies of currently living persons inevitably determine who those future persons will be. Differences in actions, behaviors, and policies will lead to differences in investments, which will lead to differences in jobs, which will lead to different people meeting and conceiving at different times, which will lead to different children with different genomes. And so for the children of those children. And theirs. And so on.

Each particular person who ends up existing thereby owes her life to whatever actions, behaviors, and policies that led up to their existence. Suppose that those same actions, behaviors, and policies had effects that we would regard as deleterious to conditions for living. Suppose, for example, that they resulted in an utterly ruined natural world. Provided that those conditions still permitted these future persons to live worthwhile lives, then we have no basis for saying that they were harmed or wronged. The deteriorated state of the world doesn't make these persons worse off than they would have been otherwise – because there is no other world in which they otherwise would have existed.

This is Derek Parfit's "Non-Identity Problem" (Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 359). Much philosophical ink has been spilled agonizing over this problem in future-regarding value. Parfit himself concludes that, if there were no differences in the number of future persons, then a straightforward consequentialist principle resolves the dilemma:

The Same Number Quality Claim or Q: If in either of two possible outcomes the same number of people would ever live, it would be worse if those who live are worse off, or have a lower quality of life, than those who would have lived.
(Parfit, p. 360)

Unfortunately, the same number assumption grossly oversimplifies the effects of different characteristic behaviors and policies in the real world. These differences would produce, not just different particular individuals, but different numbers of particular individuals. In the face of the reality of numerical differences, Parfit is stymied. He is reduced to suggesting another consequentialist resolution – "Theory X". But he confesses that he cannot specify Theory X, except by analogy, as a different number version of Q.

A very penetrating discussion of the Non-Identity Problem comes from Jeffrey Reiman, "Being Fair to Future People: The Non-Identity Problem in the Original Position", Philosophy and Public Affairs, 35:1 (2007), pp. 69-92. Reiman brings the classical, "original position" framework of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971 to bear on the question of intergenerational justice. Within this framework, he convincingly defuses the force of the Non-Identity Problem by showing how it relies on the confusion of trying to attribute to a particular person an interest in being the particular person that she is.

From behind the veil of ignorance of Rawls' veil of ignorance (Rawls, pp. 136-142), which particulars exist as persons – including, for example their race or gender – is not relevant to determining what rights those persons have, and how to achieve a just and fair regard for those rights. As Reiman points out, membership in a particular generation and whether or not a particular person is already born or not, cannot be distinguished from race and gender in this fundamental respect. It does not provide a legitimate basis for discriminating against the rights of such a person.

This is not to deny that a particular person's individuating characteristics and accidents of birth or history might affect her quality of life. Her genome and her date of birth, for example, might well have significant effects. Members of one gender as opposed to the other may encounter special difficulties. Just so, members of one generation may experience a very different quality of life (for better or worse) from members of another. But these effects do not hinge on a person being the particular that she is, as such. That fact, the original position insists, must be resolutely ignored to meet the requirements of fairness and justice.

On the other hand, those who deliberate from behind the veil of ignorance must consider as morally significant many of the properties that affect the quality of the life of particular persons – whomever they happen to be and whenever they happen to exist – and in which those persons, considered independent of which particulars they wind up being, may have a legitimate interest. The properties in question may be the personal properties – constitution-determining ones that, for example bear on the likelihood of early mortality or morbidity. More commonly, they will be properties of the world in which a particular person ends up living and that affect the quality of that person's life. The degree of pollution in the world is a clear example (so to speak) of such a worldly property.

Reiman concludes that it does not make sense to say that it is in the interest of a person to be born this particular person or that. But we can harm a future person by harming her interests – in being born with certain personal properties but not others; and in living in a world with certain properties but not others – despite the fact that she would not have existed except under these circumstances. It makes no moral sense for a future person to say that she has an interest in existing, to be considered alongside her interests in having a well-considered set of personal and worldly properties. These sorts of interests, not the particular person she is, are what count morally.

But when we ask, "Just what sorts of interests are morally relevant?" the "fixed firmament" assumption enters Reiman's discussion with the clearest possible statement of it:

We suppose that the interests of future people are just like the interests of present people, only later.
(Reiman, p. 84, emphasis in the original)

Reiman implicitly builds this assumption into his description of the remarkably narrow set of interests that he proposes as meriting intergenerational moral consideration:

It seems reasonable for parties in the original position to agree to a general duty of living people to provide for future generations’ normal functioning since the parties want to safeguard their ability to pursue their goals whatever they turn out to be, and maintenance of normal functioning (including prevention of serious defects) provides such a safeguard. Moreover, the standard of normal species functioning has the advantage of avoiding a hemorrhage of unlimited duty that could flow from the idea that we owe future people to make them the best people possible.
(Reiman, p. 81, emphasis added)

For Reiman, the goals that a person can conceive of as available and open to pursue, and thus the values that are can be derived in pursuing these goals, whichever ones are selected, cannot reach beyond the available possibilities that are "out there" in the "fixed firmament", independent any contingency other than "normal species functioning". This is presumed constant through time, fixed by biology. Therefore, all contingency concerning what values there are can be safely ignored. Contingencies bear only on whether or not the fixed values are actually realized. And these contingencies have to do with personal and worldly properties of a person that make pursuing chosen goals more or less difficult.

Moreover, obligations to serve selected interests are never unqualified – not even those that serve the narrow and most basic set of interests involved in pursuing the goal of normal biological functioning:

... this is not strictly a right to normal functioning as such, but to living people’s reasonable efforts to ensure that level of functioning; nor is it a right to a certain quality of life, but to living people’s reasonable efforts to ensure that future people face normal life expectancies and morbidity rates.
(Reiman, p. 81, emphasis added)

With this qualification, Reiman can secure only a "reasonable effort" on our part to provide future persons with a "normal level of functioning". And that seems to be little more than functioning according to a biological standard for the species. We act with appropriate moral consideration for future persons if we merely avoid unreasonably weak means of aiming to sustain a level of human functioning that can be "objectively" described in biological terms. We will have done no harm even if our not unreasonably weak efforts fail to achieve the end at which they are aimed, and the end result is, in fact, the sub-normal functioning of significant numbers of future persons.

Oxygen Should Be Regarded as a Drug (Stanley Donwood, acrylic on canvas, 2008)

Could Reiman's approach be further pursued to include levels of functioning that go beyond pure biology? Perhaps it could embrace an accoutrement of other properties that are commonly deemed basic and "normal" human needs – including autonomy, security, breathable air, food, potable water, and shelter. But even after including these other basic human needs, one can imagine a grossly impoverished, sterile world that still meets the "normal species functioning" test. One can argue (and offend many by arguing) that many of us already live in such a world. The most obvious of such worlds we call "cities". Not only are the people who live there provided for, but many of them flourish in this environment. But this phenomenon is not restricted to cities. It is pervasive and fast approaching ubiquity – to the point where ecologists have come to realize that there is little for them to study, except for "anthropogenic biomes" (http://www.ecotope.org/projects/anthromes/). These are places that cannot be understood without taking into account increasingly dominant human impacts.

But there is no need to stop with the current, highly compromised states of affairs. The world of future persons' contentment and satisfaction could be one in utter natural ruin. It need not contain even a single plot of land that is not either literally covered in human artifacts – human dwellings and possessions – or that is given to cultivation, or the extraction of resources, or that is largely shaped by previous such activities. It could be a world that contains only animals that are bred for human use and consumption. There is no logic that would prevent it from being a world where one dared drink only bottled water of human manufacture, where one dared breath the air only from canisters or in climate-controlled buildings, and where UV protection suits were donned without a second thought. Such a world in ruin could still satisfy even an extended accoutrement of basic human needs. Still, this concept of what we owe to future persons embodies one normative notion of sustainability – that we have a duty to sustain (or not make too weak an effort to sustain) normal levels of human biological functioning (and perhaps meet other basic human needs).

Why do these results seem so severely restrictive? Frankly, they don't to many. But to those who feel that some value proposition is missing from these results, it is worth asking why. In particular, why do they fall so far short of even a minimal conception of natural value? Of course, one possible reason is that Reiman, like Rawls, is concerned with a theory of justice that may not comprise a complete theory of the right and the good. A theory of justice need not account for all values.

But another possible reason for the restrictiveness of Reiman's result, we believe, traces back to a series of assumptions that start with the firmament of values that stays fixed for all generations. According to Reiman, the only legitimate candidates for goods owed to future persons are ones that are objectively "out there" in the "fixed firmament" – for "justice should concern objective goods rather than subjective ones such as [preference] satisfaction." (fn. 20, p. 81). But apparently, it does not suffice that these goods be objective in the sense of "always out there in the firmament of values". They must also be timeless in the sense that they serve needs so basic that it is guaranteed that, as a matter of contingent fact, people current and future value them. Not only always available to try on for size, they must be values that never go out of fashion, that no person would or could ever willingly forego. "A basic level of biological functioning" is a good that meets this strict criterion in a world of "fixed firmament" values. It cannot be other than a good for us, currently respiring humans; and cannot be otherwise for future, non-cyborg humans. Yet it seems that even a theory of justice that hangs on to some requirement for "objective value" has no apparent basis for assuming that it must fulfill that requirement within a universe of fixed and static values that transcend causal forces, including the causal forces at the disposal of human moral agents.

There is another way of viewing Reiman's journey – as starting from, and dealing with one kind of ignorance, but ending up by running into another. Reiman starts from our ignorance of the identities of particular future persons. He dissolves a moral conundrum that is rooted in a misconceived take on the moral implications of that ignorance. But in addressing the question of what goods we owe future persons, he lets ignorance of another sort – ignorance of what those future persons may value – dictate that we consider only the narrowest conceivable range of values for them – a range of values that seems completely and indisputably knowable now (and forever).

Following Reiman's path to this point makes it appear that the problem of ignorance of the identity of future persons is not the real obstacle in determining our obligations to them. In retrospect, we may regard the Non-Identity Problem as a detour that takes us to another problem of ignorance – this time, ignorance of the values of future persons. Again, no matter. For many contributors to the discussion about future persons and what we owe them, this, in fact, is the starting point.

2 The Non-Identity of Future Values and Economic Sustainability

We may believe with Reiman that we owe future persons an environment that ensures their normal functioning as biological beings. But, as we have presented, this need not amount to much in the way of preserving anything – plants, animals, places, habitats, ecosystems – in a way that doesn't obviously show the hand of human influence and manipulation that dominates and obscures all other characteristics and relationships of these natural entities.

If we cannot, with any assurance, argue for the importance of natural values for currently living persons, the case must be that much more tenuous for future persons. If some interests of future persons attach to the natural environment, what could they be? Even if there were such interests, how could we know what they would be? What assumptions are we entitled to make about the values important to future generations? What assumptions can we make that would not be paternalistic?

All these questions are no better presented and confronted than by economists – though, as we shall argue, there are far better answers than the ones economists supply. We include in the "economist" bucket ecological economists as well as neoclassical economists. That is because both groups share all the critical and interesting assumptions about the nature of value that render their distinctions – over which these camps have spilled oceans of ink – irrelevant to our concerns. We will nonetheless touch on the major division below for the illumination it provides on economic thinking generally. What is presented here is a compendium of the ideas of economists such as (in unprejudiced alphabetical order) Wilfred Beckerman, Herman Daly, David Pearce, and Robert Solow. This, of course, is something like a majority report, or rather a vast, vast majority report. There are occasional outliers such as Amartya Sen that may not fit the mold.

Economists have appropriated the language of sustainability to talk about future-regarding obligations. What we sustain is what future persons get. The term has infiltrated common parlance in a value-laden, if otherwise largely unspecified way. Whatever sustainability is, and in whatever unarticulated respect it might be good, it is undoubtedly good.

Not. Insofar as sustainability is about sustaining current states of affair and preventing or forestalling change, it is clearly not good in itself. There are many things that are not worthy of being sustained. Not slavery. Not suppression of women. Not bad policies that lead to war. Not my being 17 years old. Definitely not my bad luck in blackjack. Perhaps not even a species about to go extinct after a damned good 12 million year run on the planet. Certainly not ecosystems, which in nature, are never sustained in any recognizably coherent form over natural historical periods of time.

To be a useful normative concept we clearly need to know in what respect is sustainability good. What is worth sustaining and why? Whatever else one might say about economic precepts, they offer an easily grasped answer to these questions. In fact, the economic answer is at once an answer to the "what" question as well as to the "why" question.

Economists can conceive no good that isn't a matter of the satisfaction of personal preferences, which themselves stand above the need for justification. The justification, one might think, is that having a preference gives an individual a reason to try to satisfy it. But as a justification for what is good, that is doubly wrong. First, the preference may be based on false beliefs; or it may perverse (though based on true beliefs). In any case, its realization may not be in in the individual's interest. It might even be enormously destructive – for the individual, for other individuals, or for both. Second, even a preference whose satisfaction is in the preferring individual's interest does not thereby derive any special moral claim on us. We judge the preference and its satisfaction as good or bad based, not on the mere fact that something is desired, but on whether or not what is desired has some intelligible and legitimate claim as something worthy of being satisfied. On this normative notion of "worth", economics is mute.

So we must put "economic good" in scare quotes because, despite the inclusion of the word "good", there is no genuine normative content. The notion of "economic value" builds on this empty concept of "economic good". In essence, it is the degree to which something is preferred as we express them in either actual market transactions, or in theoretical surrogates for market transactions (such as "hedonic value" signals and expenditures for travel or avoidance), or in imaginary surrogates for market transactions (a "willingness to pay" or "willingness to accept" gleaned from contingent valuation studies). This is what economists call "welfare". We shall call it "economic welfare" because, derived from a notion of "economic good" that lacks normative content, it is equally devoid of normative content and therefore does not resemble any commonsense, normatively nuanced notion of human welfare. It is just another name for "economic value" or "market value". That latter term is the only one that isn't grossly misleading because it captures the essential fact that "economic value" is really a measure of scarcity and consequent demand in a marketplace. If any of the best things in life are really free, they are not and cannot be represented by economic welfare.

(This should not be interpreted to mean that nothing of "economic value" is good. It means only that the fact that something has "economic value" has little or no bearing on the question of whether it is good. Some conditions that could be associated with a "healthy economy" – such as good, well-paid jobs that contribute to persons' feeling of purpose in life – are undoubtedly "good". But the currently prevailing economic conditions (in August, 2008) show that even an economy judged "robust" by most economic indicators may not hold any real good for most people.)

Welfare economics is generally also interested in an "efficient" satisfaction of preferences – a strategy that attempts to increase or maximize levels of preference satisfaction overall. However in the context of sustainability, economists are mostly inclined to drop the criterion of (in this case) intertemporal efficiency in favor of a criterion based on sustaining some "adequate" level of overall economic welfare through time. Often, there isn't any notion of "adequate welfare" in the sense of satisficing at some absolute level. Rather, "adequate" is based on a criterion of a non-diminishing basis for producing "economic goods". (See, for example, Arrow, K., Dasgupta, P., Goulder, L., Daily, G., Ehrlich, P., Heal, G., Levin, S., Mäler, K.G., Schneider, S., Starrett, D., and Walker, B., "Are We Consuming Too Much?", Journal of Economic Perspectives, 18:3 (Summer 2004), pp. 147-172.) But (as we shall see) the bases for producing "economic goods" are themselves "economic goods" – the ones that are "invested" in producing other "economic goods". So the economic view of sustainability can be seen as a kind of globally encompassing intertemporal CBA (Cost Benefit Analysis) that, applied to a particular economic development path, determines whether or not the benefit of maintaining or raising investment welfare at one time comes at the expense of its later diminishment. Using this latter kind of criterion, a development path deemed economically sustainable need not be intertemporally efficient. (In fact, the converse also fails to hold: A development path that is intertemporally efficient may not be sustainable in the sense described.) These details of the economic analysis of sustainability need not concern us at this point in our discussion. They are mentioned in passing only to clarify the basis for our description of a distinction that Bryan Norton presses into service on behalf of his notion of sustainability, which is discussed in the next section.

The notion of "economic value" described just above is central to the economic version of the ignorance-of-values problem with reference to future persons. As Daly says:

... the welfare of future generations is beyond our control and fundamentally none of our business. ... our obligation therefore is not to guarantee their welfare but their capacity to produce, in the form of a minimum level of natural capital.
(Herman Daly, "On Wilfred Beckerman's Critique of Sustainable Development", Environmental Values, 4:1 (1995), p. 50)

Solow echoes Daly's sentiments, but brings welfare back in as the raison d'état for maintaining productive capacity:

If ‘sustainability’ is anything more than a slogan or expression of emotion, it must amount to an injunction to preserve productive capacity for the indefinite future.
(Robert Solow, "An almost practical step toward sustainability", text of an invited lecture, Resources for the Future (RFF), 1992)

Here on display is the economic dance around ignorance. We cannot know the preferences of future persons. That (according to economists) defines all value. Therefore, we must bequeath to future persons the productive means to produce the stuff that they want – whatever that may be. In doing this, we fulfill our obligation to do everything at our disposal to ensure value in the lives of future persons.

But on closer scrutiny, it seems that the economists aren't so much dancing around ignorance of the future, as making unsupported assertions about it. They certainly make claims about what constitutes future value, and about how currently living persons can (and should) ensure it. The basic logic is:

1. What should be sustained is some basic level of economic welfare (the satisfaction of market-expressed preferences).
2. Alas, the contents of the future economic welfare box cannot be known because we cannot anticipate future markets or future preferences.
3. Moreover, we cannot have an obligation to do what we cannot know.
4. Therefore, we must bequeath "adequate means" (the basis) for future persons to produce what they want.
5. The "means" is a stock of stuff (variously called "assets", "capital", "capital assets", or "economic wealth") that we currently living persons value in market transactions. It is revealing that some economists (for example, Arrow, et. al., p. 151) here try to sneak in "society's institutions". But as soon as it is mentioned, it is forgotten in their calculations, and for good reason: No marginal value, in the context of a market transaction, can be imputed to something like the Bill of Rights.
   
6. "Adequate" means there's "enough" of this kind of stuff. There are various definitions of "enough". For our purposes (and following Arrow, et. al.) we can take it to mean "a non-decreasing amount of capital over time". Though for our purposes, it could also be taken to mean "above some predefined level of welfare" (à la absolute satisficing).
   
7. Summarizing, we need to leave enough stuff for future persons to produce whatever they want. Fulfilling this obligation is a matter of leaving enough stuff for them. To do this is to act "sustainably". This is the crux of our obligation to future persons.

No argument is presented for premise 1 – the assertion that the only good of future persons worthy of our attention is satisfying market-expressed desires. Think about it for just a moment, and you realize that that assumption is an extraordinarily bold claim about future value. One would think that it requires justification. But no economist (or anyone to my knowledge) has supplied one. Nor is any argument or evidence presented for 5 and 6, which jointly assert that some adequate stockpile of "stuff" (according to some economic measure) is a sufficient condition, or perhaps a necessary condition, or perhaps a sufficiently significant gesture towards supplying a necessary or sufficient condition (the logical role of the condition is never made clear) for a future in which persons satisfy their desires at some adequate level. This claim is doubly vexing because premise 5 amounts to projecting the preferences of currently living persons into the future, which contradicts premise 2.

Salaryman (Stanley Donwood, photogravure, 2007)

To summarize: Economists say that our future-regarding obligations are rooted in "the good" of the ability of (future) persons to get whatever they may desire (at adequate levels). Professing ignorance of these desires, economists shift their focus from satisfying unknown and unknowable desires to the means that (they assert) are adequate to ensure this. This shift away from the actual satisfaction of desires occurs in two steps – first to the capability of producing whatever "economic goods" may be desired; then to what economists presume is the basis of this productive capability. Economists variously call this basis "assets", or "capital", or "economic wealth" – all of which is, like all stuff with "economic value", stuff valued in market transactions. This stuff is distinguished only by its role in producing other stuff of "economic value". The economic view of our obligation to future persons thus devolves into a matter of sustaining into the future (i.e. "investing") enough of the stuff that we currently living persons value economically largely for its role as the basis for producing whatever satisfies our own preferences.

Of course, we need not bequeath to future persons a basket of invested "economic goods" whose contents match exactly what we inherited. We are free to change the proportions in which various kinds of goods are represented. But the kinds of goods do not change. Nor really does the value attributed to them. This is because the value of an "economic good" in our bequest basket is just its "economic value". This is a matter of its being an "economic good" apart from any role it plays as the basis for producing other "economic goods". And this "economic value", in turn is a reflection, not of the desires of future persons, but of ours. It is furthermore a reflection of the current relative abundance or scarcity of that object of current desire in the current marketplace. And finally, it is a reflection of what transactions we enter or are willing to enter now in order to acquire that "economic good", given the strength of our desires as expressed in our current marketplace under these conditions of relative abundance or scarcity. In this way economists come full circle. They first shun the proposition of sustaining "goods" based on current preferences. But they then come around to saying that those same "goods" – or a subset of them in some combination and relabeled as "productive basis" or "economic wealth" – are precisely what should be sustained as the basis for satisfying future preferences.

What metaphysics of morals underlies this theory of current and future "economic value"? What is the structure or dynamics of economics' universe of values? At first one might think that placing an unqualified, uncritical, and unfortunately (as we have seen) unjustified normative imprimatur on all preferences (in determining economic welfare) implies a completely un-predetermined and boundless firmament of values, not something at all fixed and static. Of course, this bonanza of value flows from the single fixed but fecund fountainhead of human desire. The monistic nature of the source of value might redound upon its plausibility. But this doesn't diminish the plethora of values that seem to flow from it. Nor does it seem to deny the dynamic character of those values' existence, which may be seen to follow directly from the absence of bounds or qualifications for the desires of persons. The domain of human desire is so free and unfettered, so completely unconstrained, that it is only limited by human imagination – which may be no limitation at all. There is nothing too absurd, too perverse, too trivial, too wise, or too wonderful that it can be excluded from the set of things that a person may want. Or that a future person may want.

But this account of the economic metaphysics of morals ignores the role of "sustainable productive basis" that economists impute to certain stuff that has "economic value". The "economic value" of this stuff – "assets", "capital", or "genuine wealth" in economic parlance – is defined by current preferences and current (real and imaginary) markets. But in its role as "sustainable economic basis", this stuff is what satisfies (or more precisely, the basis for producing what satisfies) future desires as well as present ones. This is, so to speak, the stuff of immortality – or in the context of our discussion, the stuff of a "fixed firmament" of values. In the economic framework, these values stolidly underlie the flux of particular "economic goods" that may indeed wink in and wink out as personal preferences change and desires wax and wane over time.

The static quality of the economic meta-ethical framework is reinforced by the complete absence of any force that may cause flux in preferences. Individuals are pictured as space-time points in a force-free vacuum, isolated from the social, moral, political, and cultural institutions that, in fact, impinge on their lives. So too are they isolated from changes in our understanding of the world. In tracing out their space-time trajectories, people spontaneously acquire and abandon wants and desires, thereby altering the content of the value firmament. So the values in the firmament, reflections of preferences, may change within the confines of that one value-containing constellation. But these changes in preference and value occur in a surreal world in which the forces that shape them are absent. It is a world that is dynamic in some limited, random/Brownian motion kind of way in which no forces are evident.

Let us now take a look at the aforementioned internecine debates among economists, which concern a detail in step 7 of their basic logic of sustainability. One group of economists say that a certain kind of stuff called "natural capital" has special status and must be "sustained" separately from other stuff. Those who say this are advocates of economic "strong sustainability". Those who deny or marginalize this special distinction are advocates of "weak sustainability".

The arguments for strong sustainability (most famously propounded by Daly) are singularly unconvincing. As Dale Jamieson points out in "Sustainability and Beyond", pp. 3-4 (http://www.acad.carleton.edu/curricular/ENTS/faculty/dale/dale_sustain.html), the central arguments come down to some notion that human-produced capital "presupposes" natural capital, or that natural capital is the agent for transforming natural capital into products. These arguments are just obviously incorrect for many kinds of human-produced capital such as services and intellectual property. But even aside from these cases (noted by Jamieson), the special status plea for natural capital is highly, if not entirely contingent on, and limited by the ability of technologically produced surrogates to play the roles cited to justify special status. As a matter of fact, the requirement for natural capital in these roles is already limited and rapidly becoming more so with the rapid advance of technology.

That there is essentially no objective or legitimate basis for the special status of natural capital becomes less surprising when one realizes (with Jamieson, p. 3) that the very definition of "natural capital" (and value as capital) hinges on human economic interests. A non-renewable resource such as oil constitutes natural capital only if it is extracted and finds its way into the gas tank of your car. A renewable resource such as water is natural capital only insofar as it can be retrieved and is potable. An "ecosystem service" such as the pollination of crops is a service only if you have an almond farm or like to eat almonds. The real interests are that you get to drive your car, drink a cup of water, and sell or eat almonds. The means of satisfying them are incidental. One day, the workings of natural systems may be those means, and be the only practicable candidates for this service. The next day – with a new invention to regenerate water from organic sludge or that transgenically modifies almonds to free them from reliance on natural pollinators – the workings of natural systems may be completely dispensable. In a world not needing nails to hold things together, we can happily and without compunction or a second thought, discard all our hammers. So much the worse for hammers ... and nature.

Such a highly functional and contingent notion of natural value is, of course, instrumental and human-centric. But that, I believe, is not what makes it so highly objectionable. To those with some deep sense of natural value, it is instrumental in a way that is so fragile, so narrowly focused in time and on individual whims, and so brutishly calculating, that its normative force is eviscerated. That is partly because, with such narrow focus, the contingency isn't just a theoretical possibility. It's more like a guarantee for dispensability. Rapidly progressing technologies are making it an increasingly common reality that natural systems are not the only or even the most efficient sources for resources or services that humans already want. It is also because there is no test or standard for judging the preferences and desires, which are the ends that natural capital serve. In fact, economic sustainability – both strong and weak – denies any such standard and even, in its unsuccessful attempt to avoid paternalism, the possibility or legitimacy of such a standard in principle. Paternalism is an interesting issue and we shall return to just below as well as in the last section.

Another peculiarity of strong sustainability further illuminates, and further eviscerates whatever value that natural capital represents. Strong sustainability advocates rail against weak sustainability. They protest the free and complete interchange of natural goods with human-produced ones – a caricature that they tend to substitute for a characterization of weak sustainability. Yet, they do not hesitate to talk about the fungibility of goods within the domain of natural capital. One hammer is as good as the next. Just so, one wetland is no more nor less valuable than the next one. One patch of forest may legitimately serve as the sacrificial victim to save another. One mountain is as good as the next. In fact by the lights of strong sustainability, comparative judgments such as these are legitimate premises for development plans. To each of these last claims, one can ad: "... because each instance is as good as the next in serving whatever preferences make them natural capital."

Another unsupported and apparently unsupportable claim on behalf of the economic concept of (strong or weak) sustainability is worthy of reflection. Economists claim to stake out and take sole possession of the value-neutral, non-paternalistic high ground – achieving this by adopting a self-consciously agnostic stance on future preferences and by focusing on sustaining market-valued wealth. Economists portray themselves as courageously resisting temptations to impose their own preferences on the future. It is remarkable that this claim has gone largely (perhaps entirely) unchallenged, for, as we have seen, the economic conception of sustainability is anything but value-neutral . Rather, it rests on two value-laden assumptions in the basic logic (above) of the economic manifesto of value, now and for all time. Assumption 1, as we saw, declares that what is good for all persons – living and future – is getting more of what they want, no matter what they want. And assumption 5 declares that what we currently living persons value (according to economists) as the means of satisfying our desires – a big stockpile of capital – is what future people will value, too, as the means of satisfying their desires. It is hard to imagine a more bold (or more weakly justified) imposition of current values on the future.

Economists do not avoid paternalism in their views of what goods we should bequeath to future persons. But the guilty sometimes legitimately implicate others in the same crime. So it might be with economists' charge of paternalism in other approaches to defining future-regarding value. Perhaps paternalism is widespread and difficult to avoid. Maybe it's impossible to avoid and therefore universal. Perhaps even, this is key to understanding future-regarding values. We shall return to this thought. But first, let us try to sustain our discussion of sustainability with a brief survey of attempts to expand and buttress it.

3 Sustainability beyond Economic Welfare

How can the economic notion of sustainability be bolstered to make it a more plausible normative concept?

3.1 Norton: Beyond economic "stuff"

Bryan Norton, in his mighty 600 page tome Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management (University of Chicago Press, 2005) has one answer that fortunately can be conveyed in a short space. He says that there is more "stuff" to sustain than the stuff of economic welfare. Curiously and confusingly, Norton promotes "stuff" to an honorific status reserved for what he proposes to pile onto an existing pile of economically "justified" stuff. Our discussion uses the term indiscriminately and so requires a qualifier to distinguish the two kinds of "stuff". We shall dub Norton's "more stuff" "CBA-challenged stuff" that he thinks should be propagated into the future, in contrast with the stuff whose sustaining is justified on the grounds of some form of intertemporal CBA . That is about it – except for how "CBA-challenged stuff" qualifies for sustainability. That qualification comes from an association with the values of a community, as opposed to its individual members. The "CBA-challenged stuff" that should be sustained, says Norton, is whatever a community prefers to keep around, even a CBA does not justify this. So "CBA-challenged stuff" that should be sustained is fully described as "CBA-challenged community stuff".

While Norton is never particularly clear about how community preferences differ from aggregated individual preferences or how they differ from individual preferences expressed in community forums, this has little consequence for our discussion. What is of consequence is that, just as for the individual preferences whose level of satisfaction comprise "economic value", there are no normative criteria for the extra, "CBA-challenged community stuff". The rightness of sustaining it (or not), if that normative concept even applies, is determined by a kind of social or cultural Darwinism: So long as the community survives, it (in retrospect) was right about keeping around whatever it chose to keep around (Chapters 2 and 3). In the war for survival, the survivors get to author the norms as well as the history.

At times (for example, p. 124), Norton attempts to argue that his Darwinian "good" is not a matter of mere survival. The culture has to survive, too. But a community's choices for what stuff (including "CBA-challenged stuff") to keep is a key part of what defines its culture. To the extent that it does, if the community survives, so does its culture – by definition.

There is also, as with economic welfare, a major disconnect with natural value. The concept of "CBA-challenged community stuff", as Norton defines it, has no built-in or obvious connection with nature, natural systems, or the environment. A community might just as well prefer to obliterate a hitherto largely natural landscape as to preserve it – despite onerous costs of construction and maintenance, combined with a limited use benefit that make it fail a CBA. In its equal potential for destroying natural values rather than preserving them, the justifying grounds of "CBA-challenged community stuff" does not differ from "economic value". Norton, it seems, replaces the radical subjective relativism with an equally radical community or cultural relativism.

Essentially, what Norton has to say is that, in addition to satisfying individual preferences (which are above justification), we must satisfy community preferences (which are also above justification). Some economically justified stuff we sustain on the grounds that enough people just want it or want the stuff that it helps to make. Other (CBA-challenged) stuff we sustain just because the community decides to do so. Or not: With no identifiable or recognizable standard for judging the rightness or wrongness of community decisions, they have no more firm moral foundation than individual preferences.

Furthermore, just as individuals in the economic model make decisions and form preferences in isolation and without coordination with others (except in and via market transactions), communities too make their decisions isolated from other communities – pretty much guaranteeing a patchwork of policies bearing on the natural world. With the patches defined by political boundaries that bear no significant relation to natural boundaries, that in itself guarantees the transformation of nature systems into political artifacts.

The interest in Norton's view hinges entirely on how convincingly he draws a boundary between the individual goods that comprise economic welfare, and the additional, "CBA-challenged stuff" that, he wishes to convince us, qualifies for sustainability. But it is difficult to pin down Norton's understanding of this boundary, which seems to depend on distinguishing the community whose preferences are expressed in "CBA-challenged goods" from some group of the community's individuals whose preferences ultimately prevail within it. Sometimes, it seems as though Norton leans on an unexplicated reification of "the community". This is reminiscent of how ecologists once reified the notion of an "ecological community" as a kind of independently existing organic entity – a view that most ecologists have entirely abandoned. Other times, he speaks of "communal goods" – the commons or the sorts of goods that are jointly owned by community members:

What holds all [purely economic approaches] together … is methodological individualism, the view that the good must be an aggregation of, or a funciton of, individual goods. Countering this, I have recommended that some noneconomic obligations to the future be considered communal goods. We have these obligations because, as members of a community and a culture, we benefit from sacrifices and investments made by members of prior generations. These benefits include economic goods, but they are not reducible to such because they also include the political and cultural practices that give meaning and continuity to the culture. These practices and sensibilities form a kind of moral and cultural capital … considered an essential foundation of econoomic life.
(Norton, p. 338, emphasis in the original)

It is unclear how to interpret this in a way that helps Norton fly clear of "economic value". Much in that passage abets suspicion that he does collapse all value into economics after all – despite his protestations to the contrary. Talk about “moral and cultural capital” really does sound like economics. (How about trading some of your moral capital for that nice BMW?) What discount rate might Norton apply to them? And whatever these special forms of “capital” really are, their real importance, apparently, is to ground “economic life”. But this seems like the tail wagging the dog. What is really important, after all is said and done, are the "economic values" to be found in a fine "economic life".

Insofar as Norton's views do collapse into a modest variant of welfare economics, it shares economics' "fixed firmament" framework of values. At some points, Norton appears ready to burst out of the "fixed firmament" universe, speaking of a community's decision to keep around some "CBA-challenged community stuff" as a "performative act" in the sense that J.L. Austin gave to it (Norton, p. 334). But in the end, it seems that he never really pulls away from a fundamentally economic view of sustainability. Early on, in Chapter 1 (p. 30 ff.), he speaks with complete comfort about trading off one wetland for another in a way indistinguishable from advocates of economic strong sustainability. His "CBA-challenged community stuff" is just another, fixed stockpile of fungible items, sitting alongside or maybe on top of the items in the pile of fungible items that contribute to economic welfare, that may be kept around – or not – as a community prefers.

Norton does makes another argument that one might think is geared towards connecting "CBA-challenged community stuff" with nature, speaking of a community's respect for the past (Norton, p. 339). But he offers no help in understanding how this is the basis of a moral obligation, and to whom the obligation is due. He offers no theory, let alone a justified theory, of how we can wrong the interests of persons who do not (because they no longer) exist. But more crucially, he also provides no help in defining a normative standard that a community may apply to determine when such respect is due, and when not on these specific grounds. For surely, something is not worth sustaining merely because it came from the past. That would be far too inclusive – of essentially our entire inheritance. Qualifying eligible "CBA-challenged community stuff" by its role in defining a community's culture does not suffice, either. Cultural continuity cannot be regarded as an unchallenged trump card. There must be a way to critically reevaluate a community's view of value, to be able to recognize old ways of understanding value as flawed in the light of new knowledge and new conditions, and to be able to abandon them. But Norton gives us nothing like that; only his procedural Darwinism.

3.2 O'Neill and "narratives"

John O'Neill, Alan Holland, and Andrew Light, in Chapter 11 of their book, Environmental Values, Routledge, 2008, make two worthwhile suggestions. The first suggestion has to do with abandoning a future-regarding ethic based on preferences and replacing it with one based on needs. Preferences are intentional. In economic theory, they unconditionally create economic goods. An individual's desire for something makes it an economic good – even if it will certainly lead to that individual's destruction and whether or not the individual is aware of that. Needs, on the other hand do not rely on beliefs that may be mistaken. Even if they are regarded as "merely" instrumental to an individual's flourishing, they are essential for that flourishing by virtue of being needs. Finally, because they are essential, they cannot be traded for something else.

So, the thought is, we can formulate an objectively verifiable list of basic needs – an "objective basic needs list" – then surely we have some morally solid grounds for claiming that the ability to satisfy the needs on that list should be sustained. But the question of what is required to satisfy basic needs remains. That is, we need to get from an objective basic needs list to an objective basic goods list. At this point, we return to exactly the point where Reiman's discussion falls short. As we have argued, it seems that it would be possible to satisfy basic human needs in even a grossly defiled vestige of the natural world.

If our list is expanded to include not just basic needs, but other goods that, one may argue, promote human flourishing, we still face the problem of getting from the needs list to a goods list. The same sorts of obstacles present themselves. For it seems even these non-essential goods – aesthetic experience, relationships with an "other", etc. – can be satisfied in ways outside of any human relationship with the natural world. This severely limits the force of any normative value of naturally supplied versions of these goods. (For an insightful discussion of this, see Ronald Sandler, Character and Environment, Columbia University Press, 2007, pp. 43-52.)

Perhaps sustainability and sustainable practices are precisely those practices that ensure the continuation of the human species. Perhaps we have an obligation to make our species beat the odds and persist beyond the average 10 million year run of most organisms on this planet. On this view, sustaining humanity is a good and whatever we can do towards that end is likewise good. Sustainability, then, is a kind of species-regarding prudence, a kind of forward-looking rationality for H. sapiens sapiens. But closer examination shows that this view proffers only a rephrased basic goods argument for preserving the natural world. It has force only insofar as artifactual alternatives for natural goods do not exist. Like any basic goods argument, it cannot militate against the wanton wasting of nature and the environment when human technology nevertheless provides goods that meets the basic needs. (See Thomas Princen, The Logic of Sufficiency, MIT Press, 2005, Chapter 2, for a worthwhile explication of "ecological rationality".)

That leaves O'Neill et. al.'s second suggestion which attempts a clean break from piles of stuff and lists of goods. It has to do with "narrative" – the stories of how places came to be the way they are, and taking this into account in deciding how to extend these stories (hi-stories) into the future. As evidence for a narrative component to value O'Neill et. al. present a couple of stories (about couples) that, they claim, we tend to evaluate differently because of their different sequences of events, despite their common and tragic outcome (O'Neill, et. al., pp. 196-197). Couple A has a preponderantly wonderful relationship – right up to a falling out just before their tragic and unexpected deaths. Couple B has a preponderantly unsatisfying relationship – right up to a reconciliation just before their tragic and unexpected deaths. Consequentialists, taking the integral of well-being over time, would say that couple A led the better life. O'Neill et. al. presume that we would unhesitatingly object to that conclusion and prefer the life of couple B. But it is hard not to feel that these stories manipulate our sentiments, Hollywood-style, in a way that has little to do with the real issue.

It is undoubtedly true that sometimes, continuity and the embedding of it in a satisfying story has value. But that gains us little if we don't have any guidelines or understanding of what kind of continuity is good or what kind of story is good to tell. It is a long way from the observation that there might be some value in a continuous narrative, to the claim that some particular tradition should be continued. The narrative for our time that would be most satisfyingly seamless would be the one in which we continued to rapidly transform the planet into something unrecognizable from its previous natural history, devoid of anything that was not obviously a human construction. One might respond that conditions may arise that require reevaluation of traditional ways of thinking and behaving; some reevaluations may call for abrupt discontinuities; and that in these cases, the satisfying narrative would be, "and then, we suddenly realized we were behaving in a way that was so morally reprehensible that we immediately stopped." But having now left continuity aside, it is hard to understand how "being in a satisfying narrative" is the value-conferring element.

4 The Dynamics of Value, Paternalism, and the Future of Natural Value

In this discussion, we decline to join the failed attempts to jump straight to a characterization of our obligations to future persons. We have seen other attempts at this fall short, pulled down, in part, by questionable views of the nature of future value. So we will rest content with suggesting some kind of metaphysics of morals – one that may help us better understand moral relationships with the future and we hope, help us begin to understand how natural value might figure into these relationships.

4.1 Retroactive blame

Let us start with one more false start, albeit one that provides a clue to a better start. Some thinkers have suggested that we should sustain whatever goods they think we should sustain because future persons, realizing their deprivation, would revile us for that deprivation. It is an argument from a premise of culpability to the moral obligation which, if unfulfilled, makes us culpable. This argument is a forward-looking counterpart of Norton's previously mentioned argument that, in not sustaining what was bequeathed us by our predecessors, we disrespect them. The new, forward-looking proposal does not share with Norton's the problem of requiring a theory of how we can wrong the interests of persons that no longer exist. Though of course it still faces the challenges of all forward-looking theories of value. In this case, the theory is betrayed by its basic underlying premise.

Let us think explicitly about sustaining the natural state of at least some part of our world, versus destroying every last vestige of it. Suppose that we destroy every last vestige of wild (in the Wilderness Act sense of "untrammeled") nature. Perhaps we write a history of how our destructive acts were a key instrument in alleviating human suffering at the time (whether true or not). Perhaps we also say that we acted to create the rich complement of goods that we did pass on to future generations. What evidence do we have that we would be reviled for our actions? All the evidence seems to militate for the contrary view.

Children are almost totally accepting of whatever environment they encounter. For them, that is just the way things are. With basic needs met, they flourish without the slightest sense of deprivation. Children have no access – not just physically and in their experience, but emotionally – to a perspective that lets them evaluate their environment in a comparative, counterfactual, or critical way. In the absence of challenge, the an evaluatively impotent child becomes an evaluatively impotent adult. There is little room for doubt that this remove from a critical view would only become greater with each succeeding generation. Members of a generation only a short way down the chain would have no basis for feeling wronged. They would therefore have no basis for blaming us (as opposed to us blaming us) if we, even in a knowing and systematic way, destroyed a kind of natural world that, as a result, would be totally outside their direct experience. These persons would have nothing but historical accounts to represent the natural world to them. There would be nothing that viscerally involves them. If they had any negative feeling about its absence, how could it be anything more than the kind of casual nostalgia that one might have about not having witnessed Hannibal cross the Alps? There is no real sense of loss in this, no sense of being cheated out of something that one has a right to. And without a real feeling of loss, a shrug of the shoulders seems more likely – and more appropriate – than an accusation of moral reprehensibility. Moreover, it is likely that, by means of destroying all the natural goods, we will create many "goods" that we bequeath to these future persons. These (artifactual) goods would be present in their lives. They would barely be able to imagine their lives without them. Future persons would directly benefit from those goods, and they would be aware of that. For those goods, future persons would be grateful to us.

So in the span of a small number of generations, we would be thanked, not reviled for destroying the natural world. Of course, future persons would not characterize our behavior that way – in terms of destruction. Unable to recognize goods that accrue to living in a world with intact natural systems, they would characterize our behavior in terms of creation – the creation and passing on of the goods that are actually present in their life. Contrary to the claims of some (for example, Norton, p. 127), future generations would feel an enormous sense of community with us who so assiduously created the world that they know and love. This is an extraordinarily sad truth, which makes it hard to accept. But it is also a sobering truth that can tell us something important about future value and the value of nature.

4.2 Another interpretation

There is another way of analyzing the retroactive blame argument that sheds more light on why it is misguided. The argument relies on this hidden premise: We should avoid doing things that would garner blame, and (by extension) try to do things that would garner praise and elicit gratefulness. In the context of concurrently respiring moral agents, there is something to the presumption that perceived culpability implies a moral wrong. (Here we are not worried about whether aversion to blame and desire for praise should be the bases from which we act or refrain from acting. Nor are we worried about whether or not the blame or praise is justified or merited.) Contemporaneous persons have some common sense of what values are possible in a human life. In the domain of natural value, they can understand that its very possibility derives from shared environments in a shared world – one in which there is some vestige of nature that may have value beyond its ever-diminishing contribution to the basis of biological existence. There is a commonly recognizable domain of value possibilities that gives meaning to an assessment of blame on those who act so as to diminish or eliminate values in that shared domain.

But as we have observed, the conditions of a shared kind of environment that give meaning to assessing this kind of blame do not necessarily occur for persons in generations at even a modest remove from each other. In particular, the world may change so as to destroy the bases for a large range of natural values which thereby become unavailable and even essentially inconceivable, to future persons. In a world devoid of the bases of natural value, in which therefore there is not even the possibility of an interest in nature or natural systems (aside from any remaining contribution to biological existence), there is not the possibility of blame. If we bequeath future persons a world devoid of anything that could be soberly characterized as "nature" or "natural", but instead, a vast array of Delgado buttons, then the world of electrostimulated phenomena will comprise the universe of goods for all.

But there's more involved in the intergenerational loss of value than a difference or discontinuity in environmental conditions that form the bases of values and thereby the possibility of interests of a certain kind. This is not just a matter of the circumstance that, in the absence of any bases for values, the values cannot survive. Put more crudely, the survival of natural value into the future is not just a matter of leaving behind the right kind of intact natural "stuff" to which natural value may attach. In addition to this and quite independently of it, what we do to enhance, promote, and teach values by weaving them into the fabric of our enduring political, social, and moral institutions influences and even manipulates the interests of future persons, whether or not that is our aim. What preferences future persons have and wish to satisfy, what matters to them, what things missing in their lives constitute a deprivation for them, what avenues and possibilities they have for flourishing (and not just perhaps mistakenly perceiving that they are flourishing) – all these hinge on what institutions and systems of valuing we hand down to them. (Norton brushes up against something like this, for example in the above-mentioned passage about performative acts. But he offers no explanation of what might make a performative act worthy other than that a still-extant community decided to perform it. The community, with equal "justification", could perform an act that recognizes natural value, or that banishes it from consideration. In any case, Norton quickly returns to talking about just perpetuating more (CBA-challenged) stuff.)

Is this what economists refer to as "opportunity cost"? No! We are here dealing with something entirely outside the scope of the economic framework. Economic opportunity costs have to do with the lost investment opportunity involved in producing or consuming one chunk of stuff rather than another chunk of stuff whose potential in satisfying the investor's preferences is thereby foregone. It stays at the economic level of "stuff" that is valued in the one and only way that economics recognizes – namely, the satisfaction of preferences that are unconditionally presumed valuable. In contrast, our discussion has to do with what domains of value are, and are not possible. It has to do with how we might structure our social, political, and moral institutions to make possible and encourage the expansion of some domains of value while discouraging or precluding others. It has to do with our commitments to certain domains of value that we express through these institutions.

This is to suggest a metaphysics of morals, not some set of moral values that inhabit a world in which the meta-ethical questions that define the possibilities for value in human lives are not already answered and fixed. Our discussion cuts at a level above such considerations as the intergenerational trade-offs, distance, and typology-of-effects that concern Norton (p. 321 ff.). Because we are concerned to understand what values we should propagate into the future, these considerations are as relevant in considering the question of whether to preserve any vestige of the natural world as they are to the question of whether or not to preserve the Bill of Rights. In such cases, benefit cost analysis (BCA) is irrelevant and inappropriate. (See "A Benefit-Cost Analysis of the Bill of Rights ... and beyond, http://environmentalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/08/benefit-cost-analysis-of-bill-of-rights.html.)The tip-off is that we do not ask, in just some one case where we perceive the cost of upholding the First Amendment to be very high, whether we should violate it. Rather, we recognize that a range of values that would not be possible without the Bill of Rights opens up as the result of our institutional commitment to it – including the commitment to not make exceptions. It is critical that it be the kind of commitment that precludes BCA evaluation.

As with all such commitments, we agree to constrain some behavior that, in complete isolation may appear acceptable. We agree to permit other behavior that, in complete isolation, may appear unacceptable. We do both these things in exchange for granting us all the chance to enrich our lives by broadening the ways in which they can be made valuable. We broaden the possibilities for human flourishing.

This kind of view cuts completely free of the "fixed value firmament" of the economic world (among others) to embrace an understanding of domains of value that are not "just there". Rather they are highly dynamic. Moreover, we wield many of the forces that shape them, exerted through choices to shape and perpetuate them through our persistent social, moral, political, and cultural institutions; or alternatively, to doom them to oblivion.

Embracing this dynamic and agent-influenced aspect of value also largely dissolves the problem of ignorance as it is customarily characterized. The major dilemma no longer is a matter of not having a sufficiently clear crystal ball, as unknown and unknowable forces work unknown and unknowable ways on the preferences or other interests of future persons or the values they hold. Rather, it is a matter of our choosing how we wish to influence these preferences, interests, values. This is a formidable moral question. But it is not a question that can be resolved by simply having a clearer view of the future.

In a fundamental respect, our moral question – the question of whether or not to promote and propagate certain domains of value into the future – is no different from every other moral question, which must be addressed by humans from a human condition that always includes "factors that are unknowable, unpredictable, or uncontrollable at the time of action" (Sandler, p. 96). Such factors may conspire to make a right-seeming decision or action wrong, though it seemed right at the time. But in another fundamental respect, our moral question differs from the ordinary ones because it is "one level up". It is a meta-ethical question, a question for the theory of moral theory, whether or not to propagate a moral sensibility that we know can enrich human lives, which knowledge rests only on knowing what sort of creatures human beings are.

But isn't this some kind of paternalism? Norton touches on this charge (pp. 328-329), but his treatment of it falls short for the same reasons, cited in the preceding section, that his addition of a stockpile of "CBA-challenged stuff" to standard economists' efficient or CBA-justified stuff falls short. If this is paternalism, it cannot be paternalism in any normal sense of this term. By embedding certain values in our institutions, we are not doing anything against the will of future persons. These persons do not yet exist, nor yet have a will. We cannot make contact with them; we cannot poll their interests. The very picture implied by imagining such a poll – of future persons popping into existence, deciding on their own that they like different things from us, and informing us of this across a chasm of time – necessarily requires sliding back into the "fixed firmament" universe in which the values are again floating "out there", as if in a timeless shopping mall, with no apparent causal or any other kind of history, and in which different consumers (some yet unborn) can stop and make their value selections.

The propagation into the future of values that we know can be an important component of a rich and flourishing human life is, we believe, not usefully understood as a meddling with future persons' interests that is paternalistic in some extended sense. It is better understood as a Non-Identity Problem concerning the identity of values that parallels Parfit's Non-Identity Problem concerning the identity of particular persons. As Reiman shows convincingly, we cannot deleteriously affect a future person's interests by substantially determining whether or not that particular person comes to exist. Just so, we cannot deleteriously affect a future person's interests by substantially determining whether or not that particular interest can or cannot exist.

4.3 Towards a simpler understanding of future-regarding value

Painting the context of future values with these brushstrokes suggests a simpler understanding of their foundation. We need not understand a choice about sustaining natural values as a generation-spanning moral relationship that concerns the respect that we currently respiring humans owe past persons who might have (intentionally or unwittingly) preserved them for us. Nor need we understand such a choice as a matter of respect for the given, fixed, or foreknown interests that we project onto future persons. Insofar as it is a relationship, it is not primarily with the past nor the future, but between us and the natural world. Now.

This also does not require that we ascribe some "intrinsic value" to nature that thereby demands our moral concern. This metaphysics of morals is yet another "fixed firmament" view involving a domain of values "out there" waiting for proper human recognition. That "fixed firmament" view happens to be more sympathetic to nature than the ones more customarily espoused in public discourse. But in ignoring the dynamic quality of value and our influence on it, this account of value risks the limitations and restrictions of all "fixed firmament" accounts.

Instead, to find natural "goods" and to justify natural value, I suggest starting with a complete break from the fixed firmament and then proceeding in two steps.

4.3.1 Focusing on virtues (here, now)

A suggested first step is to focus on the virtues, for us currently respiring humans, of having a relationship with the natural world that is respectful of something that we humans had no hand in creating but that was created by the same natural processes that created us, that is beneficent, that is informed by its actually felt and experienced presence, and that derives characteristic enjoyment in cohabiting a world with these things, not as a master of them.

Of course, we cannot just assert that these are virtues. We need to justify them, and this may initially seem troublesome. These virtues cannot be justified as serving the end of the survival of an individual person who might have them, or even as serving the survival of the human species. As we have seen, the existence of anything resembling a natural place or natural system is largely if not entirely dispensable in achieving these ends. These virtues cannot be justified as serving the end of some kind of individual agents' flourishing beyond basic survival because an individual's flourishing is consistent with at least a slow deterioration of the natural world during the agent's lifetime and some dramatic deterioration or even total destruction of it afterwards. Appeals to postmortem flourishing are not at all convincing. Nor can we appeal to the good functioning of human social groups. For while deteriorating natural conditions may impose major hardships as the result of the changing conditions, there seems to be no convincing reason to regard this as anything but a struggle with change – a struggle that will diminish and largely vanish as conditions stabilize in a totally artifactual world. (For an articulate expansion of this point, see Sandler, pp. 43-48, though I dissent from his conclusion that significant sustainability requires an appeal to non-eudaimonistic ends.) However, there seems little doubt that such virtues do provide for its possessor a certain kind of knowledge – about herself as a naturally (as opposed to supernaturally) evolved organism and its place in natural history. And there seems to be little doubt that, in part because this particular kind of knowledge of the agent-in-natural-historical-context, it gives a kind of meaning to that agent's life that would not otherwise be available.

The first step in understanding the dynamics of value is to stake a claim on natural value that is grounded in current human relationships with the natural world. This includes what we have just described – the meaning it confers on the life of a person as agent-in-natural-historical-context. It contrasts with a person who has literally built a wall that severs her from this context and the meaning it confers. This is not in any obvious way future-regarding. And while rooted in history and in that respect past-regarding, it has nothing to do with fulfilling an obligation to past generations.

4.3.2 The respects in which natural value is future-regarding (after all)

The second step is to recognize that natural value is future-regarding after all – albeit in two less obvious ways. The first forward-looking aspect has to do with what is involved in the attitudes of passive beneficence and of respect towards the natural world. Leaving something alone is at the core of the considerateness and nonmaleficence involved in passive beneficence. The strength of the claim of this virtue on us should increase with the degree to which the object is delicately poised and therefore easily harmed. Respect requires a form of engagement whose first premise is that what is respected has value without imposing change that derives from any desire to transform it into something else. Therefore, these two virtues – of passive beneficence and respect with respect to the natural world – implicitly define a sustaining attitude and relationship with it. They entail that the appropriate way for a virtuous agent to respond to the natural world is, as much as possible, to self-consciously refrain from imposing her will on it or otherwise interfering with it. That, it seems to us, is a kind of sustainability that has real meaning and bite. The valuable contribution of modern ecological science to this understanding has been to make us aware of, and bring into focus just how profoundly meddling, deep-reaching, and transforming, and therefore destructive of these values human activities have been. Perhaps because this understanding is so recent, and perhaps because it is not so obvious to the casual and provincial observer, most citizens remain largely unaware.

We need to be wary of inclinations to slide from the kind of passive beneficence that is a core environmental virtue to any of the many kinds of active beneficence that are founded on a vain and uncritical illusion of our capabilities to interfere beneficently, and bolstered by the good feeling that attaches to our having "done something". For example, we might think it beneficial to expand the range of healthy ecosystems. But this suggestion can be understood in at least some ways that rule it out as an unconditional good. If the expansion is a matter of clearing out human-constructed artifacts and obstacles or (better) refraining from building them in the first place, then this is beneficial, but hard to understand as interference. This seems not so much interference as much as removing interference or constraints. On the other hand, if the expansion is a matter of constructing a new wetland “over there, where we’re not inclined to build condos”, then we have an ill-disguised human artifact with a natural value that is severely limited and given false weight by the unknowing inability of many to distinguish it from an undisturbed wetland. At the very least, this would be an act of nescient disrespect for natural value in some way similar to a transgenic modification project aimed at increasing biodiversity.

Another example, worthy of independent exploration, is the lately faddish bureaucratic incarnation of interference called "adaptive management", which features centrally in Norton's mighty tome. This is a methodology that explicitly recognizes our profound ignorance of what we are interfering with and what may result from our interference. Yet it throws caution (and any coherent version of the Precautionary Principle) to the winds, urging us to "manage" natural systems by first, imposing on them the boundaries defined by social and political institutions, and then performing short-term, local experiments on them. When we create a mess, the presumption is that we can just scrub it clean and repeat the procedure. Norton's version is especially disconcerting for explicitly deriving its justification from its view of nature as a collection of resources for a community's survival. On this view, the deleterious effects of adaptive management practices on natural systems are just collateral damage – not a matter of concern so long as sufficient resources remain to ensure the community's survival.

I would say that adaptive management is an example of a nature-regarding vice. It is especially pernicious because it operates with a high degree of self-awareness of the factors that make it a vice. At the same time, it operates with seeming unawareness of two things – how vainglorious it is to think that we can, through short-term trial-and-error experiments, "manage" nature into an improved state; and of how much real damage we can do in the process.

That brings us to the second way in which nature-regarding virtues become future-regarding. Whereas the first way derives from the particular qualities of nature-regarding virtues, the second derives from the nature of virtue in general. It is that, for any justified virtue, one appropriate response to the virtue itself is to act and behave in ways that sustain the possibility that other persons, now or any time in the future, may be virtuous in this way – that they have some opportunity to have this sort of excellence in their life. This is one level up from the normal bases of response from a virtuous agent. A wild wetland, a wild forest, a wild mountain, a wild glacier properly elicits a response that includes behavior that refrains from intruding and thereby sustains these remarkable works of nature. These are bases for a virtuous agent's respectful, passively beneficent, and sustaining response to them. But up one level, there is no more appropriate response to an agent's self-awareness of how a virtue contributes to her flourishing than to behave in ways that promote and sustain the possibility that any other agent may also come to have that virtue.

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Carbon footprints: Walking away from questions of value

In his New York Times editorial on "Some Doubts Upon Entering a New Carboniferous Era" (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/opinion/24tue4.html?scp=4&sq=june+24+2008&st=nyt) Verlyn

Pacific coast (Stanley Donwood, 2003) http://www.slowlydownward.com/

Klinkenborg focuses on the notion of "carbon footprint" as an inverse measure of environmental value and as a metaphor for thinking about it. Rather, he tries to focus on this. But a strange lack of focus pervades his piece.

Klinkenborg never mines the deep-running veins of irony that lie below the surface of carbon footprint speech. In the end, all he can say is that the concept is a little glib, a little simple-minded, a little too prone to abuse by insincere marketing efforts, and a little too likely to be superseded by a better measure. Yet he concludes with this extraordinarily grand non sequitur:

Think about it properly, and it leads you to a profound critique of who we are and how we behave.

A profound critique? How does talk about carbon footprints get us to that? Klinkenborg's bland and generalized expression of discomfort provides no clue. Not even to a substantive critique, let alone a grand one. Nor does his discussion produce even a single hint for how carbon footprint talk might connect with our identity and our behavior.

Nevertheless, despite Klinkenborg's inability to clearly explain or articulate his malaise with the notion of a carbon footprint, his malaise is warranted. Our sanctimonious fretting about carbon footprints is self-deceptive and does hint at underlying and disturbing ironies. But how?

Most fundamentally, focusing on the phrase "carbon footprint" excuses us from exercising a basic moral responsibility. That responsibility is the one to critically examine what gives meaning to our individual human lives, and how to fashion societies that nurture ways of living that have such meaning. Couching our society's environmentally destructive behavior in terms of carbon footprints catapults us past this critical examination. It permits us to eagerly engage in discussions of the science and technology while we fly by questions of value.

In doing this, we ignore the preeminent question of our times – whether economic development, whose sole aim is the accumulation and preservation of money, and which is driven by the satisfaction of self-interested preferences for things that are bought and sold, should be the value that dominates our individual and social lives. Ignoring this question of value, we fail to ask whether we should be cultivating and preserving any value other than economic wealth. The claims of the political and corporate cheerleaders, who extol economic "goods" as the most fundamental, if not the only ones, go largely unchallenged.

No wonder BP and other of the most environmentally destructive corporations in the world embrace the phrase "carbon footprint" with such natural ease.

But how could this innocent-seeming, apparently scientific and objective phrase have acquired its self-denying and self-deceptive power? The answer is precisely by wrapping the dilemma of progressive environmental destruction in a scientific cloak. As an object of scientific measurement, it is easy to let ourselves believe that the problem of planetary devastation is a scientific problem, amenable to scientific solutions – not the matter of hard moral and spiritual choices that it really is.

Moreover, as a "merely" scientific problem, it is not even one that we need to solve for ourselves. Scientists and engineers can take care of it for us. They can tell us which technology is "right" for us to use. We can buy green, consume green. We can buy "sustainable brands" (http://arieff.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/how-green-is-your-brand/index.html?ref=opinion). Better yet, "given the right incentives", corporations can tell us what is right and increase their wealth by selling "the right things" to us. In their endless pursuit of economic growth (amassing larger and larger piles of money), they are delighted to deploy their scientists, engineers, and marketeers to do just that. We place our trust in the corporate agents of economic development and wealth accumulation to halt or reverse the destruction of our planet. We invest this trust unquestioningly because, as we have said, economic development and the accumulation of wealth are unquestioned goods.

The carbon footprints lead over and away from two grand ironies at the heart of our environmental problems.

The first irony is that the relatively unfettered application of economic instruments, which we trust to pull us back from the brink of total planetary devastation has been and continues to be the principal engine of environmental destruction. That this fact fails to alert us that something in this arrangement is awry testifies to the depth of our delusion and denial of the moral nature of the problem.

The second irony has to do with our complicit historic collective complicity in aiding and abetting the engine of destruction and our current reflexive inclination – in the face of the overwhelming individual, social and environmental destruction this as produced – to aid and abet it some more. As Wendell Berry (in "The Idea of a Local Economy", Orion, 2001) notes, we long ago ceded to industry our responsibility to take a personal part in providing ourselves with such basic goods as food, water, clothing, and shelter – and more recently, entertainment, education, and care of the sick. In so doing, we launched and sustained the destructive industrial juggernaut in the first place. Now confronted with the dire effects and planetary scale of that juggernaut's destructive engine, we cede our responsibility for stopping the destruction to the very agent that is its principal driving force.

This second ironic vein runs still deeper – back into the realm of value. When we let the blind working of the economy take responsibility for basic needs and social goods, we cede more than "just" control of our water or food or any of the other above-mentioned goods. More fundamentally, we cede responsibility for deciding and asserting, independent of the economy, what individual and social values we wish to preserve. The economy decides for us. It does this by its own rules of operation. Those rules are entirely focused on buying low and selling high. We, as citizens, thereby forfeit control of our very values.

The irony is that if we decline to reflect on or assert whatever alternative values we may have, if we fail to challenge the currently unquestioned "goods" of continued accumulation of wealth by continued economic growth, then it is a delusion to think that the economy will magically produce or reflect those alternative values "given the right incentives". Of course, the economy can and does sometimes respond to changed incentives designed to divert it from what we currently perceive to be the most direct path to total destruction. The economy can be diverted. But on a slightly altered path, it will, as it always has, trample the same values in different ways. Or it will trample different values that are, at the moment, less well understood or less well guarded.

There is no mystery about why this is so. The instruments of economic development and wealth accumulation have just those economic goods as ends; no others. Economic development has absolutely no interest or motive to serve any value but more economic development for even greater accumulation of wealth. Economic powers may be motivated to convince us that they are dedicated to other values, if they perceive that that will facilitate the even greater accumulation of wealth. But they have every motive to avoid, at any cost, the question of whether economic growth and the accumulation of wealth might be fundamentally at odds with far more important individual and social human values.

There is perhaps some mystery why we lose sight of this. Part of the answer is that we have come to think of corporations as citizens. We have come to accept them and treat them as persons – with a person's values, needs, and rights. For example (one of the most significant ones), corporations have First Amendment rights in the United States. Corporations contribute to political campaigns as a form of "free speech". They avoid state product labeling laws as their right "not to speak".

As Berry (in the essay cited above) acutely observes, there is a terrible confusion in this:

... the limitless destructiveness of [the] economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person. A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. As such, unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive ,as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.

In short, a corporation acting in its own self-interest to buy low and sell high does not embrace any human or social values. Corporations might be thought capable of serving some social needs – such as providing meaningful vocations for people – "gd jbs w hi pa", as Mark Sagoff puts it (Sagoff, Mark, "The Economy of the Earth", 2nd edition, Cambridge, 2008, p. 3). But even this potential is rarely and with great difficulty realized, and for the same reason: It is only an incidental side effect that occurs when it serves the ultimate end of wealth accumulation which does not have the good of "gd jbs w hi pa" as its end. As Berry goes on to note:

[The] economy is a machine, of which people are merely the interchangeable parts. One has no choice but to do the work (if any) that the economy prescribes, and to accept the prescribed wage.

In his essay, Berry supplies a list of fourteen "assumptions implicit in the idea that corporations should be "free" to buy low and sell high". Among others, there are the assumptions:

1. That stable and preserving relationships among people, places, and things do not matter and are of no worth.
...
5. That there is no conflict between greed and ecological or bodily health.
6. That there is no conflict between self-interest and public service.
...
14. That ... vocation is a dead issue.

The irony encapsulated in carbon footprint speech is the irony of ceding our responsibility for confronting a fundamental violation of values – including individual, social, and environmental values – to the violators. In the realm of environmental value, some of us think that we have a moral responsibility to preserve our planet as some recognizable semblance of the place it has been for all humanity for the 200,000 years of human existence. Some of us think that the economic machinery that came into play just 250 years ago is on the brink of making that responsibility impossible to fulfill. Yet, we seem compelled to hide these values behind scientific-seeming, impersonal characterizations of the desperate circumstances that threaten them.

It is worth pondering why, despite his malaise with the carbon footprint metaphor, Klinkenborg silently skates by all that is truly disturbing in it. It may be that he his blind to them. And perhaps we should not be surprised by this. He explicates the metaphor in this way:

“Carbon footprint” is to your physical being what “soul” is to your spiritual being.

Here Klinkenborg denies, by contrast, a connection of one's carbon footprint to one's spiritual being. He puts up a wall with our spirituality and our morality on one side and our carbon impact on the other, physical side of the wall. In doing this, he seems to reveal an underlying belief that the environment is, at bottom a physical resource that serves economic goods. Whatever value it has is It as a bunch of raw materials to make things, and sometime later, a dumping ground for those made things. Its importance attaches to its availability for these uses – to mankind in general, and to economic development in particular. This belief is at the heart of the economic view of natural value. It seems that, like most of us, Klinkenborg cannot escape its gravity.

So no wonder Klinkenborg seems vague, unfocused, and mild in protesting BP's

Realistic (Stanley Donwood, 2006)

appropriation of carbon footprint speech. He shares with that corporation and probably all others, a fundamentally flawed view of environmental value.

That view is represented no better than by Richard Sandor. Sandor is founder, chairman, and CEO of the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). The CCX is where corporations, fearing that future regulations may adversely affect the size of their money piles, buy and sell the right to pollute the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. Asked to comment on the possibility that this kind of economic "solution" may not be morally right or equitable, he embraces all that is behind carbon footprint talk. In one remarkable breath, he dismisses personal and social values as irrelevant, conflates corporations with persons, and declares that the solution is the economy (stupid):

Frankly, this debate just makes me want to scream... People tell me, well ... corporate guys who just want to buy the right to pollute are bad ... and we should not be giving them incentives to stop. But we need to address the problems that exist, not drown in fear or lose ourselves in morality. Behavior changes when you offer incentives. If you want to punish people for being bad corporate citizens, you should go to your local church or synagogue and tell God to punish them. Because that is not our problem.

(Specter, Michael, "Big Foot", The New Yorker, February 25, 2008, pp. 52-53)

A Scientific Postscript

There is something a bit perplexing Klinkenborg's use of "Carboniferous" in the title of his piece. That geological period saw a precipitous drop in CO₂ levels (from 1500 ppm to 350 ppm) accompanied by a precipitous drop in global average temperature (from 22° C to 12° C) and the accumulation of shale and coal (from which the period got its name). Our current period is reversing all these trends. But it is both odd and eerie that we now have a climate (385 ppm CO₂ and 14.5° C) that closely approximates that of the late Carboniferous. And our current climate is heading in precisely the direction that it took after the late Carboniferous – to 2000 ppm CO₂ and 22° C by the late Permian.

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Putting Moral Considerability in its Proper Place:

A quark-inspired exercise in metaethics

Acronyms:

MC	Moral Considerability or Morally Considerable (depending on context)
MCE	MC Entity – where "Entity" means "that to which MC is attributed", sans ontological prejudice
QDC	Quantum Chromodynamics – the part of the “standard model” of particle physics that concerns the “strong force”

What entities in the world should moral agents take into moral account in their moral considerations? This is the question of what is morally considerable. It is central to ethics.

Moral Force Fields: Composition VIII (Wassily Kandinsky)

Environmental ethics particularly has spotlighted the question as a key to expanding moral considerations beyond the realm of interhuman relationships, into the realm of the nonhuman, natural world. Most environmental ethicists have proposed that moral agents owe moral consideration to nonhuman animals. And some have gone well beyond nonhuman animals to include a broad spectrum of nonhuman elements – living (plants) and nonliving (mountains, deserts, and rivers), individuals and collectives (species and ecosystems).

I'd like to gaze out into the metaethical landscape to see where we might find Moral Considerability roaming the metaethical plains and how it relates to other basic notions that frame moral valuations.

My central (and perhaps not too stunning) suggestion is that that there are both more useful ways of thinking of MC; and less useful ways. One way is the way of those whom I shall call "MC foundationalists". They conceive of MC as the foundational anchor or starting point for moral evaluation. I would suggest that his may not be the most fruitful way to go about moral theorizing and moral evaluation. Motivating this criticism is a kind of dilemma endemic to this approach.

The dilemma comes from the struggle to account for the MC, or lack thereof, of rapists, sadists, and tyrants. MC foundationalists typically want to claim that interests always and without exception generate duties and thereby, MC. So it must be for tyrants who, after all, have interests. The trick, say MC foundationalists, is to recognize that for tyrants, the duties are prima facie ones generated by prima facie interests. How can interests be prima facie? According to them, interests can be overridden or defeated. For example, to say that an entity's interests are defeated (according to a representative account) is to say that they are given "no moral weight". So presumably, an entity whose case for moral considerability hinges entirely on prima facie interests that generate merely prima facie duties is only prima facie MC.

But hold on! It appears that we have a theory according to which interests that have no moral weight – that is, that do not count morally (as the MC foundationalist defines "defeatable") – nonetheless confer MC on a moral subject – albeit a special, ethereal kind of MC that we call "prima facie MC". (I would claim that the notion of "overridden" is as problematic as that of “defeatable”. But I omit the argument for that here.)

This is far too ethereal for my materially and biologically limited mind to grasp. More to my point, it is not very useful – at least for me – in promoting an understanding what makes an entity MC. What path would lead to such an awkward theory?

To find out, let's try some deconstructive meta-metaethics.

To be fair, I think that there are more and less sophisticated versions of MC foundationalism. Relatively simple versions are propounded by such theorists as Robin Attfield (a consequentialist) and Paul Taylor (a deontologist). These are justifiably criticized in O’Neill, J., Holland, A., and Light, A, Environmental Ethics, Routledge, 2008, Chapter 6. But I'd like to start with Attfield and Taylor, then visit a couple of more sophisticated versions of MC foundationalism, and then finally suggest a rather different, non-foundational place for MC in the metaethical landscape – one that happens to fit quite naturally into virtue ethics.

MC for Attfield and Taylor – monistic MC (the QCD model)

For Attfield, Taylor, and many other utilitarian and deontologically minded theorists, MC is the foundational anchor of their theory and a starting point for moral evaluation. "Starting with MC" means identifying, individuating, and locating the MCE's that figure in moral valuations. Doing this requires a definition. And the definition is standardly conceived as a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Attfield and Taylor keep it simple – with just one (necessary and sufficient) condition. According to them, an entity is morally considerable just in case it is living.

So the primary and first task of a moral theorizer or moral agent is to go out into the normatively laden world, MC definition in hand as a kind of Sibley's Field Guide to MC, and apply it to make correct MC identifications. That gladiola is living, so it’s MC. That rock … not... And so on.

What kind of moral landscape does this exercise yield? It’s undoubtedly a landscape dotted with MCE's! Each MCE is a point source of moral force that acts on any moral agent that happens (morally) nearby. A MCE thereby constitutes a point locus of moral concern for that agent. Entities without MC exert no moral force on moral agents.

The ontology is dumbfoundingly simple. We have an MCE. We have an agent. We have the moral force that the MCE exerts on the agent; and we have the agent's reciprocal moral concern for the MCE (perhaps a duty or obligation). The force does not change – in strength, range, or quality – for different MCE's or for different agents.

I call this the "quantum chromodynamic (QCD) theory of moral considerability". That is because an alien (such as myself) might be struck by how closely this theory of the moral force of MCE's resembles the quantum chromodynamic theory of the "color force" between color-charged quarks (and quark-composed entities). In quantum chromodynamics, an entity under examination may be a proton or a neutron or some other baryon, or some more exotic thing such as a meson, or even a pentaquark. The entity may have many different properties – for example, spin, angular momentum, flavor, mass, and charge. But just one property of an entity – the color charge of the quarks that comprise it – enables that entity to exert its color force. Amazingly, the strength of this force is fixed. As is its range. (It is not governed by the inverse square law.) At one time we knew of only three kinds of quarks. Particle physicists have since expanded that set (to six) – just as MC theorists such as Attfield and Taylor have expanded the set of MCE's beyond the usual, human suspects.

The key point to notice is that one MCE – a point source of moral force – is indistinguishable from the next. Each MCE qualifies, and each one qualifies according to one and the same qualifying definition. The definition confers one and the same MC property on each qualifying entity. And each such entity according exerts one and the same moral force on any (interchangeable) moral agent in the vicinity. That’s it!

O'Neill et. al. are justifiably critical of this picture of the metaethical landscape. At the very least, it leads straight to big-time trouble in accounting for the differences in the values that we confer on MCE's whose MC is theoretically identical. (O’Neill, et. al. recount (pp. 103-104) the gyrations of Attfield and Taylor to make the appropriate fine adjustments.) Part of the problem, O'Neill et. al. say, lies in the monistic nature of MC in such theories. They correctly point out that moral considerability is too complex and nuanced a notion for it to be conferred by a single condition. Surely, there must be a plurality of qualifying conditions.

A pluralistic definition of MC

So, an MC foundationalist who is either a consequentialist or a deontologist might respond, "You want a plurality? I’ll give you a plurality. And I don't need no stinkin' virtue ethics for that!"

Of course that is absolutely correct! The MC foundationalist might therefore propose a definition of MC that has lots of clauses – and particularly, not just sufficient conditions that expand the set of qualifying entities in ever-widening concentric circles, but ones that capture interesting pockets of MC in the moral world not captured by any other condition.

But notice that merely adding a multiplicity of qualifying clauses in the definition does not avoid the initial criticism of O'Neill et. al. The multiplicity of clauses makes the definition bigger. It makes it more complex. It might include conditions that don't merely expand the set of qualifying entities in ever-widening concentric circles. But using such a definition does not, in itself, change the metaethical landscape, which still comprises undifferentiated MCE's exerting undifferentiated MC forces on undifferentiated moral agents – a landscape that requires awkwardly contrived and unconvincing adjustments to account for the differences in MC that we all acknowledge.

In short, our simple-minded QCD model of the metaethical landscape has not fundamentally changed ... yet. Though suffused with a pluralism of qualifying conditions, it is still stuck with a monism of MCE's. We just have a fancier criterion for identifying each MCE/quark in it.

Pluralistic MC (the "standard model")

What the MC foundationalist may really yearn for is not just a bigger, more complex, more nuanced, non-concentric, multi-conditional (pluralistic) definition of MC. Rather, or additionally, she may want to change the model in two significant ways – by:

1. Differentiating the MCE's on the basis of their qualifying conditions.
2. Differentiating the moral forces that such differentiated MCE's exert.

(We note in passing that moral agents are still left as undifferentiated and indistinguishable loci on which moral forces impinge.)

These changes change our metaethical landscape dramatically. It is now populated, not by a plethora of indistinguishable MCE's, but by recognizably different kinds of MCE's exerting recognizably different kinds of moral forces of varying strengths on moral agents. If one qualifying condition for MC is sentience (as it is on most environmental ethics accounts), then an entity possessing it is the kind of MCE that exerts a sentience-flavored moral force on a nearby moral agent. If an entity possesses autonomy , then it radiates an autonomy-flavored moral force. And, of course, one and the same entity can possess more than one qualifying attribute. In that case, it emanates a multiplicity of vector forces – one vector emanating from each MC-qualifying property – that impinge on any moral agent.

This move turns our QCD theory of MC into a full-fledged "Standard Model" of MC in one quantum leap (so to speak). The Standard Model of particle physics subsumes QCD. An entity may still have color, making it a point source for strong interactions – just as QCD describes. But it may also have other properties that enable it to exert other kinds of force – spin (actually, helicity) for weak interactions, charge for electromagnetic forces, and mass for gravitational forces. The full Standard Model also expands the set of qualifying (force-emanating) entities – for example, to include leptons (such as electrons), which (unlike quarks and the entities such as protons and neutrons that they comprise) have a weak force but no strong (color) force.

So why shouldn't we be satisfied with this suitably enriched, metaethical landscape with a pluralism of MCE's? The hint comes from our starting point. Let’s recall the MC foundationalist’s unsatisfying struggle to account for moral forces that really don't have any moral significance – as if there were certain kinds of shields that deflected moral forces back to their villainous originators. Great science fiction. Unsatisfying ethical theory. A truly pluralistic notion of MC (such as the one just described) does nothing to solve the problem of accounting for the MC of rapists, sadists, and tyrants.

Virtue ethics – pluralistic MC in a nonstandard model

How else can we locate MC on the metaethical landscape? Where else could we place MCE’s? In this brief note, I'd like to offer just one seminal suggestion. It's a suggestion that fits happily into at least some forms of virtue ethics, but perhaps not quite so happily into consequentialist or deontological approaches.

The suggestion is:

Don’t start from MC and MCE's as moral theoretical primitives.

It simply is less useful to anchor moral theory – as well as moral reflection and valuation – with these point sources of moral force. Populating the moral landscape with conceptually detachable and detached MCE's (even with a plurality of types) on the one hand, and then throwing in a bunch of similarly detachable and detached moral agents on the other is something that leads to the awkward epicycles to connect them and mysterious force shields to disconnect them. (I'm reminded of the noble, but awkward and ultimately unsatisfying attempts of rationalists to connect disembodied rational souls with the material bodies that those souls inhabit.)

In contrast, virtue ethics (as I would propose it) starts, not with MC, but with virtues. It starts by identifying virtues and by justifying them. The general nature of MC logically derives from the general nature of a virtue. Specific kinds of MC derive from specific properties of and justifications for specific virtues. We have this definition:

An entity is MC just in case, for some justified virtue, a virtuous agent who possesses that virtue responds to that entity by acting and reacting in ways that are appropriate for expressing that virtue in the presence of that entity.

This is a very broad and unifying conception of MC that logically precludes its detachment from moral agents. It also precludes detachment of a MCE from its contextualized role in moral evaluation relative to virtues. A MCE is an entity that is the basis of a virtuous response. The form of that response is one that is an appropriate one for that particular basis for responding.

We conclude with some salient features of this conception of MC – including features that distinguish it from any "Standard Model" – and that (we submit) help to avoid the theoretical epicycles of MC foundationalism:

1. MC is not taken to be the foundational anchor of ethical theory. Rather, the MC of something derives from a virtue or more generally, a multiplicity of virtues that are justified separately and logically prior to anointing something “MC”. A virtue of active benevolence such as helpfulness is justified for its ability to serve the ends of social cooperation and helping others realize their potential to lead a meaningful life. So far as that justification goes, it says nothing about what person or what kind of person in what circumstances might be MC for that virtue. Which leads to the next point...
   
   
2. By definition, MC is contextually dependent on a virtue (or set of virtues). It also depends on the circumstances that are critical factors in determining whether or not something might be an appropriate basis for the response of a person with those virtues. From the characterization of a (previously justified) virtue such as helpfulness, it is clear that not every person under any circumstance is a basis for the response of an agent who is virtuous in that way. As a consequence, not every person is MC with respect to this virtue under at least some circumstances. Most young children in most circumstances are bases of responsiveness for helpfulness. But not sadists, rapists, or tyrants. We return to this in our final point.
   
   
3. The virtue-relative conception of MC is a very broad and thereby unifying one, despite the fact that it does derive from virtue. It is far broader than a typical MC foundationalist account, according to which an MC entity must have its own interests. On a (or my) virtue ethics account, having interests is not a requirement. Of course, an entity could have interests. And these interests could make the entity MC. If so, that would be because an entity with interests may be the basis of responsiveness for a particular virtue – for example a virtue of "respect for nature".
   
   But we must take care to avoid a possible confusion about this. "Having interests" – the interests of a living thing or (if some might claim) a collective such as a species or ecosystem – may serve two quite different metaethical roles. On the one hand, it may be an end that justifies one or more virtues. On the other hand, it may be the basis of responsiveness for some virtue that is a disposition to promote those very interests. But these two things are logically distinct and as a matter of fact, are distinct for many virtues – even virtues whose basis of responsiveness are (or include) entities with their own interests. For example, the bases of responsiveness of a virtue of communion with nature are typically natural objects and environments. But (I would say) the ends served by this virtue are those of the moral agent – namely, her ability to enjoy and take advantage of natural delights on their own terms.
   
   The point here is that, in this virtue ethics conception, MC is a broad and unifying concept not confined to entities with interests. Objects, collectives, properties, events of various sorts can all be MC as the basis for a virtuous response.
   
   
4. It does not require that an MC object without interests have intrinsic value (in the sense of "non-instrumental value"). What must have intrinsic (non-instrumental) value is the end served by the virtue, whose basis of responsiveness is (by definition) MC. This lightens the burden of trying to sort out (as do those wedded to MC foundationalism) the duality presented by things that are MC versus things that have intrinsic value.
   
   
5. It embraces a plurality of kinds of MC. This is the almost-too-obvious consequence of the plurality of virtues, the plurality of ends that the various virtues serve (and that justify them), and the plurality of entities that are the bases for a virtuous moral agent's response. For example, benevolence (or an agent who is benevolent) may respond to other agents by promoting their capabilities. On the other hand, a nonmalifecent agent may focus on nonhuman natural goods on which others depend for their well-being, and the need to act so as not to compromise those goods.
   
   
6. It embraces the possibility that any entity may embody multiple kinds of MC. This is a straightforward consequence of the fact that one entity may be the basis of responsiveness for multiple virtues. Thus, an entity may be acted upon out of benevolence, out of respect for autonomy, and so on.
   
   
7. Finally, it avoids theoretical epicycles and mysterious moral force shields of the sort that haunt MC foundationalism and that launched our discussion. There is no need to speak of prima facie duties to a sadist, rapist, or tyrant based on prima facie interests that have no moral weight and so only confer merely prima facie MC. Nothing needs to be overridden. Nothing needs to be "defeated". Instead, we recognize that such virtues as passive benevolence (e.g. nonmaleficence) and active benevolence (e.g. helpfulness) are justified as serving certain ends. For example, they might serve social cooperation or eudaimonistic ends such as giving children the opportunity develop and realize the best in themselves. As such, sadists, rapists, and tyrants are typically not proper bases for a benevolent person's response. These kinds of people are not, at least with respect to this kind of virtue, MC.

Addendum: Through Thick and Thin: Consequentialism versus Virtue Ethics

O'Neill's, et. al. seem to claim that only virtue ethics can capture the nuance and complexity of the moral landscape and the place of MC in it. I do not subscribe to that position. But my position is also rather different from (and may not be welcomed by) those MC foundationalists who merely replace a QCD model of MC with a Standard Model of MC.

As Dale Jameison has observed (in “Why Utilitarians Should be Virtue Theorists”), utilitarianism is a kind of ethical Turing Machine. But I'm not thinking of Jamieson's advocacy of the "local appropriation" of virtue within a broader, more standard act utilitarian framework. Rather, it seems to me highly plausible that some form of rule consequentialism might be formulated so as to emulate virtue ethics. That is because the rules in such a rule utilitarianism, like the virtues in a virtue ethics, are justified logically prior to, and separate from actions. In the sort of rule utilitarianism I have in mind, actions would be evaluated with reference to the rules. This is rather different from the standard (and I believe Jamieson's) utilitarian conception of virtue as "dispositions, the possession of which maximize utility".

But while a properly formulated rule utilitarianism may turn out to "emulate" a properly formulated virtue ethics, its theoretical foundations may look quite different. That is because the logic of justifying rules in a consequentialist framework may differ substantially from the logic of justifying character traits in a virtue ethics framework. This may call into question whether, in the absence of the emulation goal, an honest working out of rule utilitarianism would, in fact, yield the emulation result.

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The Toontown guide to natural value

Or: Suspending the laws of ecological science

0 Introduction: Good values, good science, and the Natural Capital Project

Toontown: Still from the 1988 movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Toontown, in the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", is a place that is free of the laws of physics and where the principles of decent behavior are ignored. It is a place where Toons thrive. But it is an ominous and dangerous place for real people.

The "Natural Capital Project" – the working out of nature's economic value – is a place that is free from the laws of real ecological science. It is also a place that suspends basic principles of justice and other fundamental requirements for any acceptable theory of value. It is a place in which the usual beneficiaries of economic valuation thrive. But is ominous and dangerous to real natural systems, and ultimately, to people, too.

It is a matter of grave concern that many fine scientists, motivated by the urge to save nature, have joined the rush to the Natural Capital Project. In fact, its most public and distinguished proponents are extremely talented scientists. These people, most of whom have a deep respect for nature and wish to halt its accelerating destruction, are unable to resist the allure of natural capitalism, which derives from the power of "bottom line" reasoning to influence and justify policy. On first encounter, I also found it exciting, even revelatory.

But the proponents of natural capitalism, like myself at first, may not have considered, or may not be equipped to consider whether this project really makes sense as a legitimate value proposition. Whether it makes sense as a legitimate theory of natural value. Whether it make moral sense. Whether we could really live with what it implies. Whether it even makes scientific sense.

Scientific sense. Good scientists are greatly concerned that their science be represented correctly to inform social deliberation. There have been too many recent cases of the intentional warping of science to suit preconceived political ends. I will argue that it is a distorted or cartoon version of science that supports natural capitalism. I don't think that the scientific community that supports natural capitalism realizes how that support subverts the real science that they hold dear.

At bottom, the Natural Capital Project is an hypothesis or claim about natural value. Of course, it is not entirely, or even mostly, an empirical claim. But I think that in one important sense familiar to scientists, it should be regarded as would a scientific hypothesis or claim – as something that merits the most vigorous and rigorous scrutiny.

There's a lot at stake. Nature is being destroyed at an almost incomprehensible pace. Many of our monetary and intellectual resources to try to slow, stop, or reverse the destruction are invested in the Natural Capital Project. Surely, we would not wish for that project to be a path that not only fails to slow the devastation, but actually accelerates and even guarantees it. That, I believe, is the direction where natural capitalism leads.

I am here concerned with assumptions and presuppositions that are rarely, if ever, thoughtfully discussed in the scientific and economic literature. The issues of value and good science are complex and merit some extended discussion. Here are major signposts to help the reader navigate it:

1) Why economic value is completely inappropriate as a general theory of value.
2) A socio-psychological speculation on the striking paradox that economic reasoning is embraced as a way to preserve nature despite the fact that it has been the principal driving force behind its devastation.
3) The role of science and scientists in the economic valuation of nature.
4) The dangers of playing this role.
5) A brief digression describing the very different (and, I think, irrelevant) problem set that economists define for themselves.
6) How the "science" that scientists present to describe units of natural economic value is a cartoon version of the real science that they do.
7) Chess value: An analogy for natural capital.
8) A postscript: How to see through some transparently bad defenses of natural capitalism.

1 Economics and a cartoon theory of value

Economics is evaluation based on unvarnished, unchallenged human self-interest. Not just any kind of self-interest. Rather, it is specifically the kind of self-interest that we express in the marketplace by giving up something we prefer less (often, part of our paycheck) for something we prefer more (a thing we like). The universe of economic value is the universe of value-in-trade, which projects the subjective preferences of the traders, each trying to gain her own marketplace advantage.

It is startling, or it should be startling, that economists speak of this kind of value as "human welfare". But in the world of economics, "human welfare" is just another term for "economic value". Economic value is realized by acquiring as much as possible of what we think we want. Omitted is any consideration of whether or not that really does result in well-being. Or a good life. Or whether it properly considers the rights and interests of other persons. (Which some would say is part of living the good life.) Everyone is expected to look after her own rights and interests. And to satisfy them to as great a degree as possible. Independent of the consequences for others – which the economic calculus is prepared to include in its cumulative calculations.

Some players in the market game have nothing or almost nothing to give up for trade. They are therefore willing to take almost anything from those of greater means with a lot to gain in a trade. But the perfectness of a "perfect" market transaction has nothing to do with fairness.

That this may be acceptable value framework even in the marketplace is not, or should not be a foregone conclusion. But economists go further – much further. Perhaps duped by their own, ill-considered use of the term "human welfare" (scare quotes mandatory), or perhaps over-impressed with their virtuosic facility in computing economic value, they carry their notion of value well outside the domain of the marketplace. They boldly present the concept of economic value as a general theory of value. Or at least, the theory of value to use in public discourse. Often, its most flagrant failing – its radical subjectivity (the third of economic valuation's four problems discussed below) – is flaunted to justify its use in the public domain. In this context, economists relabel the radical subjectivity of their moral universe as "moral neutrality".

It is painfully obvious that the economic conception of value is a non-starter for a general theory of value. It seems absurd to think that a market-based conception of human interactions could ground a theory of moral value, a theory of the good life, or a theory that accounts for normative standards in human relationships – both inter-human relationships and relationships with non-human nature. But exactly that thinking – that economic value is a viable conception of general value – has a stranglehold on the public imagination. It is ensconced in our political institutions. It has even taken hold in many if not most organizations that profess environmental advocacy. And it is the basis for natural capitalism.

Perhaps this is "just" thinking as though economic value is all the value there is. But we base some of our most critical decisions on the equivalence of value (unqualified) and economic value. These are decisions that, for example, determine who and how many people are to die from toxic pollution. They are undeniably laden with implications for morality and justice. So in practice "just" thinking as though value = economic value is no different from thinking that they are substantively equivalent.

The purchase of economic evaluative thinking on the public mind – and more to the point of this essay – on scientists is real and tenacious. So before proceeding, we would do well to briefly consider (just) four in a long list of crippling problems with this premise.

First, the economic conception of value is extraordinarily narrow. To make the value of every thing the value of that thing considered as a commodity in a market transaction is to grotesqely truncate the value of things. (The use of the term "commodity" is not uniform. We here use it in the general sense of a relatively homogeneous "good" that can be a resource or a service. The homogeneity is sufficient to make interchangeable all goods of a kind.) It is doubtful that this conception of value would serve even for commodities, let along for other persons, social standards of conduct, or for nature. The old, beat-up, Sears Craftsman hammer that my father gave me as my first "grown-up" tool is worthless as a marketplace commodity – assimilated into the domain of a multitude of vastly superior pounding tools now available at Sears and elsewhere. Yet it was, and still is to me, priceless as a symbol of my father's recognition of my emerging adult competence and trustworthiness. A hammer is one thing, perhaps a minor one. But economic value is stretched well beyond its credible boundaries when used as the value of a human life, of human autonomy, of a constitution of a state, of an old-growth forest, of a wetland, of the public "good", or of our relations to future generations of persons. To name but a few. Is (as economic theory demands) one wetland (whether built by nature or constructed by conservation biologists) as good as the next? And only valuable in relation to the condominiums that we might otherwise develop on such valuable real estate? The notions of "mitigation banking" and "habitat banking" that natural capitalists tout as successful applications of their theory of value take advantage of that theory's support for building a fake wetland in a poor location for condos to substitute for the loss of a real wetland in a location that makes a lot of money for the developer. Economic value is thereby increased.

Second, it is surely naive to think that unrelenting preference satisfaction leads to greater overall value – let alone a better life – for all. The claim that it does is an empirical one. It may be true or it may be false. To believe it true is to ignore the overwhelmingly negative effect of placing all (considered) values in the strategic environment of the marketplace. I think that this becomes clear when we consider the world of market transactions as the strategic backdrop for all deliberation. This is the world in which every isolated actor looks out for her own interests. She tries to satisfy as many of her preferences as possible, with no obligation (or inclination) to consider any other interests – except insofar as they immediately effect hers. Critically, each actor acts with the understanding that this is how the other actors are playing the game, too.

The phrase "playing the game" is apt. This is the world of game theory that so intrigues economists. But as game theory shows, it is a world in which actors are notoriously denied the best opportunities for leading a good life. In the absence of the good and meaningful kinds of social relationships that may establish expectations for cooperation, an entire universe of opportunities is made completely inaccessible. As a result, each actor is confined to a set of choices in a universe where the value opportunities are severely constricted. In such a universe, an actor cannot possibly realize the best in life. The best of the remaining choices may be (and it seems, often is) poor, or even utterly vile. But in this kind of strategic world – one that excludes even the possibility of the truly best choices – the isolated individual actor must embrace the poor, or the utterly vile as the choice that serves her narrow interests. That is what she "prefers". As a result, that is what registers in economic inventory-taking. [A player in this economic game is known as "economic man".]

Third, the economic view of "human welfare" is so radically subjective that it seems to preclude any normative standard at all. It seems quite naive to unquestioningly assume that what any person prefers to acquire in a trade enhances her "welfare" and therefore enhances the total "welfare" of all. A raft of circumstances contribute to this. There is self-destructive behavior. There is grossly misplaced and misconstrued wants. There is the general difficulty of any person determining what is really in her best interest – especially when subjected to the psychological manipulations of modern marketing.

There is even less justification in supposing that total "welfare" is increased when any person satisfies her preferences. To suppose this is to embrace the unworthy interests of bad people and even monsters – tyrants, barbarians, serial rapists – along with worthy interests. They are all interests, and economic preference satisfaction has no possible way to differentiate them. The "moral neutrality" of economic value cannot and does not discriminate. It therefore cannot discount, let alone discard entirely the interest of moral barbarians.

Fourth, economic value is built on a foundation of thoroughgoing injustice. The marketplace is red in the pocketbook. The weak players – the poor and powerless – count for less because they have less to spend. Their very lives count for less in the economic calculus because they are willing to accept less remuneration for economic development that literally poisons them. They accept bad deals because they have few choices; and for the poorest, all of the deals are bad. The preferences of the rich are represented and considered more than those of the poor. And not just proportionally more, according to how much more rich they are. Because the rich are also powerful. And with that power comes a disproportionate control of social and political institutions, which consequently become levers for even greater consideration of their preferences. The end result is a wholesale violation of the equal consideration principle – perhaps the single most basic principle of justice.

As we have indicated, these are not the only problems. The list is quite long. But for our current purpose, they suffice to suggest that we should be alarmed at the use of economic reasoning to ascribe value in most contexts – including the context of complex natural systems. Taken out of its natural marketplace habitat, economic value is a frightening cartoon of a theory of value.

2 The paradox of using economics to defend nature

In his essay "Beyond Hope" (Orion, 2006), Derrick Jensen comments:

Most ... environmentalists are fighting desperately, using whatever tools they have – or rather whatever legal tools they have, which means whatever tools those in power grant them the right to use, which means whatever tools will be ultimately ineffective – to try to protect some piece of ground, to try to stop the manufacture or release of poisons, to try to stop civilized humans from tormenting some group of plants or animals. Sometimes they're reduced to trying to protect just one tree...

Among other environmentalists, Jensen's passage describes well-intentioned natural capitalists, who have have latched onto the tool of economic reasoning.

2.1 Destroying the environment in the name of economic value

I have argued that, as a general theory of value, economic value is a cartoon.

But it is undeniably ensconced in the policy-making conventions of our social institutions – the institutions that wield power. From that leverage point, the theory of value as economic value is largely responsible for the kind of thinking and attitudes that underlie human activities that have destroyed earth's natural systems and are currently finishing the job. That is because, by traditional economic lights, natural systems are purely and simply fodder for the economic engine that increases economic value – satisfying the wants and desires of economic man.

It can be argued (and has been, elsewhere in this blog), that unless this economic concept of value is reined back into its proper and very restricted domain (of efficiently running a business), unless it is framed by a real, coherent general theory of the good life, it will continue to justify and fuel the economic engine that completes the destructive project that it unleashed in the first place. By all indications, it is doing just that. The devastation is, if anything accelerating. And economic evaluation is squarely behind it.

2.2 Saving the environment in the name of economic value (natural capitalism)

So it is an exquisitely painful irony that some economists have deployed their concept of economic value (aka "human welfare") to stop the devastation. At the very least, it seems odd to suggest that the solution to a problem is to perpetuate its cause. How can this possibly work?

The reasoning goes like this: Why are humans engaging in activities that are accelerating the destruction of nature? At bottom, there is really just a single answer. It is because we humans value most other things more than we value nature. For us, the value of intact natural systems falls so far below the value of what we believe we gain (the consumptive preferences that we satisfy) by destroying them – using them as fuel for the economic engine – that the destruction barely registers as a contravening consideration.

But what if we could show that, contrary to our initial assumptions, destroying nature actually destroys what we value? That is the Holy Grail of many who feel, some with great conviction, that nature has enormous value, and that its irrevocable destruction is an unspeakably enormous loss of that value for all humans now and forever.

If anything, this latter day Holy Grail is more elusive than the original. The conviction that there really is enormous value in intact natural systems seems suspended in space – with no visible support or suspending thread. It is frustratingly difficult to find a justifying foundation for nature's great value.

Casting about for the values that strongly influence modern attitudes and behavior, we inevitably stumble into the dominant evaluative force of modern society. The juggernaut that powers the decision engine of society and apparently even widely adopted by many individuals, is none other than economic value grounded in the calculus of human preferences.

From the economic viewpoint, the question:

What if we could show that, contrary to our initial assumptions, destroying nature actually destroys what we value?

is transformed into

What if we could show that previously unbeknownst to us, our economic self-interests are damaged – that is, economic value is reduced – when we damage natural systems?

So it is that we are led to ask if we might ascribe economic value to nature. Asking this question and trying to answer it – really, trying to answer it with a prejudice for ascribing as great an economic value as possible, to save as much of nature as possible – is the "Natural Capital Project" (http://naturalcapitalproject.org). Those who pursue this project call themselves "natural capitalists".

3 Where science and scientists come in

When economists go to compute the value of nature – the economic value as "natural capital" – they need to slice and dice natural systems into pieces amenable to economic accounting. An account of natural systems for economic accounting is one in which nature is modeled as a collection of commodities. Each commodity comprises multiple units – the pieces from the aforementioned slicing and dicing. And each unit is, or at least (for the purposes of economic computation) must be considered indistinguishable from the next. Then, the economic value of nature is revealed as the price units of these natural commodities command in a marketplace – real or imagined.

But how do we identify the "chunks" of natural systems – chunks of stuff (natural resources). Or chunks of services rendered? (Our economy is now largely a "services economy", a fact not lost on the natural capitalists.) When we stare at a forested mountain, a tropical jungle, a salt marsh, where do we draw the lines to define the chunks that we can trade? How do we identify the units of service –- sequestering carbon, filtering water – that it provides? There's a lot of stuff in there – leaves and soil and roots and insects and bigger animals and bacteria and lots more. And there are a lot stuff going on there – nitrogen being fixed, carbon being assimilated, water being circulated, temperatures being regulated, plants being pollinated, and lots, lots more.

This is where scientists come in. Eager to do their part to abate the accelerating destruction of nature, scientists oblige environmental economists by giving them chunked up, commoditized versions of nature – something as ready and fit to be traded as a microwave at your local Walmart. As I argue in the following sections, these are a grotesquely cartoonish versions of scientists' real understanding of nature. The end result, I think, is that wonderfully good scientists create cartoon versions of their work to prop up a cartoon theory of natural value.

4 Why scientists should not compromise their science

I need to emphasize that I believe that it is cartoon versions of their science, not their real science, that scientists feed into the economic calculus. My case is based on four deep and abiding concerns – concerns that I believe scientists in the natural capital program would share.

First, it seems highly likely that if the Natural Capital Project succeeds – in the sense of being accepted as the primary tool for assigning value to nature – then it will utterly fail in its objective of halting nature's devastation. In fact, it will succeed in justifying an ever more accelerating and ever more thorough devastation of nature, just as economic thinking has all along. The major (though not the only) reason for this has to do with technology. Whatever economic value we can find in nature – in terms of either resources supplied or "ecosystem services" rendered – will increasingly be supplantable and therefore, supplanted by cheaper and therefore economically more desirable (i.e., economically more valuable) technological surrogates.

Consider the classic and oft-cited case described by Rickets T.H., Daily, G.C., Ehrlich, P.R., and Michener, C.D., "Economic Value of Tropical Forest to Coffee Production", Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), 101:34 (August 24, 2002), pp. 12579-12582. This study seemed to demonstrate that wild bees living on the periphery of a Costa Rican coffee farm contributed "pollination services" that substantially increased coffee production. Thus, it may have seemed, the best economic value of the forested periphery land was realized by leaving it forested, as a habitat for the bee polliinators.

But what if we found that we could domesticate these bees and keep them in hives? Or what if we found even more efficient, non-wild pollinators that did not need the forest habitat? What if a clever engineer invented a cheap super-pollinating device that could out-pollinate any bee now or ever, and by wide margin? What if the farmer determined that another crop, not requiring native pollinators, would be more profitable? Then the now-forested land would become more (economically) valuable for other uses – most likely, after the forest is cleared. The questions we posed were "what if" questions. But is there really any doubt that they are more legitimately "when" questions?

Unlike the "what if" questions, the "when" question is an empirical question. It has an empirical answer that we may legitimately decline to try to answer before the fact. That should not make us lose sight of the power of the "what if" questions which make it plain that a natural capitalist is committed to welcome any turn of events that frees the forest as a hostage chained to its economic value as a home for pollinating bees.

As a matter of fact, it really was a question of "when" for the bees. Soon after the study, the price of coffee dropped precipitously. The farm replaced its coffee plantings with pineapple which did not have the coffee plants' pollination needs. When that happened, natural capitalists should have lobbied to "develop" the forested land. Left standing and no longer providing the basis for any service, it had been transformed from a possible benefit into a definite opportunity cost. On natural capitalist principles, cutting down the forest for development is the right action – the action that increases "human welfare". Perhaps it's even the required action; it would be reprehensible to do otherwise. (See McCauley, D.J., "Selling out on nature", Nature, 443:7 (September 2006), pp. 27-28 (http://www.fsd.nl/naturevaluation/75062). See also the anemic responses to McCauley's commentary – some of which we cite below – in the same issue of Nature.)

Two further conditions exacerbate the downward spiral of natural economic value. For one thing, we often come to understand how an ecosystem really works only after it fails. Almost as often, that juncture is also when we come to understand the ecosystem's economic value – the services it was quietly providing without our being aware. Why does our knowledge so often have this retrospective (as opposed to predictive) quality? It is because ecosystems are so complex – there are so many interacting variables and factors – that even the most brilliant and clever ecologists never know them all. In their investigations, they cannot even control for all that they do know. But a point of failure provides an anchor from which clever scientists can play detective, and trace back through the serious of insults that led up to it. They can reconstruct how, one by one, each successive insult removed some incremental ability of the system to recover from the next insult. Finally comes the understanding of the final insult – the proximate cause of failure – as the one that acted on a system devoid of resilience. Applied to a system with no further ability to compensate or adjust, we understand how that final insult – in a single, dramatic quantum leap – pushed the system into its final state of low and degraded functioning. Alas, at that point, the ecosystem's value – economic or otherwise – has plummeted. There is little left to salvage. There is little left to love or to value.

The other exacerbating condition is a positive, sociological feedback that strongly reinforces the inexorable decline of natural capital. As natural systems vanish, they vanish from human consideration. They therefore vanish from human preferences to preserve them. But since these preferences are the ultimate basis of all economic value, their economic value vanishes, too. There is already strong and growing evidence of this positive feedback effect (http://www.world-science.net/othernews/080204_nature).

It is worth noting that a true natural capitalist – a true believer in the economic conception of natural value – should welcome this result. Viewed through an economic lens, it is good news indeed, because it means that little or nothing of (economic) value is lost with the loss of any part of the natural world that doesn't provide resources or services that (at least at the moment) cannot be provided inexpensively by human technology. The already-evident bottom line of economic reckoning will become ever more clear. "Human welfare" increases as we make use of now (otherwise) valueless places in nature. "Human welfare" will increase as we appropriate places that now have no place in human consideration – except as places for highways, housing developments, oil exploration, and shipping lanes. All of these things, after all, satisfy strong, deeply entrenched preferences.

The second element of my case is that, by presenting a cartoon version of their science for the purpose of economic analysis, and by putting their imprimatur on it, scientists sabotage critical public thinking on, and deliberation about nature's value. Firstly, they compromise the credibility of their own science. With scientific credibility already under assault from other (politically prejudiced) quarters, it seems grossly irresponsible for scientists to volunteer for an inside job. Secondly, they marginalize the vitally needed, messy, and complex real science by thrusting it into the shadow of its grossly oversimplified cartoon version. It is the credible and real science of natural systems – the science that depicts nature in its real, interconnected, gnarly, and admitted largely unknown complexity, and as part of an equally complex historical unfolding of geological, biological, and chemical systems – that is irreplaceable as the factual backdrop for a full, rich, and satisfying picture of natural value.

Third, even now, with technology in its current state (see the first point of this section), much of what scientists appear to value in natural systems is just not worth saving according to honestly done economic analyses. Economic valuation looks at the "marginal (economic) value" – the value of protecting the next commoditized unit – one more species (say the right whale) or one more hectare of habitat (say, old-growth temperate rainforest). As a matter of empirical fact, the marginal values of such "commodities" are often vanishingly small. It is just a bad (economic) deal to save the next right whale or the next hectare of old-growth rainforest. The probabilities of these natural entities having some economic in the future is so vanishingly small, that this kind of future-looking consideration adds essentially nothing to their net present economic value.

For a discussion of the rainforests, see Bulte, E., Van Kooten, G.C., "Economic Science, Endangered Species, and Biodiversity Loss", Conservation Biology, 14:1 (February 2000), pp. 113-119. As they point out, the enormous timber value of the trees and the superior carbon uptake of a plantation of young, fast-growing saplings that could replace the old-growth trees strongly militate against saving most of what remains of these ancient forests – on economic grounds.

For a discussion of right whales, consider the logic (and ignore the crudeness) of the imagined poster of "Those goddamn whales" (http://environmentalvalues.blogspot.com/2008/04/those-goddamn-whales.html). That character is the mouthpiece of the economist who understands that right whales (unlike the ancient forests) have essentially no economic value and that slowing down ships to avoid ramming them has a measurable economic cost. Therefore, "human welfare" is increased by continuing to sail ships at full throttle, no matter how many individual whales are injured or killed, and despite the significant contribution towards the species' extinction. To embrace natural capitalism is to enthusiastically embrace the extinction of the right whales, happy in the knowledge that it truly serves "human welfare".

The previous three points argue that economic valuation is impotent in preventing natural destruction. That might be an unhappy result for some of us. But if we were honest, we should embrace it as the honest moral truth about nature: It's just not worth much.

The fourth point gets back to value and the damage that economic valuation does to natural value. Natural capitalism teaches us that it is the right thing to let a developer build condos in a wetland in exchange for constructing an artificial one elsewhere. It teaches us that the forest around that Costa Rican coffee plantation did suddenly plummet in value when the farmer replaced the coffee with pineapple. It teaches us that we should enthusiastically embrace the extinction of the right whales – happy in the knowledge that their demise serves "human welfare" by permitting shippers to reduce their costs and therefore ours as consumers of the shipped goods. In short, I would say that any value that we place in nature is sabotaged by this economic conception of its value.

5 A digression: The problems within the economic field of view

Before proceeding with the main thread of the argument, I should acknowledge that at least some environmental economists sense the difficulty of identifying the valuable chunks in the first place. They see that there are an awful lot of chunks of stuff – not just in number, but in type. They aren't packaged in any neat or uniform way. Ecosystem services are particularly tricky to identify in a way that is directly linked to its economic benefit. Confusion about this can lead to double-counting. See, for example, Boyd, J., "The Nonmarket Benefits of Nature: What Should be Counted in Green GDP?", Resources for the Future (RFF) DP 06-24, May 2006.

By Boyd's lights, these difficulties are merely technical ones that are surmounted by careful estimation techniques on the one hand, and careful accounting on the other. Thus, we can estimate the distribution of timber densities in the forest, weigh certain services by their availability (proximity) to human settlements, or, as seems increasingly common, take a survey of previously published economic results (which seems a methodologically vexed approach). According to Boyd, we just have to be careful to tie an ecosystem service to its marketable benefit.

Economists are also concerned that much of the "stuff" from natural systems and perhaps most of their services don't actually enter into the marketplace in the way required by economic theory. This is very inconvenient for a theory that is focused entirely on market value – or rather, value as expressed in the context of a market transaction. Even when natural "goods" do enter into transactions, there are often "externalities" (costs or benefits that don't accrue to the parties in the transaction) that skew the actual market price (aka "economic value").

Confronted with this dilemma, one might think that it wise to take a step back to ask if the value of every "thing" – a natural system or a human life, for example – can be conceived in terms of value-in-a-transaction. Not economists. They have a facile solution for their apparent predicament: If there are no real prices in a real market, invent them. The prices. And the market.

The reader with no economic training may think that this defies common sense. I'm afraid that it does; but it is nonetheless how economic valuation is done. For goods that are not traded at all, "shadow prices" are substituted for the market prices that would exist were there a real market for them. How, you may ask, do we find these prices, if there is no real market? By economists' lights this is "tricky" but "just" another technical difficulty – one easily surmounted by clever estimation techniques, value proxies (for example, hedonic pricing), preference (for example, contingent evaluation) surveys, and various theoretical constructs that, so far as I can tell, are supported (if at all) by thin analogies and armchair speculation about hypothetical situations. The ultimate estimation technique that professional economists use is the survey of previously offered and unsupported estimation techniques.

These are the problems in economists' field of view. They are the launching pad for taking off into the stratosphere of economic equilibrium theory and flailing away at the "technical difficulties" in framing natural systems as natural capital. In the process, many Ph.D. candidates turn into Ph.D economists and many Ph.D. economists make many calculations of natural capital and publish those calculations in many economic (and scientific) journals.

It is extremely distressing to me that the most basic and vexed premises – the ones about natural value as natural capital – that fueled the launch in the first place are left far behind and untouched. A very few "environmentally enlightened" economists such as Jim Boyd mention them. But he and others that do quickly brush them aside and just forge ahead with the economics. Far more often, these premises are never even acknowledged.

6 Natural capitalism: Cartoon science for a world of cartoon value

I now get to the part of my argument that, I think, should especially concern scientists in their role as scientists. (In their role as moral agents like the rest of us, I hope that scientists will also reflect on the preceding discussion of the principles of economic value and the implications of using economic valuation to value nature.)

Why do wonderfully good scientists who produce wonderfully good science offer cartoons instead of real science to economists? The section on Where science and scientists come in hints at the answer.

The economic calculus works with commodities (in the sense that we prescribed at the outset) that comprise collections of discrete, atomic, largely static and non-interacting, and indistinguishable chunks of "stuff" (or services) that can be traded in a market and that are therefore viewed in the narrow timeframe of a market transaction. Unfortunately, natural systems are not anything like this.

No matter how brilliant the scientist, when she attempts to reduce an ecosystem to simple economic parameters, the ecosystem is no longer recognizable as the thing that it is. Gone are the complex guts of a natural system that makes it interesting to scientists. Gone are the myriad components and threads of myriad processes that intertwine and interact in every possible time frame – from seconds to years to millennia and beyond. Gone are the interconnections at every possible spatial frame – from direct contact to downstream to the other side of the planet. Gone are the impossible-to-predict chains of events that stem from even the seemingly smallest and least significant perturbation or insult, but that lead to major, irreversible changes.

What remains is an eviscerated depiction of nature. What remains, I think, is something like a Toontown version of science – a cartoon that makes economic calculations possible. Gone are the guts. Gone too are the significant, non-economic values that (unlike economic value) just might make nature worth saving.

Let's examine this more closely – first by way of a common example of environmental economics, and then by way of analogy.

6.1 An example: The economic value of a unit of forest

We have this very typical statement from an environmentally concerned economist:

The shadow price of an asset represents the change in welfare due to an incremental change in stock, and is the value we assign (or impute) to that resource. So for example, the shadow price of deforestation is how much worse off we are due to an incremental loss of forest, and the physical change is the forest area change between this year and last year. Our total welfare loss is the product of these two components, i.e. the unit cost of deforestation multiplied by the total area lost.

We have already encountered the notion of a shadow price. We offer no further comment here, except to remind ourselves that when an economist says that these are not real market prices, this should not be misinterpreted to be even the slightest departure from the basic economic conception of value as conferred to something as an object of trade. Rather, with that phrase, economists are saying that, as an inconvenient matter of fact, there exists no perfectly functioning market (according to the precepts of neoclassical economics), for units (in this case) of a forest commodity. In the best of economic worlds, there could be. In any case, we can imagine such a world well enough to approximate the commodity's "true" price.

So what picture do scientists paint of a forest as a basis for economic evaluation?

First, it is a collection of homogeneous hectares – a very uninteresting jigsaw puzzle with identically sized and identically shaped (square, I would imagine) pieces. For as we have seen, the calculation of economic value presumes a market for a commodity – something with units that are (for market purposes) indistinguishable.

Second, to attach a value to each unit of the forest commodity, scientists find some goods (and bads) in each of these averaged hectares. And they find some services (and disservices) averaged over them all.

How many economic goods (or bads)? How many services (or disservices)? The list is typically short. Very short.

For a forest, the lion's share of the resource goods typically comes from the timber – the market value of the "harvest" from an average hectare. The lion's share of the service goods (again, for a forest) typically comes from its carbon-processing capability – the average that is recaptured from the troposphere and the incremental economic benefit of avoiding the need to deal with whatever climate havoc that bit of atmospheric carbon (as carbon dioxide) might have caused.

To be sure, other goods are mentioned from time to time. There's the "potential for the miracle cancer cure" gambit. But as previously mentioned, for any reasonable set of assumptions about likelihood, that value is typically miniscule compared to timber value. Modern society's technological prowess in synthesizing chemicals also rears its value-diminishing head.

"Environmentally very enlightened" economists often tip their hats to "aesthetic cost" of a clear-cut hectare. Recreational costs of such a forest use are dutifully cited, too. But these costs are again tiny – and diminishing with our increasing disinclination go there or to find one of these increasingly rare places. Economists rarely take into account the opportunity cost of not replacing relatively unpopular and boring forest hectarage with a far more popular Disney theme park. But by their own precepts, they should.

There are the birds, and sometimes, as in a previously mentioned example, the (pollinating) bees. But the birds only make biologists and bird-watchers happy; there are so few of them (and sadly, also the birds, which have been disproportionately affected by the current great wave of extinction) that their preferences barely register. And the bees? We've already noted how their contribution to value can (and in the cited famous case did) vanish literally overnight.

Almost never are the economic bads mentioned. For many forests (such as old-growth temperate forests), the services they perform by sequestering carbon are negative, not positive in value. The trees represent not a benefit, but rather the opportunity cost of not replacing them with vigorously growing plantation monocultures that sequester carbon at far higher rates.

We are left with a picture of the forest as a collection of generic hectares – units of stock on the shelves of a natural Walmart. Each unit of stock yields a certain amount of timber and provides a poor to rather bad service in snatching carbon out of the air. Its unit (marginal) value is what such a unit commands in a market transaction.

6.2 The forest as science really sees it

How does this picture of an anonymous unit of forest fit with our best science? How does it fit with ecology? Or with systems theory?

It doesn't. I think that it doesn't even come close. There's barely anything that is scientifically recognizable. How does it miss the mark? It's hard to know where to begin, and even harder to know where to end, in answering that question. At least, we begin.

What do scientists really see when they look at a forest? Nothing like an homogeneous commodity with two or three value-determining characteristics. Instead they see that:

-> The effect on the community (species) structure of an ecosystem depends critically on which patch of forest is destroyed. For example, island biogeography demonstrates that eliminating the population island that is the principle recolonizing source for satellite patches subject to periodic, but perhaps infrequent disturbance (e.g. drought) could wipe out all populations in the region. In a tropical forest, where distances between individual trees of the same species may be great, a single tree may be a population island for species-specific insects.

-> The effect on community structure also may critically depend on whether "harvesting" leaves one large area intact, or whether it leaves a patchwork of many small fragments, or whether the entire area was uniformly "thinned".

-> Trees removed near a stream or lake will have a different effect on erosion, leaf litter, habitat for insects, the amount of unfiltered, sediment-laden runoff, and the consequent vitality of fish and aquatic invertebrate populations. Any of these changes could be utterly transforming.

-> The relative ability of different organisms to act and react to different kinds of changes comes into play. The success of some species to adjust and the failure of others to do so could easily lead to dramatic changes in trophic interactions. Any reduction in forest area will have a greater adverse impact on large predators that require larger territories. Trees removed from a mountaintop "island" will have a far greater effect on land-bound organisms compared to birds.

-> The decline of some species could make the forest more susceptible to alien invasions that would be a strong positive feedback for a further decline of native species.

-> The removal of trees may have relatively hard-to-calibrate effects, such as the the greater sensible heat and higher local temperatures that result from the decreased albedo in a way that hinges on small details in the pattern of tree removal.

And then there are the cascading effects that ecological science cannot predict – including ones that directly impinge on human lives. Any of these scenarios are possible, but our total ignorance of them or their likelihood make them impossible to evaluate:

-> The demise of large predators leads to an explosion of smaller, disease-carrying animals. The people who are encouraged to move into the cleared spaces have increased contact with these animals. A parasite is given the opportunity to infect human hosts. A new and devastating human disease is born.

-> Humans now in close proximity to the forest bring their livestock, and with them parasites that, for the first time, infect the native forest creatures. Or they build the inevitable roads, perhaps using asphalt, that further changes the characteristics of soil drainage, leaches toxins, and causes shifts in wind patterns, and consequently temperature and humidity. The forest dies, giving way to grasslands.

-> With the decrease in albedo and increase in heat comes more fire and the "need" to clear more forest to reduce its risk. With this positive feedback, the cutting down of the forest accelerates until almost none is left.

These intertwining and interacting complexities can be viewed through an additional lens – that of complex systems analysis. From that discipline we know that complex systems may appear to continue to function – at least for a time – after component parts are compromised. The role of the compromised component is discovered only when a disturbance or combination of disturbances makes its role apparent. Economic calculations never take into account the large temporal and spatial dimensions needed to observe and understand this. Thus, logging and even clear-cutting may go on for decades without any apparent problem (except aesthetic). Then, for example, a bark beetle infestation may destroy the entire forest – perhaps, as it turns out, because along with the trees went the nesting sites for the birds that fed on the beetle.

6.3 The economic view of one forest
In some cases, actions taken on economic grounds preempt any need to wait or to worry about the subtleties, gross uncertainties, and impossibly entangled causal webs of real ecological science.

It is worth mentioning such a case – also noteworthy because in it, timber is (or was) not the dominant economic value of the forest. In Madagascar, a rare coastal tropical forest was just an obstacle to realizing the far greater economic value of another resource. As an economist would say, the forest was an "opportunity cost" because it hindered the extraction of the vastly more (economically) valuable ilmenite.

Increasing the economic value of Madagascar's coastal forest land.

Ilmenite is the mineral source for titanium dioxide. Its economic value in Madagascar derives from the use of titanium dioxide as a white pigment, in the discontinuation of lead-based white pigments, and in the exhaustion of the Australian and South African sources of ilmenite. In this case, the trees were just collateral cost for the economic benefit of coloring things white – quite literally, the "good" of white-washing.

This case illustrates how our collective desires (preferences) for white house paint, white plastics, white toothpaste, and white-tinted cosmetics represent an economic value that far exceeds that of a rare kind of coastal tropical forest that is home to some of the rarest creatures on the planet. Whiteness in our life has more value than the precarious marine ecosystems that adjoin the ilmenite mine. It has more value than the ways of living and livelihood of the people who were uprooted to make way for the mine, a new port, and a network of roads. It is an economic benefit so great that it offsets the spread of HIV/aids

Lemur catta (Ring-tailed lemurs)

from the influx of migrant labor into Madagascar from the HIV-riddled African mainland.

Certainly, the mining company executives of Rio Tinto are being richly rewarded. In economic terms, the benefit far exeeds the cost of the total devastation of the local land and culture. It evidently also more than compensates for the fact that ultimately, after the mining is over and done in just a few decades (according to Rio Tinto's own projections), there will be no local economy at all. That has been accounted for in the net present value of the mining operations.

Of course, that still leaves out the preferences of lemurs to continue their (various) species' existence. And as you can see, that really pisses them off.

6.4 A brief digression: An enigma about scientists

Again, we digress – this time, for a very brief observation. Concern about many of the science-defying problems that we have expressed are acknowledged by scientists that are the very bulwark of the Natural Capital Project. See, for example, Daily, G.C., Söderqvist, T., Aniyar, S., Arrow, K., Dasgupta, P., Ehrlich, P.R., Folke, C., Jansson, A., Jansson, B., Kautsky, N., Levin, S., Lubchenco, J., Mäler, K., Simpson, D., Styarrett, D., Tilman, D., and Walker, B., "The Value of Nature and the Nature of Value", Science, 289:5478 (21 July 2000), pp. 395-396 (http://cisac.stanford.edu/publications/value_of_nature_and_the_nature_of_value_the/).

These authors characterize their concerns as "limitations of the scope of valuation". But they somehow cannot bring themselves to follow their own strong and correct instinct to the conclusion (that should be more obvious to them as highly trained scientists than to the rest of us as mere reasoning citizens) that this "limitation of scope" dictates a limitation of the science used in valuation to cartoon versions of their own excellent science. Enigmatically, they just turn their back on their own work that demonstrates, for example, that "highly interdependent and seemingly small changes in one place cause large impacts on the overall system."

7 An analogy from chess

I'd like to offer an analogy for the cartoon quality of science-in-the-service of economics. It comes from the world of chess.

Consider a critical juncture in a match between grandmaster players. We assess the board positions of white and black. We do this by taking an inventory of the chess pieces (resources) and give each resource a conventional value (commodity price). Actually, chess players view a chess piece more as a "chess service" than a resource. A piece's conventional value reflects a generally agreed upon generalized capability or function that it performs. In the chess marketplace, trades (aka piece exchanges) might be judged in terms of these values.

For the board in our grandmaster match, the inventory might be:

White: 1 knight @$3/knight, 2 bishops @$3/bishop, 3 pawns @$1/pawn, 1 king @$???

Black: 1 bishop @$3/knight, 1 rook @$5/rook, 2 pawns @$1/pawn, king @$???

In this chess economics, we find that white is worth $12 – $2 more than black's $10.

Are we satisfied that we have properly valued the position? That white's chess welfare is better than black's?

No, of course not. This is a cartoon valuation of the chess position built on a cartoon description of it. The description does not capture the lion's share of what we need to know about chess reality in order to arrive at meaningful chess values. Only someone ignorant of or purposely ignoring the complexities chess "systems" could deny this. I would say that this would be as ignorant as valuing natural systems based on the numbers that come from similarly static, highly truncated, and narrowly selective inventories of goods and services that happen to satisfy current human preferences.

Does it matter that "we got the numbers right" in our chess evaluation? (We did.) Does it matter that "at least we have some numbers, even if they're not the only ones"? (Again, we did.)

The answers are, of course, "No" and "No, again." To think of the value of black's rook (as we have) without regard to how its position relates to every other black piece individually and in every possible grouping, to think of its value independent of its relationship with every white piece and every possible group of white pieces – is senseless. Absent information about where each individual piece is placed on the board, absent an understanding the myriad dynamic relationships that exist between each piece and every other – not just in the current position, but in every possible development of it – our static chess inventory has no meaning.

As a consequence, it is a meaningless basis for assessing chess value, or the value of white's position versus black's. Chess novices quickly come to realize that a single-minded focus on reducing their opponents' piece inventory rarely produces a winning position. They quickly find out about gambits. Any merely competent chess player can easily construct a board position that has the chess economics that we have specified for our grandmaster match, but in which black checkmates white in the next move.

So it is with natural systems. Insofar as we can neatly define "pieces" in nature – for example, the individual plants and animals in population ecology – they cannot be understood independent of a raft of dynamically evolving relationships with each other and with myriad non-biotic conditions and processes. Nor can we dismiss the fact that each individual is unique. We know that some individuals can play unique and pivotal roles in their ecosystem dynamics. One views individual organisms as commodities at a considerable scientific risk.

The major point of disanalogy is that much or even most of nature cannot be understood as neatly defined "chunks" that resemble pieces on a chess board. We can carve up a forest in any number of ways achieve an equal number of perspectives on how it works. This is part of the creative art of ecologists. But the ecologist understands that each of the myriad chunks in each of these frameworks is connected to the chunks in its own framework, as well as to the different-in-kind-and-in-spatial-and-temporal-size chunks in all other frameworks through webs (not lines) of interactions that are as varied as the interacting nodes (chunks).

Yet, we still have not exhausted all that matters, even in chess. It does not suffice to just consider the continually changing threads of interactions on the chess board starting from the specified position. That alone fails to provide the complete story in a real tournament between real people. The history of the game leading to the current position may be critically important. How much time remains on white's clock versus black's as a result of their previous struggles? Has white's piece superiority come at a high mental cost from parrying one clever and aggressive thrust after another from black? With less time left on white's clock, what mental resilience does that player have in reserve?

Again, so it is with natural systems. The history of insults to them counts. What the insults were. In what sequence they were inflicted. Ecologists know that. But it is not in any way reflected in the cartoons they draw for economists. The economic calculus demands the cartoon.

The economic calculus does compute what economists call "dynamic efficiency". But the "dynamic" part of that has to do with allocating resources in different periods of time. In the world view of natural capitalism, it does nothing to change the cartoon of nature as a stock of discrete chunks of essentially non-interacting stuff. All it says is that some chunks can be taken off the shelves of nature's warehouse now; other chunks can be taken off the shelves later.

Consider this other question couched in terms of our chess analogy. What are we to make of the king? What is its chess value? Is it infinite? It is part of the inventory; so it must have some value. Perhaps a chess player would say that its value is infinite. Perhaps, by saying this, she would mean that there is no game without the king. A checkmate ends the game. So it doesn't even make sense to ascribe a conventional point value to the king.

Economic theory does not brook this view. Economists deny that there is anything of infinite value. I believe that the real meaning of this claim is "there is nothing whose value is not, at bottom, economic value. Therefore, people who give this answer in a contingent evaluation study (a survey used to determine human preferences) are summarily dismissed. Economists do not hesitate to throw out data that do not fit their theory. That is something that should make a scientist squirm.

To make the rest of us squirm, an economist would likely suggest that the king's value is something like the value we are willing to pay to make a polluter refrain from pouring toxins into drinking water that will likely cut short our life. It is exactly analogous to the economic value of a human life – the notion that human value is directly tied to and limited by preferences for the goods that a polluter creates. This basic confusion about value in general, and human value in particular is central to the illusion (and delusion) that economic value represents human welfare, or can represent natural value.

8 Postscript: A field guide to economic protestations to the contrary

It is useful to anticipate at least one type of response from the proponents of natural capitalism. This is the claim that economic value theory can be fixed. Though it starts out as a hollow theory of general value, it is a worthy framework on which we can hang all kinds of value as a kind of retrofit. What about, "existence value"? And "aesthetic value"? And "cultural value"?

I will submit my position on this and leave the arguments for another paper. I believe that:

• One cannot, as an afterthought, retrofit a theory fundamentally designed to achieve market advantage, so as to transform it into a theory of general value or a general theory of the good.
• One cannot, as an afterthought, retrofit a theory whose strategic environment precludes some of the greatest and most basic of human goods, to usher those goods in through a back door.
• One cannot, as an afterthought, retrofit coherence into a theory of value whose fundamental principles cannot distinguish between what is desired and what is good.
• One cannot, as an afterthought, retrofit justice into a theory built on principles that are fundamentally unjust.

Economists try (and claim) to do all these things. I hope that this paper provides some tools for recognizing these kinds of retrofitting projects. And I hope that it provides tools to help understand why they are very misguided.

Here we have time for just two examples.

Example 1: Contemplating situations like the one in Madagascar, economists protest: "No, no. Our conception of value is not as narrow as you claim. Yes, we value natural systems on the basis of the "ecosystem services" provided. But we also gladly add to our calculations their 'cultural services'." (See, for example, Reid, W.V., "Nature: the many benefits of ecosystem services", Nature, 443 (October 2006), p. 749.)

"A cultural service". The surest field guide tip to the fact that we have not escaped the strong gravitational field of pure economic reasoning is that word. "Service". If you're an economist you'll not bat an eyelash. If you're not an economist, this will sound profoundly strange. Unnerving, even.

I would urge that you trust your instincts.

Ask yourself: "Are the symbols of your cultural heritage, which may include the burial places of your parents and theirs, or the traditional places for meeting, or the traditional ways of finding basic sustenance that tie your life to that of your ancestors and that you envision will tie yours to that of your descendants – do you conceive of these as things that you might sell in a market transaction?

Ask yourself: "Is the value of a culture the sum total of human preferences to sustain it, weighted by how strongly those preferences are backed by an ability to pay to satisfy them?" On that basis – the basis of economic valuation – poor subsistence cultures are nearly valueless. That, of course, is part of the economic justification for the disruption and destruction of such cultures in Madagascar and other places.

Example 2: Confronted with economically justifiable (and justified) devastation such as we have in Madagascar, where mining corporation executives are the biggest beneficiaries, natural capitalists often offer a certain non-sequitur. I call it the "take your eyes off the major beneficiaries of economic valuation and blame it on the poor" gambit. Here is a textbook example (from one response to Douglas McCauley's commentary, cited above):

The conservation debate cannot be reduced to a choice between protecting nature or making an extra million for a yacht or villa. If it were, then perhaps moral arguments alone would be enough to protect the environment. The reality is that poor people are deforesting vast areas of tropical forest for subsistence agriculture...

Marvier, M., Grant, J., and Kareiva, P., "Nature: poorest may see it as their economic rival", Nature, 443 (October 2006), pp. 749-750.

On similar grounds, Kareiva and his colleagues would point out that the Madagascar mining operation offers steady employment for some people. In Kareiva's judgment, this must be a great benefit – an improvement for these people over their previous, more precarious subsistence way of life (at least until the mine closes in a few decades). After all, by agreeing to employment with Rio Tinto, they demonstrate their preference for this new way of life.

Or do they? Or are these poor people just selecting from a small set of bad choices – a set that they are powerless to help define? Are these people, in fact, fully autonomous actors in this kind of circumstance? The reader is referred to Lamblin, E.F., et. al., "The causes of land-use and land-cover change: moving beyond the myths", Global Environmental Change, 11 (2001), pp. 261-269, for a start in understanding the economic and sociological naivete of Kareiva's gambit.

9 A final caveat

It concerns a favorite natural capitalist syllogism, which goes:

P1: The alternative to economic value is intrinsic value.
P2: You cannot effectively justify the preservation of nature (or incidentally, of anything else) with intrinsic value.
C: Ergo, if you believe that nature has value, only economic value can properly represent it.

This syllogism seems to be overwhelmingly successful in suppressing the better instincts of those who have not succumbed to the numbing effect of economic training. That is odd, because both its premises are false.

P1 is false because it posits a false dichotomy. It may be that the natural world does have some kind of intrinsic (non-instrumental) value. But it may have many other kinds of value connected with the flourishing of people quite aside from any economic value. It is unfortunate that this possibility never enters public discourse.

It is not clear whether P2 is an empirical claim about whether and how people are persuaded, or the force of modern institutions (whether or not they are good), or a claim about correctness and cogency (because people may not be persuaded by convincing arguments).

Taking these possible interpretations in reverse order: If a claim about correctness and cogency, P2 falls – because it depends on the false presupposition (or conflation) that "effectively" means "effective economic argument". If a claim about the force of modern institutions, P2 does not address the possibility that these institutions may be ineffective in promoting true human flourishing, and perhaps even brutish. If an empirical claim about persuasive efficacy, then it seems that the right experiments have not been made to test P2: Economic arguments have dominated political discourse for decades now. But more important, it would be cynical to promote an economic argument for its persuasive effect on the polis, if we knew or felt deeply that it was incorrect or feeble or largely irrelevant.

This argument might make sense in Toontown. But not in the real world where, I hope, reason still has a chance to prevail.

Read more...

Those goddamn whales

Whales. Right whales. "Right" whales? Right. Don't make me laugh.

Right whale calf with mother (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 2008) http://www.whoi.edu/

They get to be 60 feet. Hell, I didn't even get to be 6 feet. There I was at 12, playing first 'cause I was the tallest guy on my team. A first baseman! Throws right? Yeah, 'cause I could snag those high throws from our wild-ass third baseman. There I was, all set to shoot up into the stratosphere of manhood. Guess I didn't eat enough of those crusty-aceans or krill or whatever.

Damn those whales for getting to be so big.

And damn 'em 'cause they move so freakin' slow. Freakin' slug-slow. They're goddamn big. And in the goddamn way. 'Cause they're so goddamn big and slow. You know what it's like when you're stuck behind a friggin' semi doin' 45 on a one-lane 70 mph road. Just like that. As if they owned the road. Damn 'em. I pay my taxes for the goddamn road.

And I mean, this "road" we're talkin' about is a goddamn big important highway. Right past those big eastern seaboard ports. Man, we gotta get those big ships in and out. Our economy depends on it. Can't slow that down. Are you kidding? Put good honest people outa work? Raise prices for good, honest, hard-working people like you and me? Why the hell should we take that kind of punch in the gut? For some goddamn, port-blockading whales that are too goddamn slow and stupid to get outa the way?

A blockade! It's a goddamn blockade! Isn't that an act of war? D'ya expect us to take that like some kind of freakin' wimp? Let some goddamn port-choking slug declare war on our economy? Tell me how that's not like letting some kind of goddamn Arab terrorist run all over us. Come on. Tell me. Get outa their way? Go slow for them? Why the hell don't we just nuke 'em?

Get outa their way? Crap, give me a break. No one else is gonna get outa their way. No one else with any kind of sense. So why should we? Tell me. Why should we take the hit? Jeez. Anyone else with any kind of sense is just gonna sit back and laugh up their lunch at us. The free lunch that they got off us for bein' so freakin' stupid.

Get outa their way? What the hell do they do those hunks of blubber do for us? They don't pay any goddamn taxes. But they sure as hell make us pay more. Makin' the goddamn economy go down the goddamn toilet. Don't we have enough problems without having to worry about those goddamn freeloaders? They're not worth a dime. Not a dime. So few of them left, we wouldn't even notice if they all went off to the great whale happy hunting ground. Our economy would be the better for it. No doubt about it.

Ya know, if ya let those goddamn "right" whales get away with it now, they'll really get us "right". Right in the balls, I'd say. Not just with big ships. No. Want to have some fun on the water? Fishing? Just cruisin' around? Even whale-watching? Forget it, sucker. Too many goddamn blubber buses in the way. Get that? Huh? Get it? Can't even have the fun of watchin' the goddamn overgrown tons-of-blubber slugs. 'Cause it would hurt the poor little darlings. Don't make me puke.

Right whale and calf (Richard Ellis, 1980) RichardEllisPrint

Those goddamn whales. Screw 'em!

Respectfully,
The White House Office of Management and Budget
The Georgia Ports Authority
The US Navy
The World Shipping Council
... and concerned economists everywhere

Dawn, S., "Even the Whales Have Their Predators: Ships", The New York Times, August 12, 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/12/us/12whales.html?ref=science)

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The mother of all conservation moves

This past week, the Science Times ran this article, "Unnatural Preservation", on how climate change changes the rules of conservation:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/science/earth/29habi.html?ref=science&pagewanted=all

The article portrays the hand-wringing of conservation biologists faced with the confounding factor of a changing climate. Is it, for example, worth trying to save some plant or animal in a preserve where its vulnerability to rising temperatures and its limited ability to find more suitable living conditions will likely make it succumb anyway? Should we, perhaps, sign up United Van Lines to help stage the mother of all moves, to a more hospitable clime, that climate-distressed organisms cannot manage on their own – often because of man-made barriers?

The article's presentation glides silently by two remarkable aspects of this topic. One has to do with accepting the science that motivates the portrayed agonizing over alternative approaches to conservation in the face of a warming climate. The other has to do with the peculiar nature of that agonizing.

First, some brief remarks about the recent history of the scientific premise behind the discussion: Most biologists would expect that many organisms would respond to changes in the temperature (among other factors) with adaptive changes of their own. They see this clearly in the evolution of species throughout geological history. In particular, in times of warming, species have tended to migrate to higher latitudes and to higher elevations. These changes in distribution and relative abundance at a given latitude and elevation are, in turn, bases for finding or confirming the climatic changes that cause them.

Additionally, biologists would expect what they call "phenological shifts". Organisms remaining in increasingly warm conditions would tend to shift their seasonal behavior – doing their "spring thing" (migrating, breeding, nesting, egg laying, flowering, budding) sooner rather than later.

Both the presence of these biological responses and the causal inference from the recent rapid changes in climate have stubbornly resisted universal acceptance – even after the reality of modern climate change became incontrovertible well over a decade ago. The element of controversy is evident in the defensive tone of these Nature papers from 2003, which lay out the case. You may assess it for yourself:

Permesan, C., and Yohe, G., "A globally coherent fingerprint of climate change impacts across natural systems", Nature, 421 (2 January 2003), pp. 37-42 (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v421/n6918/full/nature01286.html)

Root, T.L., et. al., "Fingerprints of global warming on wild animals and plants", Nature, 421 (2 January 2003), pp. 57-60 (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v421/n6918/full/nature01333.html or
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/TLRetal-NaturePublished.pdf)

Second, we turn to what may be the even more interesting "adaptive response" of the scientists themselves. The prevailing sentiment expressed by the scientists cited in the article is that a changing climate is a dramatically complicating variable in understanding how we should do conservation. But in the end, it is "just" one more variable. We "just" need to take the effects of climate change into account in managing the world's biogeosphere – moving plants and animals hither and yon, "triaging" the doomed, deciding whether or not to build barrier islands to thwart the terrestrial intrusions of rising seas.

The scientists acknowledge the uncertainty of the effects of climate change (as contrasted with the certainty of its happening), but they seem to regard that uncertainly as yet another biosphere engineering variable, albeit a difficult one. For them, radical uncertainly doesn't change the nature of the problem. The problem remains fundamentally the same, just a bit more difficult, with a few more variables, including some representing uncertainty.

Apparently, for these scientists, the project is to engineer ever more precise and intricate manipulations of ecosystems. No matter that radical uncertainty gives them essentially no hope of knowing what the outcomes will be. No matter that "assisted migration" is essentially the systematic introduction of exotic species, which is known to be a major contributor to the great Pleistocene-Holocene extinction, currently underway and accelerating. Not one cited scientist seems to acknowledge the possibility – or, given the radical uncertainty of outcomes – the likelihood that their manipulations will increase devastation of biota rather than decrease it.

Why do scientists just "stick to the program", despite the apparent madness of it? The reason is easy to grasp. No matter how hard the engineering puzzle, playing engineer is the easy thing to do. It lets us fool ourselves into thinking that we're doing something. And surely, we have to do something.

Yes, something is required of us. But just as surely, to act out of desperation just for the sake of acting – without any legitimate basis for knowing whether we will increase or decrease harm – is tragic foolishness.

It's more than foolish. In a less obvious way, but with high likelihood, an insistent focus on engineering tricks will inevitably increase the harm – by giving us license to avoid considering changes that we really need. Those are changes in the attitudes and behaviors responsible for the harm in the first place. Left unquestioned, the same attitudes and behaviors will ultimately guarantee a situation so irretrievably dire that not even the cleverest or (more apropos) luckiest of interventions could possibly succeed.

The project of critically examining our values contrasts in two ways with the project of ever more arcane feats of engineering. On the one hand, it is a far more difficult thing to get ourselves to do. But on the other hand, the values involved and the attitudes and behaviors they entail are far easier to surmise than the tortured manipulations of conservation biologists.

In fact, at least some values seem to be quite obvious, as do some of the actions that flow from them. Roads are barriers to adaptation. Yet we continue to build (or try to build) them. Shoreline development is a barrier to wetland migration. Yet we continue to do it. Just this past week, the California Coastal Commission considered a proposal to build a road through (not to) a coastal California state park (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/06/us/06beach.html). The proposed road would have been a barrier in both above-mentioned ways. Fortunately, the Commission saw fit to deny the developers a critical permit. But why would we even seriously consider such a thing? In this case, the goal was simple – to provide more pavement so that more cars can be crammed between San Diego and Los Angeles.

What, we should ask, are the values that lead us to view this kind of road (and many others) as preeminently valuable? In light of what different values would this attitude be viewed as unacceptable and not even worthy of serious consideration?

In all the uncertainty of how biota will react to changes in climate, we may be able to glean one certainty. It is that, so long as we continue to behave as we currently do – aided and abetted by the attitudes and values that now predominate – we will inexorably increase the harm to the natural world, the adaptive capacity of plants and animals will be exceeded, and no engineering trick – no matter how clever – will be able to counteract or compensate for that.

That leaves open the question of how we should behave in the presence of the adaptive plight that we have already inflicted on our fellow creatures. The first, most obvious suggestion is to understand in what ways we have inflicted the harm and to stop inflicting further harm in those ways. If building roads is screwing things up, then we should stop building them. If shoreline development is critically undermining the adaptive capacity of coastline habitats, then for goodness' sake, let's stop it!

The second suggestion seems equally obvious but far more difficult to contemplate – perhaps even unimaginable – without a serious re-evaluation of values. If we have literally built obstacles that seriously constrain and thereby compromise the natural world, then should we not consider removing or moving those obstacles? Why do we consider only moving the natural systems whose adaptive movements and processes we have impounded? Suppose that we convince ourselves of the fantasy of being able to move intact, or at least functioning natural systems hither and yon. With no change in values, shouldn't we expect that "hither and yon" to succumb to the same kind of human incursion? Shouldn't we expect that will happen until neither hither nor yon remains?

Perhaps we should employ United Van Lines for the mother of all moves. But the purpose would not be to move and thereby further decimate the paltry remains of natural systems that we have already fragmented and nearly destroyed. Rather, it would be to move us, or (at least) the fabrications that are instruments of our damaging influence, far enough away to give those systems some breathing space and a fighting chance to survive.

Of course, a full answer to the question of how to help our fellow creatures is not anywhere near that simple, because damaging human influence extends well beyond our most obvious physical artifacts. But the changed values that supports this way of thinking may have some chance of dealing with the complex realities of human alterations of, and damage to natural systems.

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Aristotle takes up environmental virtue

(The fourth in a series of interviews with the great philosopher)

[In his previous appearance, "Aristotle takes a closer look at natural capital" (http://environmentalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/11/aristotle-returns-to-take-closer-look.html), Aristotle promised to suggest an alternative to natural capitalism for valuing nature. He returns to begin to make good on that promise.]

H: Good day, Mr. A. We understand that you've been reflecting about environmental values for quite a few days.

A: With great intensity.

H: That's easy to believe. You've certainly shown us how vexingly difficult this subject is.

A: I don't think that I've ever given my armchair a tougher workout.

H: None of that new new experimental philosophy stuff (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/magazine/09wwln-idealab-t.html) for you, huh?

A: Indeed not. It's not until one's posterior has found its proper resting place that one's mind can, too.

H: "Posterior Analytics", so to speak?

An Old Man in an Armchair (Follower of Rembrandt van Rijn, late 17th c.)

A: Hah! One of my better efforts, wouldn't you say? But that work is all about demonstration and syllogism — the kind of thing that the chunking, counting, and computing econo-consequentialists like to do. As we've seen, "demonstrating" moral value by a theory that calculates it from first principles is not the right tool for the job of weighing the many complex and conflicting interests and demands on our moral attention. The econo-consequentialists produce moral non-sense with those tools. At least, that may give us the sense that that kind of neatly packaged theoretical guide to ethics is a chimera.

H: But surely, we can't ignore science. All the earth sciences, the biology of all of earth's creatures, and particularly ecology tell us so much about the natural world. How can our values float free from all this theoretical knowledge?

A: Hey, man, everyone focuses so much on my physics, astronomy, and cosmology that they forget how much sweat I put into my biological studies. I was pretty much the first one to do biology systematically and empirically. And I didn't just look at humans like those Hippocratic medical dudes. I looked at all kinds of creatures — animals and even plants: anatomy, physiology, reproductive behavior, embryology, systematics. Check out my piece on hectocotylization in cuttlefish in "The History of Animals" (IV.2 http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/history_anim.4.iv.html and V.6 http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/history_anim.5.v.html). That wasn't just damn good for its day. It took until 1959 for modern biology to catch up to it!

H: Yeah, you really are the guy with the theory of everything.

A: You bet. That's because science informs philosophy and vice versa. There's no separating the two. And science is particularly critical in understanding environmental values — perhaps more so than in any other realm of moral valuation. But it must be used properly.

H: How, if not by measuring value, or by calculating it — like those econo-consequentialists who sum and subtract utilities...

A: ... or the ones who find marginal utility at the intersection of cost and benefit curves? No, not that way. To understand the proper role of science in informing our understanding of environmental values, one must understand two dimensions of ethical evaluation.

H: Which are?

A: As I've written,

the work of man is achieved only in accordance with practical wisdom as well as with moral virtue; for virtue makes us aim at the right mark, and practical wisdom makes us take the right means.

Aristotle, "Nichomachean Ethics", Bk. VI.12, tr. W.D. Ross
(http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.6.vi.html)

H: Virtue and practical reasoning?

A: Exactly. In practice, neither is prior to the other, though our explanation must consider them in sequence. Let's do that for environmental values.

H: Ok, shoot.

A: First we determine what kinds of environmental virtues or excellences are essential for, indeed constitute human well-being. We ask ourselves, "What kind of person do I want to be — should I be — insofar as I am that kind of animal that I am, a human animal with a rational soul, operating in a natural world? What kinds of attitudes and habitual ways of acting should I develop — to the point that I adopt and practice them with an ease devoid of any felt resistance, reluctance, or burden — that conduce to my flourishing in the environments in which I find myself?"

H: And the other, "practical reasoning" part?

A: That's what I call "phronesis".

H: Phronesis?

A: Yes. The wisdom that guides us in finding the specific actions for our specific circumstances in a way that improves our well being. As a result of this kind of practical deliberation, we develop attitudes and habits that are a starting point for further deliberative action. But attitudes and habitual behavior alone never suffice or ensure continued well being. We are never anointed "excellent" in this way or that, whereupon we flourish forever after.

H: I suppose you might say that such a person would have succumbed to the vice of sloth, or at least, laziness. I guess that it's no different for environmental virtues.

A: Not different at all. In matters environmental, we never stop needing phronesis to find how best to continue to develop and express our various environmental excellences in balance with themselves, as well as in balance with other excellences that are characteristic of those who live well. Don't forget friendship, for example (remember what we said in our first session (http://environmentalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/08/interview-with-aristotle.html)?; and there are many other virtues, as I discuss in my "Nichomachean Ethics".

H: But you make it sound as though phronesis is just another virtue.

A: A virtue is precisely what it is! But not "just another" one. Phronesis is, in fact, the intellectual virtue that enables us to deliberate and find those acts that express, in a balanced way, the many excellences or virtues that are part of living well.

H: So let's get back to the role of science in this.

A: Well, if there are two dimensions to moral evaluation, then one might think that there are two possible ways to apply scientific or theoretical knowledge to it.

H: Are there?

A: Perhaps there is some role for science in phronesis. But I believe that the overwhelmingly dominant role of science in environmental morals is to help us understand various kinds of environmental virtue and their characteristics — not in precisely defining an algorithm for the deliberative processes that we use to arrive at decisions about how best to act in a particular case.

H: Don't the econo-consequentialists have it backwards?

A: I think so. They maintain that we have a phronetic algorithm. We arrive at the right act by deducing it from first principles of economic science — perhaps the principle of maximizing welfare, or perhaps the principle of efficiency, or perhaps some other, similar principle. For them, that is the sum total of deliberation— a stick figure version of phronesis, at best. One can view the econo-consequentialist's mistaken supposition about how science informs moral values to be the root cause of their distorted and contorted results.

H: That's a really helpful insight. But then, how does science help us define environmental virtues?

A: That, my friend, is an ideal place from which to launch a general enquiry into the nature of environmental virtues.

H: Why is that, Mr. A?

A: We don't really need science to understand how our flourishing is interlocked with the flourishing of our friendships and the people that we befriend.

H: I suppose not.

A: And so it is with the other virtues that I discuss in my "Nichomachean Ethics". It's even true that many environmental virtues are variations on virtue themes that I explored in my "Nichomachean Ethics".

H: I guess that shouldn't be surprising.

A: Still, some of the most important environmental virtues and their salient characteristics cannot be well understood — their huge moral significance cannot be appreciated — without the help of the sciences that show how our flourishing is interlocked with the flourishing of the natural world. The twin sciences of ecology and evolution are particularly important. In fact, for some environmental virtues, the tie to ecology is so strong that we might call these "ecological virtues" — with the caveat that we understand this as a reference to how we come to realize the nature of this category of environmental virtues, not a reference to how one should be an excellent ecologist.

H: Ok, so let's start with some of those ecological virtues.

A: Consider first our place in the history of the planet earth, only home we have — our connection as a species to the past extending back before H. sapiens existed, and extending out to the future beyond the time when H. sapiens goes extinct.

H: Science certainly shows us that no species is a permanent fixture on our planet.

A: I have it from good sources (Dirzo, R., Raven, P., "Global state of biodiversity and loss", Annual Review of Environment and Natural Resources, 28 (2003), pp. 137-167) that the average lifetime of a species is between 5 - 10 million years. Mammals stick around for up to 13 million years. So let's be outlandishly generous to ourselves and give H. sapiens an unprecedented 20 million years. Even if we acknowledge archaic varieties of H. sapiens that might have emerged 300,000 or more years ago, or take the starting point to be that of the genus Homo (of which we are are the sole surviving species) as much as 2.4 million years ago, let's suppose that we have a good long run ahead.

H: But not forever.

A: Not forever. Our species came upon the scene sometime in the very recent geological past. There is no scientific reason not to expect that it will exit the scene sometime later, if not sooner, in the very near geological future. We are extraordinarily adaptable, but not infinitely so.

H: I suppose that we would have had a tough time dealing with the methane-rich atmosphere of geological times past...

A: ... as one example.

H: So what does that mean for environmental value?

A: With this relatively new knowledge of our species' place in earth history comes our understanding of our connection to our ancestors — the creatures from which we evolved and from whom we inherited the kind of place, or really, places (for it changes constantly), that the earth was for them at various times through prehistory. It gives us a sense that we, too, may be ancestor for some one or more species that descend from us. And, even if we are to be the last species of the genus Homo, then it still gives us a sense of ourselves as ancestral keeper of the the place that will be home for whatever species survive our departure.

H: So, if I may paraphrase: Science teaches us that we have a biological and geophysical heritage; and that we shall leave a similar legacy — even if there is eventually no species to propagate the human genome or whatever genome that evolution transforms it into.

A: A quick study you are. And this understanding of geological and species history suggests our first environmental virtue — a certain, scientifically informed sense of honor — for the creatures and places that engendered us, for our human ancestors who, whether consciously or unwittingly, left enough intact for us moderns to connect to more ancient times, for the fellow creatures that made it with us to this point of geological time, for human descendants who deserve to make the same connections and whose ability to do so depends on our behavior, and finally, to our descendants and the kind of place they will inherit and inhabit.

H: What kinds of places do you have in mind?

A: Think of places like the canyonlands of the Colorado Plateau. They are a storehouse of the history of creative forces pre-dating the Cambrian explosion of fauna around 530 million years ago, at the very start of the Proterozoic Eon. A place like that connects us to the forces that resulted in who we are, where we are.

H: I didn't know that you've had a chance to make it out there.

A: There's only so much wear and tear that my armchair can take over 2300 years, you know.

H: You sure don't hear economists talk about anything like that.

A: The value of our natural heritage is horribly distorted when viewed as a neatly chunked and counted stockpile of goods in a warehouse right now. Rather, it is, in part, the value of something — a planet and the creatures that inhabit it — with a history that is responsible for our genesis, and with a history that, if we demonstrate this kind of environmental excellence, will engender creatures beyond the end of human history.

H: You said something about our fellow creatures. Would you say something more about them?

A: Yes. In fact, I would propose a second environmental virtue that focuses on them.

H: What would that be?

A: A sense of honor, but also sympathy for fellow organisms that coevolved with us and that now share our home. Once again, our science is indispensable in understanding the degree to which they share with us a common genetic heritage, and with that, similar needs, drives, desires, and limitations. The conservation of genes among creatures that appear wildly different to human sensibility makes this impossible to ignore. Perhaps it's not too surprising that only 1.6% of human and chimp genes differ, though almost all genes in each species has a counterpart in the other. It may be more surprising that, despite 75 million years of separate evolution, only about 300 genes — less than 1% of the 30,000 possessed by mouse — have no obvious counterpart in the human genome (The Mouse Genome Sequencing Consortium, "Initial sequencing and comparative analysis of the mouse genome", Nature, 420 (5 December 2002), p. 521, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v420/n6915/full/nature01262.html).

H: Holy mole.

A: No, mouse. But it's probably not much different for moles. And that shouldn't surprise. Mouse and human both must have what it takes to be a terrestrial mammalian vertebrate on this particular planet. Or, as a computational biologist would put it, the conservation of genes reflects functional constraints on the existence of a terrestrial mammal (Thomas, J.W., et. al., "Comparative analyses of multi-species sequences from targeted genomic regions", Nature, 424 (14 August 2003), pp. 788-793, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v424/n6950/full/nature01858.html) If we go to D. malanogaster, the common fruit fly, we still find only 40% of its genes differ from human's. But that much similarity is part of what it is to be a terrestrial animal of any kind on this planet. To focus on the differences in our fellow creatures and to view as limitations differences from humans, is to ignorantly overlook our own.

H: Wow, Mr. A. You've really must have been boning up on science in the last 2.3 millennia.

A: Remember, I was already doing some damn good work in my day.

H: Yeah, I remember that cuttlefish work. it's a shame you couldn't have gotten that published in "Nature".

A: Now that would be something — seeing my work right alongside the stuff by Constanza, Pimm, and those natural capitalists. Hey, speaking of the devil, did you hear Constanza honking his natural capital panpipes on NPR's "Marketplace" last Wednesday (http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/01/02/natural_resources_value/)? Why don't those NPR troglodytes put me on with him?

H: Maybe they don't find many people in their target audience who speak ancient Greek. But we'd be happy to lend them our babelfish translator.

A: No matter — especially since recent science is generally changing our perspective on our place in the natural world. And the changes in perspective demand changes in how we view our moral character as actors in it.

H: So you're saying that, in a certain sense, our understanding of our moral character keeps pace with our scientific understanding?

A: Yes! For example, think of the pre-human state of New Zealand where, in the complete absence of terrestrial mammals (except for two herbivorous fruit bats), flightless, ground-nesting birds flourished. When the Maori's colonized the islands, they introduced mammalian predators, such as dogs and Polynesian rats (which are known to enjoy scrambled eggs and a hatchling or two for breakfast); they appropriated the habitats of these animals; and they themselves hunted them intensively. According to Rodolfo Dirzo and Peter Raven,

The colonization by humans of the Pacific Islands eastward and northeastward from southern Asia resulted in the elimination of some 1000 species of birds over a period of about 1000 years in this area alone—about a tenth of the world total that existed before the Polynesian colonizing voyages took place. Studies of these islands suggest that about half the species present when humans arrived have been preserved as fossils and that they and about an equal number of unknown species were lost as a result of human activities.

Dirzo, R., Raven, P., "Global state of biodiversity and loss", Annual Review of Environment and Natural Resources, 28 (2003), p. 153

H: They were incredibly destructive! What does that say about their moral character?

A: They could not have understood the moral significance of their behavior in the way that science now enables us to do. Given their innocence, we cannot assess their character in the same way that we do ours.

H: So there's a kind of co-evolution of scientific understanding with our understanding of human excellence...

A: ... and a co-evolution of how we assess a person's moral character. But I think it undeniable that science now demonstrates our close connection with other living things. And this allows us to see the lack of excellence in the character of a person who nowadays would casually and even ignorantly behave in ways that help sustain the 6th and possibly most devastating of the great mass extinctions in the 545 million years of the Phanerozoic Eon. Surely, honor and sympathy for other creatures is an environmental excellence that requires of a person that she find ways of living that avoid helping to destroy the legacy of creative forces that tie our existence to theirs.

H: What does that imply for our behavior?

A: At this point, there's are no major mysteries about how we impinge on the well being of other creatures. We appropriate all the land for our own, species-narrow purposes. We change the climate beyond the adaptive capacities of other creatures. We introduce alien animals and plants into biomes in which they did not evolve, and which are subsequently simplified and degraded. We introduce unprecedented amounts of nitrogen into habitats as airborne industrial pollutants and as agricultural runoff that change completely how many ecosystems work — to the detriment of many organisms who thrive on their efficient use of nitrogen. And we spew unprecedented amounts of CO₂ into the atmosphere. Aside from the effect on climate, this wreaks havoc in habitats in which plants use different metabolic pathways with differing efficiencies, to assimilate that gas. (Sala, O.E., et. al., "Global Biodiversity Scenarios for the Year 2100", Science, 287 (10 March 2000), pp. 1770-1774, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/287/5459/1770)

H: Ok, I get it. So there we have a second environmental virtue rooted in science.

A: Yes, "rooted" is a good way to put it. Our recognition of these kinds of environmental virtues is not dictated by, or deduced from science. Rather, the science provides a deeper, richer, more interconnected picture of the world that's tied to its past as well as to its future. How we act, on a stage so transformed, is not surprisingly transformed in moral significance. On this stage, previously hidden parts of our moral character are revealed.

H: You've identified two ecological virtues, so far, Mr. A. Are there any more environmental virtues that you'd call "ecological virtues"?

A: There are. Consider how recent science has given us a newfound appreciation of natural systems as comprising an impenetrably complex sustainer of all life, including human life. It runs according to an inextricably entangled and complexly interacting web of rules that play out over time spans that range from the near-instantaneous to geological. This is not some kind of pre-scientific obeisance, but a knowing acknowledgment. That acknowledgment helps us recognize some more environmental virtues, including perhaps some of the most critical ones.

H: What would they be?

A: I would liken the rules by which earth's natural systems operate to a kind of constitution for all that exists on earth. Like a constitution, it is a foundational framework with subtly counteracting forces. But this one is prior to all other frameworks — including political constitutions — because only it is only within it that everything constitutive of any life, let alone a flourishing human life, is possible.

H: So what should we make out of that?

A: Let's consider how we regard our political constitutions.

H: Ok.

A: Pop quiz.

H: Oh no! I thought I was doing ethics, not political science.

A: A completely arbitrary distinction, in my judgment.

H: You didn't pop quizzes on your students at the Lyceum, did you?

A: Heraclitus in Hades, yes. It's a long-standing academic tradition that I see is alive and well at Stanford. But don't worry. I'll give you a big hint for answering my question.

H: Ok, shoot.

A: In what salient respect do constitutions of state mimic some important basic properties of natural systems that we've just mentioned?

H: Hint please?

A: History! Connections! Continuity (not sameness) with the past and future! We've shown how static inventories don't properly capture environmental value. What is a preeminent historical significance of a constitution?

H: Well, at least a successful and long-lived one would embody a kind of political or cultural wisdom that binds us to persons in our society that preceded us, and to those who will come after.

A: Excellent! A constitution is the time-spanning connective tissue of a society. In part, a state's constitution defines the rules of change for a society in a way that permits it to adapt and change itself without damaging or necessarily changing the very rules that make it possible. Speaking of Heraclitus, I have my differences with that crazy dude. But he'd be pretty sympathetic with this notion of a political order. He saw human society as a cosmos like the natural cosmos, with its underlying order reflected in its laws.

H: Ok, I think that I can buy that.

A: In fact, I would say the the very identity of a state is bound up in its constitution:

since the state is a partnership, and is a partnership of citizens in a constitution, when the form of government changes, and becomes different, then it may be supposed that the state is no longer the same, just as a tragic differs from a comic chorus, although the members of both may be identical. And in this manner we speak of every union or composition of elements as different when the form of their composition alters; for example, a scale containing the same sounds is said to be different, accordingly as the Dorian or the Phrygian mode is employed. And if this is true it is evident that the sameness of the state consists chiefly in the sameness of the constitution, and it may be called or not called by the same name, whether the inhabitants are the same or entirely different. It is quite another question, whether a state ought or ought not to fulfill engagements when the form of government changes.

Aristotle, "Politics", III.3, tr. Benjamin Jowett
(http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.3.three.html)

H: So really, you can't change a state's constitution without changing, or really destroying that particular state.

A: Of course, for a state, there's the possibility of creating and adopting a new constitution after abandoning or significantly altering the current one.

H: But that sounds pretty risky, doesn't it?

A: Emphatically agreed. Suppose that a constitution promotes the flourishing of its citizens through its articles. Suppose that those articles effect a delicate balance of positive and negative feedback for its citizens that guides them to behave in ways that conduce to their individual and mutual well being. Then it would be risky, indeed, to alter that balance. It is difficult, if not impossible, to calculate how a change in one article or another will change the point of balance.

H: And a lot is at stake.

A: The entire state and all its citizens. But not just now; and not just the well being of a single citizen.

H: I suppose that's why successful constitutions contain provisions that make it very difficult to change them.

A: That is so. And much the same is true of the "constitution" of the natural world. One cannot cherry pick the "articles" that presently seem convenient to keep in place while ignoring ones that may lately appear somewhat inconvenient.

H: Aren't there differences between the constitution of a state and the "constitution" of the natural world?

A: Of course: The framework and fabric of the natural world is not a contract in the social sense, not a human construct of any kind. It is there before our very eyes, though sometimes only immediately evident to our best scientific experts — as embodied in the various creatures and their habitats, as they have come through the last 4.5 billion years. And of course, violations are subject to the rule of natural, not human law. But insofar as it is a vital framework for our well-being, insofar as it is a framework that unites us with all that came before us and all that will follow, insofar as it is a framework that has created the only kind of home that we humans have ever known, insofar as it is evidently an arrangement of delicate balance that is easily upset — we owe it the care and respect that we owe to socially constitutive frameworks. That ecological wisdom and the respect it should engender is, I would say, a third ecological virtue.

H: Boy, that's a lot different from thinking of the natural world as a resource for getting all the stuff that we want at the lowest possible cost.

A: I would say, a world apart. In fact, our third environmental virtue has several corollary virtues that may further distinguish our approach.

H: What do you have in mind?

A: I would suggest that the kind of wisdom and respect we've just discussed has also a certain elements of courage, restraint, and humility.

H: How do you mean?

A: The natural creativity that we've been discussing is something mostly outside of human control. In our environmental wisdom, we know that it is inimitable. It is far to complex and impenetrable to imitate, let alone to duplicate or to substitute for. As we have observed, while it created the human species, it almost certainly will also destroy it.

H: That's pretty scary.

A: It's extremely scary. I would say that it takes tremendous courage to understand this, and yet strive to keep these natural creative forces alive and healthy in the earth's ecosystems.

H: Even though we also know that, in fact, we flourish in this advocacy.

A: Even so. I would identify this kind of courage as a fourth environmental virtue.

H: I would have thought of that as a kind of restraint.

A: I think that's involved, too. We can intervene at will and pretend to substitute our creative abilities for those of natural systems, and we have often done so. There is perhaps a temptation to exercise our power just because we have it. But we should know that our creative abilities cannot really substitute for natural creativity which, since it does not originate with a single (human) creature, reflects far more complexity and diversity. And so a fifth virtue is that of restraint from this kind of careless exercise.

H: But I would think that understanding of our limits also implies a kind of humility.

A: Exactly where I was heading. As we've observed, our scientific understanding of natural systems has sufficient power to make us realize that some aspects of our behavior, as it affects the natural world, have moral significance. At the same time, we should have the humility to acknowledge that science does not thereby become a measure of value.

H: That's kind of similar to the mistake that the econo-consequentialists make.

A: Very much so. But also — and this is really a separate point — we need to admit how puny — in fact, and perhaps even in principle — our scientific knowledge is when it comes understanding causes and effects in complex ecosystems in a way that permits us to reliably predict the outcomes of our intrusions. Ironically, it seems that our finest scientists are often the worst offenders in advocating interventions with a gross absence of this kind of humility.

H: I guess a lot of our blog has been devoted to pointing that out. Remember our account of introducing the cactus moth to control unwanted prickly pear cactus in the the prickly pear's native Caribbean habitats (http://environmentalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/10/managing-baseball-managing-nature.html)?

A: Ah yes. It seems that the Mexican poor are about to pay a heavy price for that bit of arrogance. Unfortunately, it's not an isolated case. Think of the half-century long policy to eliminate predators — "bad" animals — wolves, bears, mountain lions — that prey on "good" ones — deer, for example. (A.S. Leopold, et. al., "Wildlife Management in the National Parks", in U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Administrative Policies for Natural Areas of the National Park System (Washington, D.C., 1968); also National Parks Magazine, 37 (1963)). We now see through that analysis — even laugh at the fact that we were expressing an "arbitrary", though really, anthropocentrically self-serving preference to remove the natural predators — so that we humans, qua hunters, could replace them. But in truth, we know of few interventions that are better justified.

H: I'm afraid that there's a pretty long list.

A: Evidence the implementation of the Endangered Species Act. We selectively embrace what feels good to us. Small non-furry creatures such as frogs and spiders don't feel so good; they have little support. Big furry creatures fare better. Plants? The primary producers of our planet? If they produce pretty flowers, they might get noticed. Otherwise, they're nearly forgotten.

H: Yeah, it's pretty embarrassing. I guess that for critters, we act to keep something only if it looks good in the zoo, as a stuffed animal, or on our plates.

A: You might think that ecologists do better when they discuss this sort of thing in their scientific journals.

H: Don't they?

A: Think of the discussion of how to target our efforts to save the organisms that inhabit the earth. We read that biodiversity is the key.

H: Gee, isn't it?

A: Why should we think so? There isn't even any single definition of "biodiversity". Depending on her purpose an ecologist may have in mind any one or more of multiple characterizations — genetic, intraspecies diversity; or the diversity of species; or the diversity of functional groups; or concentrations of endemisms. (Dirzo, R., Raven, P., "Global state of biodiversity and loss", Annual Review of Environment and Natural Resources, 28 (2003), pp. 138-139)

H: I hadn't thought of that.

A: Should we save the hotspots of endemism on the grounds that those contain the most kinds of endangered species in the least amount of area — 1.4% of the earth's land surface? What about the "coldspots" in the other 98.4% of the land that may provide global and local ecosystem processes that natural capitalists would consider important; or that contain unique evolutionary lineages and rare species; or that encompass the last major wilderness landscapes; or that provide habitat for wide-ranging animal species? (Kareiva, P. and Marview, M., "Conserving Biodiversity Coldspots", American Scientist, 91 (July-August 2003), pp. 344-351, http://www.scu.edu/cas/biology/staffandfaculty/loader.cfm?url=/commonspot/security/getfile.cfm&PageID=32625). Are some species just plain dispensable? Many conservation biologists say that. "We wouldn't even notice when this little caddisfly vanishes in Glacier Nation Park..."

H: Gee, I don't know about that.

A: Neither do I. For one thing, we may not notice the absence of an organism — at least, not right away — only because of the limitations in our science, or in the time span in which we can make observations, or in the conditions that happen to obtain in that limited time span. We may never get to observe the conditions in which a creature's now vacated role becomes obvious, even paramount. But more fundamentally, what possible justification do we have for adopting any one or more of those biodiversity criteria for intervening on behalf of some species, or for casually declaring the death sentence for others? On what grounds can we claim that our choice in any of these cases is any less arbitrary, or self-serving, or based on less narrowly construed human preferences than the now-abandoned dictum to eliminate predators?

H: But surely it would be better to choose one than none, better to save some rather than to lose all.

A: Because the species we choose to save has a "scientific" justification for its continued existence?

H: Ah, yes. That's something that The Nature Conservancy scientist, Sanjayan, would say, as helioskiagrablog discussed last month (http://environmentalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/12/environmental-values-science-and-nature.html).

A: As you intimated in that piece, that's surely an ethically empty criterion — no different from the one that justified the predator elimination program that we now disavow. But even more profoundly, I would also suggest that the kind of choices you feel compelled to make — grasping for this species here, that other one there — are choices of a desperate triage whose ultimate failure is almost certainly guaranteed. The conditions that make the triage compelling now will make it ever more desperate. No matter how careful our choices are, we really never completely understand their full effects. And in any event, we will at some point be reduced to choices that plainly consummate the evisceration of what little we have left of natural ecosystems. Unless we begin to question the assumptions that seem to necessitate this losing struggle. I think that worthy of its own separate discussion on another occasion.

H: We may take you up on that. But in any case, I think that you've convinced us that humility, perhaps a kind of scientific humility is an environmental virtue.

A: Well put. I would say that our sixth environmental virtue is the humility to admit first, that it is a category mistake to think that science is a measuring stick for natural value. And second, we should have the humility to acknowledge that it is, as a matter of fact, too puny for measuring the "importance" of parts even if that importance is narrowly defined in terms of what we humans desire or prefer to keep with us. Certainly, our track record in satisfying those preferences, however justified (or not), is abominable. We simply do not have any kind of reliable handle on either the resilience or vulnerabilities of the natural systems that we seem unable to resist meddling with.

H: Wow, Mr. A. We've covered a whole lot of territory today.

A: I'd say so. Six virtues in one day. That's kind of like a virtue marathon — maybe even an all-time record.

H: Could be.

A: And yet, there's much more to do.

H: I kind of thought so. More environmental virtues?

A: More of those. But also, I'd like to share some thoughts on what virtue ethics is, and what it's not; and to defend it against some common, but misguided criticisms.

H: That would certainly be helpful, Mr. A.

A: Also, I'd like to get back to why your triage conundrum is a false one.

H: Excellent. Anything else?

A: How about a look at the last man example?

H: You mean Richard Sylvan's thought experiment? And the last people example, too?

A: I think that would be illuminating.

H: Hey, Mr. A, there's no greater luminary than you to discuss stuff like this.

A: I do my best. But I think that it's time to dive back into my armchair. There's a lot to contemplate for next time.

H: Thank you, Mr. A. And we'll see what we can do about getting you a spot on NPR.

A: Hey, d'ya think you could get a theme song for me played on a barbitos? Alcaeus and Sappho had some hot tunes for that instrument, ya know. Still popular around Lesbos when I was tramping around there doing my field work with Theophrastus.

H: Your biologist buddy?

A: Yeah, I loved that guy — even though he believed that eating meat is unjust on the grounds that it robs non-human animals of life. Seemed strange at the time; but after 2.3 millennia, maybe that's worth another look. My armchair awaits...

H: Ok, helioskiagrablog readers. There you have some of Aristotle's first thoughts ever on environmental virtues. And there's more to come.

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Environmental Values, Science, and The Nature Conservancy

Peter Kareiva has no trouble understanding environmental values. This blog's readers will know Kareiva as the scientist who joined with some colleagues to declare that nature is a resource whose value is realized by "domesticating" it. New readers should refer to "'Domesticating Nature' — NYT Commentary" (http://environmentalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/08/domesticating-nature-nyt-commentary.html) and "'Domesticating Nature' — How vs. Why" (http://environmentalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/08/domesticating-nature-how-vs-why.html).

Gardening animals: Topiary (Priscilla Wilson) http://www.threadless.com/product/1159/Topiary

Humans now dominate the vast bulk of the planet. We should just get on with completing the job for the pleasure and profit of people.

The question that Kareiva is concerned to address is "How should we manage the earth domestication project?" How shall we customize the earth and all its ecosystems — in fact, all its systems — to best serve human interests? It is hard to find a more stunningly arrogant statement of nature's value. Or one more oblivious to our oft-demonstrated and probably unavoidable incompetence to realize the vision of man as "earth manager".

Kareiva is the chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy.

The Nature Conservancy avers that its mission is (http://www.nature.org/pressroom/links/art10292.html):

to preserve plants, animals and natural communities that represent the diversity of life on Earth by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive. We are dedicated to preserving biological diversity, and, as described below, our values compel us to find ways to ensure that human activities can be conducted harmoniously with the preservation of natural diversity. We aspire to the vision articulated so wisely more than 50 years ago by Aldo Leopold in his book, A Sand County Almanac: conservation is a state of harmony between man and nature.

How are we to understand this vision of harmony, solemnly offered with the imprimatur of Aldo Leopold? As read through the lens of Kareiva's sensibilities, it is the harmony that we achieve by subjecting every last bit of nature to human control for human pleasure and comfort.

This past month, we have a "Dispatch" (http://www.nature.org/tncscience/features/art22977.html) from Sanjayan — another Conservancy "lead" scientist. In it, Sanjayan describes a meeting in Missoula with Kareiva and the Conservancy program director there. There is no mention of domestication; no mention of widening our "global footprint" (as Kareiva would say) to ensure that every last corner of the planet bears it. That is refreshing, even encouraging, considering Sanjayan's company that night.

Instead, we find confusion. But that is appropriate! Understanding environmental values is an extraordinarily difficult enterprise. Sanjayan is struggling along with the rest of us.

Sanjayan asks:

When the goal is to protect a little bit of everything on the planet, can a conservation organization afford to protect places for non-scientific reasons?

Evidently, "scientific reasons" can confer indisputable value. But other ways of conferring value are suspect -- as he implies by going on to ask:

[can a conservation organization afford to protect places] Simply because of human values? Aesthetics? Emotional ties that bind people to place?

Some may wish to dismiss Sanjayan for committing a form of the "naturalistic fallacy". But that "fallacy" has little to do with either naturalists or fallacies. Instead, we should say that Sanjayan offers an enthymeme, well described by Aristotle (who else?) in his "Rhetoric" Book I.2 (http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.1.i.html) as a syllogism with suppressed premises. Sanjayan's enthymeme is:

• Premise 1: A landscape that has not lost any species in 200 years makes it (let us say) "200-year-species-intact".
• Premise 2: 200-year-species-intact landscapes are "unique".
• Premise 3: Only science can realiably identify 200-year-species-intact landscapes.
• Conclusion: Therefore, species-intact landscapes are worthy of preservation.

Before getting to the missing premise, we should acknowledge that Sanjayan hedges his Conclusion with the comment that

The value of a totally intact landscape versus a slightly impacted landscape is hard to quantify. Some lost species will be noticed; others, frankly, will not.

So apparently, Sanjayan is willing to qualify his conclusion. But this is a quantitative qualification, not a qualitative one. His conclusion holds for a landscape that, insofar as we can notice, is "intact". If we overlook the disappearance of a species or find it hard to notice its absence — presumably using current ecological science, and within the range of conditions and time in which scientific observation has been possible — then we should not attempt to distinguish that landscape from one that is (by all measures of current ecological science) completely "intact". Perhaps the missing species is merely an arachnid whose ecosystem role cannot be identified and in any case, with which it is hard to be empathetic.

So what's the missing premise?

• Missing Premise: A landscape with a scientifically verifiable unique property is valuable.

Is this premise true? Probably not. Sanjayan certainly provides no reason for us to believe it.

Clearly, we can find properties in any landscape that are unique to it and that distinguish it from any others. The peculiarities of its peculiar biogeochemical composition would suffice for a unique thumbprint. What Sanjayan seeks are properties that confer conservation-demanding value on landscapes. Uniqueness alone doesn't do this.

Do certain unique properties such as 200-year-species-intact have a special status in the realm of environmental values? Perhaps they do. But this value does not result from the fact that the valued property is scientifically determined and understood — that it has, in Sanjayan's words, a "scientific reason". The various properties that typify or constitute a Superfund site may be scientifically determined, too. But that doesn't give such a site a value that demands its preservation. Quite the opposite.

Biodiversity, too, is scientifically characterizable — albeit in a number of different ways that give different answers to the question "how biodiverse is this landscape?". Taking one measure, we may determine that a landscape is biodiverse. So much for the science. We then have to decide whether this diversity (not the fact that it was scientifically determined) confers some kind of value on the landscape that commands our moral attention.

Sanjayan is justifiably nervous about saying that science somehow confers value. He may sense, though doesn't say, that science does, indeed must inform our best judgments of value. It helps us understand more fully the implications of our actions. To the extent that consequences count in moral evaluation and deliberation, science may help immensely. But it doesn't tell us which consequences count; or which ones merit moral consideration; or for those that do, to what degree they command our moral attentiveness.

Science, too, can help us find in landscapes properties — and potentially valuable properties — beyond those that satisfy our most near-sighted and narrowly construed interests. Science helps us see that not every plot of land has value merely as a place to build a condo, to lay down a highway, or to plant endless rows of ethanol-yielding corn. But science doesn't have the power to confer the value. Rather, it can only help us find the properties that we find valuable in our moral deliberations outside of (though informed by) scientific inquiry.

Sanjayan does hint at other ways to proceed with the project of finding environmental value. But he immediately despairs of making any headway with them:

Every place, it seems, is precious to those who live there; it’s difficult to argue that some are more precious than others.

These are, as he says, merely "emotional ties that bind people to a place". How can we possibly sort this out? But really, this is an excellent place to start! We would urge Sanjayan to start from there — the value of places to people.

Sanjayan offers other hints, by way of being dismissive, of letting "human value" or "aesthetics" enter into consideration. These may also be areas of fruitful moral, though not scientific inquiry.

We would urge Sanjayan not to expect an easy formula or "scientific reason" that will identify properties that carry environmental values, let alone create a neatly ordered hierarchy of such values. The world of values, including (or perhaps especially) those attaching to nature and the environment, arise from many, varied, and dynamically changing interests that do not admit a neat order. We are likely to find many different kinds of values and no alchemy for converting one kind to another. There may not even be a common measure — as much as we yearn for this when the values conflict and demand tradeoffs.

This blog requested that Sanjayan record his comments on these thoughts. Sanjayan did not do that. Nor did he even respond to the request.

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Aristotle breezes back to share some Socratic wisdom

H: Hey, Mr. A. We didn't expect you back so soon!

A: My mention of Meno yesterday put me in mind of an instructive exchange he had with Socrates on desires or preferences for goods, their acquisition, and the relation of these to virtue. Having absorbed our discussion of preference consequentialism from yesterday, your readers are well prepared to understand what Socrates has to say. It seems that he might have had some of the same misgivings that we've expressed about preferences as measures of value.

H: Ok, Mr. A. We're delighted to present that dialogue without further comment:

Detail of Socrates teaching, from The School of Athens (Raphael, 1509-10)

Men. Well then, Socrates, virtue, as I take it, is when he, who desires the honourable, is able to provide it for himself; so the poet says, and I say too -

Virtue is the desire of things honourable and the power of attaining them.

Soc. And does he who desires the honourable also desire the good?

Men. Certainly.

Soc. Then are there some who desire the evil and others who desire the good? Do not all men, my dear sir, desire good?

Men. I think not.

Soc. There are some who desire evil?

Men. Yes.

Soc. Do you mean that they think the evils which they desire, to be good; or do they know that they are evil and yet desire them?

Men. Both, I think.

Soc. And do you really imagine, Meno, that a man knows evils to be evils and desires them notwithstanding?

Men. Certainly I do.

Soc. And desire is of possession?

Men. Yes, of possession.

Soc. And does he think that the evils will do good to him who possesses them, or does he know that they will do him harm?

Men. There are some who think that the evils will do them good, and others who know that they will do them harm.

Soc. And, in your opinion, do those who think that they will do them good know that they are evils?

Men. Certainly not.

Soc. Is it not obvious that those who are ignorant of their nature do not desire them; but they desire what they suppose to be goods although they are really evils; and if they are mistaken and suppose the evils to be good they really desire goods?

Men. Yes, in that case.

Soc. Well, and do those who, as you say, desire evils, and think that evils are hurtful to the possessor of them, know that they will be hurt by them?

Men. They must know it.

Soc. And must they not suppose that those who are hurt are miserable in proportion to the hurt which is inflicted upon them?

Men. How can it be otherwise?

Soc. But are not the miserable ill-fated?

Men. Yes, indeed.

Soc. And does any one desire to be miserable and ill-fated?

Men. I should say not, Socrates.

Soc. But if there is no one who desires to be miserable, there is no one, Meno, who desires evil; for what is misery but the desire and possession of evil?

Men. That appears to be the truth, Socrates, and I admit that nobody desires evil.

Soc. And yet, were you not saying just now that virtue is the desire and power of attaining good?

Men. Yes, I did say so.

Soc. But if this be affirmed, then the desire of good is common to all, and one man is no better than another in that respect?

Men. True.

Soc. And if one man is not better than another in desiring good, he must be better in the power of attaining it?

Men. Exactly.

Soc. Then, according to your definition, virtue would appear to be the power of attaining good?

Men. I entirely approve, Socrates, of the manner in which you now view this matter.

Soc. Then let us see whether what you say is true from another point of view; for very likely you may be right:-You affirm virtue to be the power of attaining goods?

Men. Yes.

Soc. And the goods which mean are such as health and wealth and the possession of gold and silver, and having office and honour in the state-those are what you would call goods?

Men. Yes, I should include all those.

Soc. Then, according to Meno, who is the hereditary friend of the great king, virtue is the power of getting silver and gold; and would you add that they must be gained piously, justly, or do you deem this to be of no consequence? And is any mode of acquisition, even if unjust and dishonest, equally to be deemed virtue?

Men. Not virtue, Socrates, but vice.

Soc. Then justice or temperance or holiness, or some other part of virtue, as would appear, must accompany the acquisition, and without them the mere acquisition of good will not be virtue.

Men. Why, how can there be virtue without these?

Soc. And the non-acquisition of gold and silver in a dishonest manner for oneself or another, or in other words the want of them, may be equally virtue?

Men. True.

Soc. Then the acquisition of such goods is no more virtue than the non-acquisition and want of them, but whatever is accompanied by justice or honesty is virtue, and whatever is devoid of justice is vice.

Men. It cannot be otherwise, in my judgment.

Soc. And were we not saying just now that justice, temperance, and the like, were each of them a part of virtue?

Men. Yes.

Soc. And so, Meno, this is the way in which you mock me.

Men. Why do you say that, Socrates?

Soc. Why, because I asked you to deliver virtue into my hands whole and unbroken, and I gave you a pattern according to which you were to frame your answer; and you have forgotten already, and tell me that virtue is the power of attaining good justly, or with justice; and justice you acknowledge to be a part of virtue.

Men. Yes.

Soc. Then it follows from your own admissions, that virtue is doing what you do with a part of virtue; for justice and the like are said by you to be parts of virtue.

Men. What of that?

Soc. What of that! Why, did not I ask you to tell me the nature of virtue as a whole? And you are very far from telling me this; but declare every action to be virtue which is done with a part of virtue; as though you had told me and I must already know the whole of virtue, and this too when frittered away into little pieces. And, therefore, my dear I fear that I must begin again and repeat the same question: What is virtue? for otherwise, I can only say, that every action done with a part of virtue is virtue; what else is the meaning of saying that every action done with justice is virtue? Ought I not to ask the question over again; for can any one who does not know virtue know a part of virtue?

Plato, "Meno", tr. Benjamin Jowett (http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/meno.html)

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Aristotle takes a closer look at natural capital

(The third in a series of interviews with the great philosopher)

[Aristotle returns from the pub to which he retreated for a well-earned respite after discussing Robert Constanza's suggestion that we value nature as "natural capital", in "Aristotle shows up in Ecology 101" (http://environmentalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/09/aristotle-shows-up-in-ecology-101.html).]

The truth in natural capital

A: Well that was quite refreshing.

H: Yes indeed.

A: Three Philosophers Ale is quite a brew. Do you think that I'm one of those Three Philosophers? I mean, you could make a much better case for me than for Plato. With all due respect to my mentor, I'm skeptical that even a Philosopher King could truly enjoy the Form of Beer. Me? I'd rather just quaff some sensible suds, hang out in a cave — Philosophy Corner would do just fine — and debate the merits of valuing nature as natural capital. The Form of Beer will never tickle anyone's taste buds...

H: No doubt, a debate to have with Plato over a few more brews. But right now, we're anxious to get back to what we discussed last time — you know — Mr. Constanza's project of valuing natural places as natural capital.

A: Yes, this is one of the most important and most urgent topics of the day.

H: Mr. Constanza and his colleagues undoubtedly lack neither good intentions nor intellectual prowess. And a great many other equally well-intentioned and brilliant thinkers — some of our most eminent scientists and economists — have joined his project. It's so seductive to think of natural places as capital investments. It all seemed such a promising, even natural way to demonstrate the stupidity of reckless disregard of our natural resources — until you pointed out that it leads us to such absurd conclusions.

A: Yes indeed. I propose that we inquire into assumptions that underlie the natural capital valuation project. Perhaps we shall find that that RompInASwamp DevCo aren't the only ones building on a quagmire.

H: That's exactly what we were hoping for...

A: That will help set us up for a time when we might find a more satisfactory way of valuing nature by exploring some elements that are missing from the natural capital picture.

H: Splendid! Well, why do you think that Constanza's project is so appealing?

A: I think that there are many reasons. But the one I'd like to focus on first is that there is undoubtedly some truth in it.

H: Whoa there, Mr. A. I thought that you were going to help us see just the opposite. I mean, how else would it endorse such crazy things as casually trashing deserts or turning every swamp into a condo complex when that presents the greatest economic benefit?

A: We shall see about that. But I'd like to start by acknowledging the truth of one of Mr. Constanza's most fundamental premises — namely that nature provides a host of resources that we draw upon to satisfy a great many human needs. It provides the raw "stuff" for us to make many of the things that we desire and to satisfy our many and varied preferences.

H: That's certainly true.

A: No one can doubt that we "make a living" from nature...

H: Right.

A: ... or that nature has value to us because of that.

H: So Constanza didn't get everything wrong...

A: Not at all.

H: Then why not go with Constanza's project of setting the right price for nature and her services? Isn't it better to have some number that represents the value of a natural system than no number at all? Won't that at least give us some way to ask whether we'd be better off by going ahead with the next project that destroys part of our natural heritage?

Consequences for human welfare = the true measure of an act?

A: Excellent questions! I sense an inquiring rational soul at work.

H: Thank you, Mr. A. Coming from you, that's quite a complement.

A: Perhaps the most fundamental question we should ask is whether the consequences of an act, and particularly, the state of human welfare that derives from it, should be its true and only moral measure. Some might say that we sometimes, often, or even always should choose to act in a way that fulfills our duties and obligations to others, and that honors the just demands of others on us — even we thereby decrease overall welfare. I think that my buddy Manny might say something like that.

H: Sure, sometimes it's more important to just keep a promise to a friend — even if it might mean forgoing some significant preferences of our own and even if they likely outweigh the benefits for our friend.

A: An excellent example. And there are others who, when considering a particular act, might wish to focus on whether we would want to be the kind of person who would do it. I can't imagine who might want say that. But that doesn't sound totally crazy, does it?

H: I wouldn't have thought of that. But now that you mention it, I sometimes find myself thinking in just that way, too.

A: A man after my own rational soul. But let's begin by assuming that the outcome for human welfare is the right way to evaluate our actions.

H: Well, ok. Though you've made me pretty doubtful...

A: Does it follow that the price that such an outcome commands is the true value of the welfare that it provides?

H: Why wouldn't it be?

Price = Value?

A: An astonishing question. My first question would be, "Why in Macedonia would you think that it does?"

H: Gee, how could you not think that?

A: Let me tell you about a chat that I had with a bloke in that brew house. Called himself "Adam". Beat us Theatetus, could he belt down those Scottish ales.

H: Adam..., Adam..., common last name? Rings a bell...

A: In between pints, and before he slipped under the bar, he managed to write this down for me:

The word VALUE, it is to be observed, has two different meanings, and sometimes expresses the utility of some particular object, and sometimes the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys. The one may be called "value in use"; the other, "value in exchange". The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; and on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce any thing; scarce any thing can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it (Book I, Chapter IV)... The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it (Book I, Chapter V).

A. Smith, "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations", 1776 (http://www.econlib.org/LIBRARY/Smith/smWN.html)

H: Ah, so he's saying that there's no real relationship between price and utility for people. The price reflects the amount of labor...

A: ... a "factor of production"...

H: ... not its effect on welfare. That puts a pretty big dent in the theory that the price of something is a measure of its value for human welfare.

A: Exactly so. On the one hand, there's value in use -- the true utility of something — its true significance for human welfare. On the other hand, there's its value in exchange -- in the marketplace. What Adam wrote down for me shows us why we shouldn't expect any particular relationship between the two. Of course, that's the old labor theory of value -- the classical view. Modern economists — the neoclassical dudes that I call "econo-consequentialists" — don't buy it... so to speak.

H: Damn. I thought we had that one nailed.

A: Yeah, well, when I brought up the neoclassical view, poor auld Adam slid off his stool and slipped under the bar.

H: He felt kind of marginalized?

A: Hah! Exactly! Talk to any self-respecting neoclassical economist these days, and she'll say the price of water isn't a matter of how much labor went into its production. The price isn't even a matter of the total value of all the water in the world.

H: No?

A: Not at all. What counts is the water's marginal utility. The price for a unit of water is what a person is willing to pay to satisfy her last and least important desire for it. With abundant supplies, one needn't worry about its vital role in human survival. Instead, its price comes down to what we're willing to pay to use it to wash off sidewalks. But diamonds are so scarce that those who want them are willing to pay a way higher price for one than for a glass of water. A diamond's marginal utility, hence its price dwarfs that of water.

H: Amazing.

A: What I find amazing is that, if poor auld Adam hadn't had quite so many ales, he would have realized that those neoclassical dudes just take a different route to the same conclusion. The price of a thing does not reflect its value for human well being — not even insofar as that well being is a matter of how needs and preferences are satisfied. Economic theory — either classical or neoclassical — refutes that interpretation.

H: Wow.

A: Why do you find this surprising? Consider how, according to Stuart Pimm, Constanza and friends place the astounding $17 trillion price tag on nutrient cycling by the oceans. According to Pimm,

If the oceans were not there, re-creating their nutrient cycling would require removing the nutrients from the land's runoff and returning them. The estimate of this service's $17 trillion value is arrived at by multiplying the cost of removing phosphorus and nitrogen from a litre of waste water by the 40,000 cubic kilometers of water that flow from the land each year.

S. Pimm, "The value of everthing", Nature, 387, 15 May 1997, p. 232 (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v387/n6630/abs/387231a0.html)

There's a problem, though.

H: Which is...

A: ... that, according to Pimm, at least "In the short term, many would not notice (and perhaps not care) what happens to the elements as they flow into the ocean." (p. 232) So by the principles of preference consequentialism that underlie this valuation, that price grossly overestimates its true value for welfare. But say that we devise a wondrous technology that reduces the cost of P and N removal and recycling by a factor of 1,000,000. The price would then be a mere $17 million/yr. — a veritable bargain. Are we to think that such technological innovation reduces the value of the oceans for us? That a breakthrough technology would make the oceans dispensable? Would that make it ok for us to start heaving all our waste into them? Would we be free to stop worrying about eutrophication? Would that be the signal to start building pipelines to convey all our toxic wastes to the ocean?

H: That doesn't seem right.

A: I think what you feel is that, even if part of the value of the oceans has to do with nutrient cycling, not all its value derives from that. In fact, viewing the oceans simply as a resource for our use may fail to capture the most significant values of the ocean for us.

H: But wait a minute.

A: Hey man, I don't know about you, but I've already been waiting for two and one-half millennia. I can spare a few more moments or so.

H: We really appreciate your patience, Mr. A.

A: It's rather embarrassing, but we philosophers are not known for the speed with which we solve problems.

H: Ok, you've convinced me that price is pretty shaky stand-in for welfare value. As you've pointed out, economic theory itself — both classical and neoclassical — undermines that interpretation.

A: It's rather worse than that. Not only are Constanza and Pimm in error by presenting the supposed market price of nutrient cycling as its value for human welfare, they don't even get the market price right. I confess that Environmental Economics was not in the Lyceum curriculum. But I'm pretty sure you'd flunk the Stanford course if you used Pimm's substitution logic. To determine the true market price of a thing or service, a modern economist doesn't ask "What would it cost you to do that?" That's pretty much auld Adam's cost of labor theory. Instead, the neoclassical economist figures out our willingness to pay using contingent evaluation interviews. She would ask, "If it cost you $17 million to cycle N and P, would you buy that service? Yes? Ok, how about $17 billion? Really? How about $17 trillion?" if the economist's interlocutor says, "Jeez, Socrates; I'm gonna take my $17 million and buy myself 17 million lottery tickets instead — then that's the market price. A pretty crummy dialogue by Plato's standards. But I guess that modern economists doing contingent evaluation don't have his panache.

H: Ok, so let's make those ecologists take Environmental Economics before we let them publish again in "Nature". In the meantime, let's look at the bigger picture. Water and diamonds and nutrient cycling are only a tiny part of all the myriad things that we need and want. Aren't welfare economists just finding a way to express our preferences — and with a very satisfying mathematical precision, at that? Doesn't our welfare increase to the extent our preferences are satisfied? Can't we quantify our preferences for things or states of affairs by how much we're willing to pay for them — at the margins, as you say — by determining or estimating their price?

A: There are a raft of further assumptions behind those questions and we should look into them. As we've already seen, the market price of a thing has no necessary or even empirically observable connection with its value — considered as the importance of that thing for human well-being or flourishing.

H: But I can't help thinking that we could find a way to reconnect them.

A: Let's look at some other assumptions first — to see if that's the only problem.

Needs = preferences?

H: Ok, Mr. A, what's the next assumption?

A: That preferences and needs can be considered as one. Economists lump them into the basket of market "goods" that we might be willing to pay for.

H: How do you mean?

A: We all have a need for water and food. The nutritive part of our soul, which we share with all other organisms — plants and animals alike — and which is the source of our natural capacity to grow and reproduce, cannot flourish without food:

The nutritive soul then must be possessed by everything that is alive, and every such thing is endowed with soul from its birth to its death. For what has been born must grow, reach maturity, and decay-all of which are impossible without nutrition. Therefore the nutritive faculty must be found in everything that grows and decays.

Aristotle, "De Anima", Book III.12, tr. J.A. Smith (http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/soul.3.iii.html)

H: Can't get any more basic than that!

A: Right! And because we humans are social animals, certain kinds of relationships with other persons are also necessary to us. For example, we cannot flourish without friendships — for we need friends to develop and exercise our natural capacities as the kind of social animal that can take another's interests as one's own:

[Friendship] is a virtue or implies virtue, and is besides most necessary with a view to living. For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods; even rich men and those in possession of office and of dominating power are thought to need friends most of all.

Aristotle, "Nichomachean Ethics", Book VIII.1, tr. W.D. Ross (http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.8.viii.html)

H: That's a pretty strong claim. But I'd be hard pressed to contest it.

A: There's no possibility of a person flourishing in the absence of these sorts of things. In fact, we would suffer serious harm without them. They are independent of beliefs and position in life and even our ongoing projects in life because they arise directly from the very kind of living being, the kind of animal that we are.

H: But preferences...

A: ... are unlike needs in key respects. They depend on beliefs and on one's position in life. We can be mistaken about our preferences and prefer things that are not at all good for our well-being. We may mistakenly think that drinking six pints of ale every night with two scotch chasers bolsters our spirits and is good for us.

H: Like poor auld Adam, it seems.

A: Ah, he barely got to his third. But there's a related distinction that may be even more important.

H: And that is...

A: ... that our preferences, in contrast to our needs, can develop and change -- sometimes in profound ways -- as we develop our natural human sensibilities and become aware of relationships or new dimensions in relationships that we have to other things, other organisms and creatures, and to other persons in our world. Where the real estate guys at RompInASwamp DevCo see only a mosquito-infested and inconveniently water-saturated tract of land on which to build lucrative condos, the trained ecologist sees a vibrant community of plants and animals interacting with the "stuff" of an increasingly rare kind of place that presents conditions in which that kind of community can flourish. The developer sees a resource, a means for satisfying her preference to enrich herself. The home-buyers see a prestigious home site that satisfies their preference for the offered amenities. But the ecologist sees a place with a special kind of bio-geological history that gives it a correspondingly special place alongside and in relation to human beings.

H: In other words, ecology scientists such as Constanza and Pimm should see some kinds of value in swamps that have nothing to do with the services that they perform for us?

A: Yes, and it's a pity that they, of all people, don't insist on including such non-market values in their discussion of the value of places.

H: So we need to take care that we don't lump preferences together with needs. What else do we need to be wary of?

Willingness to pay = justice?

A: Remember that notion of "willingness to pay" that we mentioned?

H: Sure. That's how neoclassical economists measure the strength of our preferences.

A: Right. So we need to ask what "willingness to pay" really measures. Consider this. Economists ask themselves whether or not it's ok for people to die as the result of proposed policy — say to allow an industry to dump toxins into a river at a certain level.

H: Gee, doesn't that already violate the distinction between needs and preferences that you already discussed?

A: It does, indeed. But there's another point to be made. As Stanford economist Lawrence Goulder explains ("Benefit-Cost Analysis, Individual Differences, and Third Parties", Februay 2007, paper prepared for the conference, “What We Can Do To Improve The Use Of Benefit-Cost Analysis?” University of Washington, May 18-19, 2006), "The key statistic in this context is the value of a statistical life (VSL), which is calculated based on each affected individual’s willingness to pay for the change in the statistical probability of death that applies to him or her." And guess what? Rich people are far more willing to pay to increase their survival chances than poor people.

H: Well Plato's tomatoes, they've got the money to do that, and the power to make it happen.

A: Of course. So on the watch of the neoclassical economists, the life of a poor person is worth less — often considerably less — than the life of a rich person. Of course, when we say that, we mean the "the value of a statistical life". But actuarial tables play out in the real world with real human lives. By economists' evaluative rules, it's better to pay for toxic pollution by cutting short the life of a poor person than of a rich one.

H: I can see why you're not too keen on econo-consequentialism. Doesn't it have some sense of justice?

A: Perhaps, as an afterthought. Goulder, for example, claims that rich people have a preference for the poor not to suffer unduly. Taking that preference into account would even things up a bit.

H: So we are to find the value of poor people in rich persons' sympathy for their suffering? There's something even more appalling in that response than the obvious injustice of discounting poor lives in the first place.

A: What we are observing is the retreat by neoclassical economists from the principle of equal consideration. That principle was maintained by their classical utilitarian forerunners such as good old Jeremy Bentham. On his account, the pain of every person — perhaps even every sentient creature — counts equally.

H: Now that sounds fair.

Maximizing welfare = justice?

A: Fair in the respect that all are considered equally, but still not fair in how goods and harms may be distributed.

H: How so?

A: In the bad old days of classical utilitarianism, consequentialists took themselves to be simple-minded utility accountants. For the consequences of some act, add in Meno's increase in utility. Subtract the decrease for Zeno. Do that for all positively affected Meno's and all negatively affected Zeno's

The naked Archimedes (c 287-212 BC) running through the streets of Syracuse shouting 'Eureka!' From the title page of: 'Notizie istoriche e critiche intorno alla vita, alle invenzioni,ed agli scritti di Archimede siracusano' (Historical and critical information about the life, inventions and writings of Archimedes of Syracuse) by Count Giammaria Mazzuchelli (1707-1765), published 1737, Brescia, Italy.

and ηὕρηκα, um, voilà (that babelfish is quite something) you have a rating for that act and possibly one very excited economist running around naked holding up a sign with that number. Another economist takes another possible act, does the Meno's/Zeno's calculation for that alternative, and there, you've got two naked economists running around, each with their own number. Pretty soon, you have a mighty ugly sight. But barring the unlikely outcome of a tie, only one of those economists will be running around with the highest number and the others will have to get dressed and go home.

H: Whew. I was worried that things might be getting out of hand.

A: There may be disagreement about the ingredients for utilities in these calculations. My buddy Jeremy Bentham would keep it simple, restricting the calculus to pleasures and pains. John Mill would muddy the waters by throwing in most preferences (including the preference to experience pleasure and that to avoid pain), with some kind of, if you'll pardon the expression, preferential preference ranking. But in the end, it's basically a matter of addition and subtraction — modified only by weighting a pleasure or pain by its strength, or by weighting a preference by strength and type. The total welfare that is results from a choice — the summation of its consequences, both positive and negative — is what counts in comparing that choice to others.

H: Without using willingness to pay to measure preferences?

A: Right. The pleasures and pains of all count equally; or if you prefer, the preferences of all count equally.

H: How could that be unjust?

A: Injustices may result when some persons derive more utility from a choice than others. If the choice that maximizes the utility does so by providing enormous benefits to some, and the sum of those enormous benefits far outweighs (in the calculus) an enormous suffering that it inflicted on many, but fewer others, then classical utilitarianism would endorse it.

H: Even if the sufferers were in the minority, that would not be very just, would it?

A: Especially not in that case. That is what some would call the tyranny of the majority.

H: Yes, I can see that. Where do you think the calculation goes awry? It seemed such an unassailably good idea to choose those acts and policies that maximize welfare.

A: Ah, the question of justice brings us to yet another major question.

H: Which is...

Additivity of utilities?

A: Why, in the first place, should we think that we can we can meaningfully add and subtract the pleasures and pains of different people, or their preferences for different goods that they suppose are constitutive of their well-being?

H: Well, if Bentham is right, and our welfare is just a matter of pleasures and pains, it doesn't seem too hard to think of adding and subtracting them.

A: Even restricting our attention to pleasures, aren't there a plethora of different kinds? Do you really suppose that you can compare the pleasure of one person in being awarded a degree in philosophy with another person's pain in knowing that a departing friend will never again be seen?

H: I see what you mean.

A: Going beyond Bentham's simple world of pleasures and pains, consider the infinitely more diverse set of goods that might be the subjects of our preferences. Consider, for example, a preference to have good and fast friends. Can that be added to or subtracted from a preference to lead an autonomous life, free from the shackles of slavery? Can we say that a slave living in the most ignominious conditions is compensated by the fast friendships that, in her position, she can and does develop with her fellow slaves?

H: That would seem to be a tough proposition to endorse. But couldn't there be a way to compare two preferences without having to have some absolute rating of each?

Maximization and rights

A: Willingness to pay is one way to do that. That concept is, among other things, a tool that may appear to make possible a comparative measure, a ranking of all preferences. But we saw how quickly it leads us to an unjust distribution of the satisfaction of those preferences. There is yet another problem with "willingness to pay" that perhaps I shall leave for the end of today's interview.

H: Gee, Mr. A. It doesn't take too hard a glance at utility maximization to make it crumble before your eyes.

A: Yeah, it's kind of the reverse Gorgon effect. We philosophers are pretty good at it.

H: Are there any more questions on your list?

A: Well, our discussion of the utility arithmetic used in utility maximization serves well to introduce what may be our final question for today — which is, in fact, the first question we asked. Even if it makes sense to add some persons' preferences according to its strength and type, and to similarly subtract the preferences denied others, why should we think that maximizing preference values is the only thing that we should value in our moral considerations?

H: Well, I guess we've already shown that the distribution of goods counts. And man, maximization can really screw that up.

A: Yes, and the injustice of maximization doesn't end with the inequitable distribution of utilities. What about respect for basic rights — such as the right to autonomous existence, free of physical and intellectual enslavement? What if a system of enslavement maximized total human welfare? And what about the right to satisfaction of basic needs? Remember how we distinguished them from mere preferences? In considering one person's need for water directly against another person's preference for a 5-bath, 6-bedroom house instead of much more modest but perfectly adequate shelter launches us into morally troubled waters. Placing both on an equal footing inside the same calculus makes it possible to violate the basic right to satisfy such a basic need in the interest of maximizing preferences (broadly construed to include needs).

H: Well that seems to be all the more reason to get away from this maximization thing — this business of adding your utility and subtracting mine.

A: Spoken like a true neoclassical economist. Such an economist would say that you are onto something.

H: Really?

Justice of efficiency?

A: Indeed. Efficiency and Kaldor-Hicks compensation.

H: Huh?

A: The method of choice — the test of so-called "efficiency" — that neoclassical economists propose in place of maximization of welfare.

H: How does it work?

A: Maximization calculations are made on the problematic assumption that the preferences of Menos and Zenos can be assigned numeric values that can be added and subtracted in the preference calculus. Latter-day economists have invented the notion of economic efficiency precisely to avoid that — and thereby avoid the concomitant problems that we've unearthed.

H: That may not be a bad thing.

A: Not at all. So let's see how it works. This notion of efficiency builds on the notion of Pareto improvement. That's a change resulting from some act or policy which at least one person prefers but to which no one objects. One reaches Pareto optimality when no further Pareto improvements are possible.

H: Right. No adding or subtracting in that.

A: Exactly. But the Kaldor-Hicks criterion of efficiency sneaks interpersonal comparisons back in.

H: Then why would it be better than the maximizing calculus?

A: Well, the comparisons are less direct. The Kaldor-Hicks criterion broadens the simple notion of a Pareto improvement to allow, not just improvements to which no one objects, but ones that are so great to the beneficiaries that they can pay off the losers and still come out ahead.

H: It sounds as though we're also sneaking back to measuring preferences in terms of willingness to pay; or, in the case of the losers, willingness to accept compensation for their loss.

A: I'm afraid so. Interpersonal comparisons are back, though perhaps in a more limited way. Equal consideration is back out the door, because poor losers will tend to accept a pittance for their misery. And that's not even the worst of it.

H: It already looks like a pretty bad idea. It's hard to see how it could get worse.

A: Notice I said that the winners could pay off the losers.

H: Right?

A: Kaldor-Hicks does not say that they actually do that!

H: I'm stunned.

A: It's stunning, indeed. Kaldor-Hicks requires us to believe that justice is served when winners merely contemplate compensating the losers.

H: It's hard to believe that would sit well with the losers.

A: Or anyone with even a modest sense of justice.

H: Well, Mr. A, where does that leave us?

A brief synopsis

A: Not with much — at least, insofar as consequentialism and its incarnation as "natural capital" in valuing nature is concerned. Consequentialism in its various forms starts with one worthy insight — that the consequences of our actions and policies count in our moral assessment of them. Unfortunately, that insight is betrayed by the raft of assumptions that follow. There's the assumption that only consequences count. Close behind it is the assumption that the moral meaning of an act is entirely captured by how it affects human welfare. There's the flawed theory about how needs and preferences enter into human welfare. We have seen that it seems unlikely that we could make sense of comparing and adding interpersonal preferences. And it seems equally unlikely that we could find a just way to evaluate the aggregative consequences for welfare — whether we maximize utilities or apply an efficiency criterion. But even if we could do those things, questions about those first two basic assumptions would remain.

The grip of econo-consequentialist thinking

H: So how did such a problematic theory of moral value get such a grip on us?

A: I'm a philosopher, not a sociologist. But I'm willing to speculate...

H: that...?

A: ... there's a lure to the apparent mathematical precision of economics — so great a lure that we find it hard to overlook the possibility that the numbers may be meaningless. Economists aid and abet our urge to have a satisfyingly complete ordering on our choices. Of course we need the additional fiction of complete predictive ability and complete knowledge of human preferences for that. But nonetheless, the total ordering is hard to resist. All conflict dissolves away In a world in which all goods are completely ordered and comparable. There are no tradeoffs, really — just the choice that maximizes welfare for a maximizing consequential; or the most efficient choice for the modern economist. There's no tradeoff in choosing more welfare over less or more efficiency over less.

H: That would be too good to be true.

A: And I'm afraid it is. The unfortunate but real truth is that weighing the moral implications of an act is an extraordinarily imprecise and difficult practical art — not something that admits precise calculation. In the realm of natural value, part of the illusion of econo-consequentialist precision comes from its truncated account of that value as a set of resources and services from which we live. As we have already suggested, there's certainly more to natural value than that. Ethical considerations must embrace a wide variety of irreducible goods — not just how preferences are satisfied. Those goods tend to intertwine and conflict in agonizingly complex and difficult ways.

H: Yeah. I guess it's a mistake to try to make a simple thing out of something so complex.

A: Well said.

H: Do you think that there's anything else that makes econo-consequentialism seem so attractive?

A: Perhaps there's another attraction in how that view falls comfortably into the tradition of democratic liberalism. That tradition demands neutrality on the question of what we "should" prefer. We don't have to question one person's preference for a gigantic house over basic but entirely adequate shelter any more than another person's "preference" (or really need) for adequate drinking water. We take each preference at the same face value, as each person reports it to us. Even though we have seen that preferences are sometimes ill-conceived, to challenge such claims as less legitimate or illegitimate is vexingly difficult. Econo-consequentialism let's us avoid confronting this problem.

H: This has been an illuminating and most interesting discussion, Mr. A., but I don't think that I can cram more than one more thought into my head right now. Is there one final thought that you'd like to leave with us?

A: I've suggested that modern economic thinking has gone fairly far astray by failing to find and question some of its basic assumptions. That's not at all uncommon in ways of thinking that are institutionally ingrained. Nor is it uncommon for such ways of thinking to ignore obviously conflicting evidence. I'd like to bring one such case to your reader's attention — the problem with willingness to pay that I deferred 'til this point.

A final thought: Ignoring the evidence

H: Sure, shoot, Mr. A.

A: I have in mind the phenomenon of "protest zeros" in the contingent evaluation studies that economists use to find preference strengths for goods that are not traded in a market. These are answers that interviewees give as a way of refusing to assign any value to, say, preserving an area as wilderness. Economists quickly dismiss and throw out these "votes" on the grounds that they cannot be a true reflection of preferences: As they would say, "Nothing has either zero or infinite value." The evidence is discarded simply because it doesn't fit the theory. That, I would suggest, is as irrational as insisting that the premises "result of necessity" from the conclusion of a syllogism.

H: Pretty bad, I admit.

A: You should look at my discussion of bees. I honestly admitted that I didn't yet grasp all the facts and that

... if ever they are [sufficiently grasped], then credit must be given rather to observation than to theories, and to theories only if what they affirm agrees with the observed facts.

Aristotle, "On the Generation of Animals", Book III.10, tr. Arthur Platt (http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/generation/complete.html)

Doesn't anyone read what I have to say about the proper role of evidence in theory?

H: I guess not nearly enough.

A: Unfortunately, in discarding these "protest" data, economists discard an invaluable clue about the nature of value.

H: What is that?

A: That some goods are such that no price is acceptable. Not that such goods are worth zero dollars. Or an infinite number of dollars. Rather, as we philosophers like to say, there is a category mistake. Stipulating a price is a social act, entirely appropriate as part of the social interaction for exchanging certain kinds of goods in a market, but entirely inappropriate as a way of conveying the true worth of others. To say that one is willing to pay for certain kinds of goods, or to say that one is willing to accept payment for certain kinds of harms is to fundamentally mischaracterize, and mis-categorize those goods and harms. Consider interhuman relationships. How much would you be willing to accept to sell your child into slavery?

H: Good grief, Mr. A! How could I even consider that?

A: Or how much to betray your best friend? We also think of certain environmental goods in this way, places and non-human beings with which we also have relationships. So you might not be willing to say how much you're willing to accept for...

H: ... paving over the rim of the Grand Canyon for a Walmart parking lot?

A: Aha; you catch on quickly.

H: And how about such things as the constitution that sustains the social organization of a polity; or the biophysical underpinnings of life on the planet? We looked at those in "A Benefit-Cost Analysis of the Bill of Rights... and beyond" (http://environmentalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/08/benefit-cost-analysis-of-bill-of-rights.html).

A: Yes, that was a wonderful piece of rhetoric.

H: It certainly felt like a category mistake to apply BCA to the fabric of society and then to life itself. But I think that you may have put your finger on the root cause of that category mistake. Categories such as costs and willingness to pay are not the ones that we use, or that even make sense to use in evaluating the sustaining and organizing principles of life and society.

A: You know, we have openings at the Lyceum for promising students such as yourself. And the tuition is a pittance next to Stanford's.

H: After hearing what you had to say today, I'm pretty sure that the difference in price is no indication of a difference in educational value.

A: You can be sure of that! And check out the new, Ethically Enlightened Environmental Economics course that we'll be offering.

H: I hope that's not an oxymoron.

A: We shall see.

H: Well, thank you again, Mr. A. We hope you can return to give us some better ways of thinking about value, particularly environmental value.

A: I'd be most pleased to do that. In fact, I'm off to begin preparing right now...

H: Ok, helioskiagrablog readers. There you have one more in our series of exclusive interviews. Aristotle, the philosopher with the theory of everything, thinks that natural capital is most definitely not the natural theory of natural value.

Read more...

An Intentional Climate Change Story

(A literary interlude)

Apropos of our preceding post, this blog has unearthed (so to speak) an ingenious plan to improve our climate. In a little-publicized public auction held by the current administration (that not even the Sierra Club got wind of) The NPPA (North Polar Practical Association) has purchased territories north of the 84th parallel. That entrepreneurial organization plans to make good use of this apparently useless, icy, and uninhabitable region by, more easily than ever, extracting its still relatively untapped wealth of fossil fuels and precious minerals. The key is easy access to this treasure-for-the-taking. To that end, the NPPA plan to transform the polar region into a temperate zone — by reducing the earth's axial tilt, which is currently an inconvenient 23º 26'.

Those who might react with fear based on squeamishness about "unnatural" change need not worry. The tilt of the earth's rotational axis is currently decreasing anyway. This kind of change in axial tilt is a completely natural phenomenon. The NPPA just seek to hurry it along — to do their part in meeting our growing need for fuel and minerals.

In tropical Africa the NPPA have forged the greatest cannon ever devised. On the scheduled day (which this blog pledged not to reveal), the massive armament, hidden deep in a mountain shaft, will be fired. Its recoil will effect the tilt adjustment. This has been precisely calculated by the eminent scientist, J.T. Maston, whose computational wizardry is legendary. Who can doubt the result?

Jules Verne can. According to his 1889 "Sans dessus dessous" ("Topsy-turvy" or "The Purchase of the North Pole"), nothing happened. As it turned out, Maston miscalculated. Dropping three zeros in the measure of the earth's circumference (40,000 m. instead of 40,000 km.) at the outset of his computation made him overestimate the axial effect by 12 orders of magnitude (http://www.lesia.obspm.fr/~crovisier/JV/verne_SD.html).

A silly error base on a simple mixup in units in 19th century fiction based on now-surpassed computational technology? Or the same kind of very human error with which we now lose $125 million space ships (http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/Metrication/mystery_of_orbiter_crash_solved.htm)?

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Intentional Climate Change Again, Again

From managing biota ("Managing Baseball... Managing Nature" — http://environmentalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/10/managing-baseball-managing-nature.html), we effortlessly leap to managing the climate. Actually, it's no leap at all. We bring to this climate management project the same "rationality" and the same "sensibility" as we bring to the biotic one. We are out to "improve" nature to satisfy human desires — at least short-term ones.

We are quite deliberately — at increasing rates — burning fossil fuels, practicing agriculture, and doing lots of other things that we fully know spew greenhouse gases into the troposphere. We know that we are on course to more than double pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gases. And we know that this is warming the planet — not a little, but a lot from the viewpoint of many biological, geochemical, and climate systems.

In other words, without a doubt, we are intentionally changing our climate.

In an October 24, 2007 New York Times editorial (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/opinion/24caldiera.html?ref=opinion), Ken Caldeira, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution’s department of global ecology, recites without credit an August, 2006 proposal by nobel laureate Paul J. Crutzen (Crutzen, P.J., "Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma?", Climatic Change, 77:3-4 (August 2006), pp. 211-220, http://www.springerlink.com/content/t1vn75m458373h63/?p=ac0f8d1a677948bfa4b589a55cfa1792&pi=3). The idea is to spray aerosols — particulates, or particulate-forming chemicals — into the stratosphere in order to increase that atmospheric layer's albedo (reflectance), thereby reducing the radiative energy reaching the earth's troposphere (lower atmosphere) and surface.

Aerosol painting. Which color suites the stratosphere?

In other words, in order to fix the bad, warming effects of how we're currently intentionally changing the climate, it is proposed that we intentionally change the climate some more.

Caldeira closes by glibly posing the question:

Which is the more environmentally sensitive thing to do: let the Greenland ice sheet collapse and polar bears become extinct, or throw a little sulfate in the stratosphere?

What picture does "throwing a little sulfate in the stratosphere" conjure up? Is it, perhaps, a bit like throwing a little rice at a newly married couple? Crutzen helps us flesh out the picture. He estimates that the cost would be $25 billion to $50 billion per year, plus a half-million premature deaths from particulate pollution, unspecified damage — both biotic and abiotic — due to an increase in acid rain, plus a risk (among others) of depleting stratospheric ozone (again). He notes that the sky would whiten, but that we would be compensated by more colorful sunrises and sunsets — as happens now in areas of dense particulate pollution. He says that "the required annual S inputs are large" (p. 215), estimating the need for 5.3 Tg S to compensate for doubled greenhouse gas concentrations (p. 213). (A teragram is one million metric tonnes; a metric tonne is 1000 kg.) And he admits that spewing sulfates into the stratosphere would be "a messy operation" (p. 213). So we should consider doing it from a tropical island. It seems that doing this from the Carnegie Institute's back yard is contraindicated.

This, then, is what Caldeira means by "throwing a little sulfate in the stratosphere".

There are other possible effects. Among the ones we know enough to ask about are the effects of the concomitant warming of the lower stratosphere and tropopause (the troposphere/stratosphere interface), an increase in high cloud cover (due to a sulfate-induced increase in cloud longevity), and shifts in wind patterns that (among other effects) may warm Eurasian winters — as has been observed to accompany natural (volcanic) stratospheric sulfate "experiments". And then there are the effects that we don't even know enough to ask about — the indirect physical effects of changing the profile of solar and longwave radiation in the upper atmosphere on static and dynamic equilibria, the physico-chemical effects of increasing stratospheric heterogeneity, and (perhaps after a long causal chain that will never be uncovered until after the fact, if even then), the effects of all these things on living things on earth's surface.

No matter how much research we put into the new, cooling kind of ICC (Intentional Climate Change), there will be some effects, and not unlikely some big effects, that we will not be able to anticipate. And, while the direct effects of sulfates in the stratosphere — at least the know direct effects — are relatively short-lived (on the order of a few years), we cannot predict whether the indirect effects will be equally short-lived or whether they will be reversible.

What ought we to do?

The answer to this question is the answer to the question: "Is intentional climate change morally justified?"

We are not going to try to answer that question in this post. But it is not easy to see how the question, as it applies to engineered attempts to cool the climate, is different from the question as it applies to our current, deliberate warming behavior in any ethically relevant way. To say that climate warming is not the main point of the behavior that causes it is beside the point. We know very well what we're doing, we deliberately do it, and we deliberately continue doing it.

What are some of the morally relevant questions? Here are some:

1. The choice to proceed with cooling ICC would likely be made by the same people who have decided to continue their warming ICC and who are reaping its short-term benefits. The climate of the poor and disenfranchised would be changed, too. They, too, will have to live with the results. And, if for no other reason than their relatively adaptive incapacity, they will tend to affected disproportionately. Is this right?
2. The disenfranchised include future generations of people, as well as all the other creatures that share our planet; and these, too, are likely to be disproportionately affected. Is this right in view of the fact that we have another, far more conservative choice — the choice to discontinue our current ICC behavior?
3. Looming behind the previous question is the specter of irreversibility. Of course we can stop bombarding the stratosphere with sulfates. And we have good evidence that the particulates will dissipate well within a decade. But in such a grand experiment on such a grandly complex system, we can never know whether some part of the atmospheric system, some static or dynamic equilibrium, will make a quantum and irreversible shift. Shifts of this kind of system could easily be "forever" — for time frames that apply to the human species — 200,000 years or so for Homo sapiens, 2.5 million years or so for the entire genus Homo. In the world of morals, irreversibility counts. That a homicide cannot in any meaningful way be undone or compensated, that there is no way to right that wrong, makes it all the more egregious.
4. On the other hand, we can choose to change our own behavior and institutions that encourage undesirable behavior. This is undoubtedly difficult. But people are malleable. People can adopt different ways of living. They can change their institutions. It is possible to change; and this is undeniably a far more conservative choice. Is it right to choose the risk of catastrophic and irreversible damage in light of this alternative?
5. We do not know in any detail what the consequences are of any ICC. We do know that our attempts to intervene in systems so overwhelmingly complex always have unexpected results. By definition, we will be completely unprepared to deal with them. We know that some of the unexpected results will be problematic. There is distinct chance that one or more may be catastrophic — perhaps even more catastrophic than the problem it was to address. With lives literally in the balance, can we justify this risk?
6. Focusing on ICC for cooling will have the inevitable social and political effect of legitimizing our refusal to seriously consider changing our current warming ICC behavior. It will distract us from even considering such a change. Can this be justified?
7. These are difficult questions by any measure. Yet there is no evidence of any inclination to embed their critical examination in the process of looking into cooling ICC. This is a very different kind of examination from scientific assessment of risks and probably effects. We have the disturbing specter of research into ICC and even its implementation outside any kind of well-thought-out ethical framework. At the very least, is it right to proceed without climate ethicists?

But what ought we to do if, as Caldeira and Crutzen both agonize, we deliberately choose to continue to warm the globe with our greenhouse gas emissions? The answer is that, if we believe that our current experiment in deliberately warming the planet is wrong, then conducting a geoengineered cooling experiment would be, too. If we choose to continue our ICC for warming, that fact should not change the ethical assessment of ICC for cooling.

But what happens if, as a result of our current, intentional climate-warming behavior, we face the sort of situation that Stephen Schneider (Schneider, S. H., "Geoengineering: Could-or-Should-we do it", Climatic Change, 33:3 (July 1996), pp. 291–302, http://www.springerlink.com/index/NVQ736V7JQ017V72.pdf) portrays:

Supposing, a currently envisioned low probability [in 1996; now much higher] but high consequence outcome really started to unfold in the decades ahead (for example, 5º C warming in this century) which would characterize as having potential catastrophic implications for ecosystems . . . Under such a scenario, we would simply have to practice geo-engineering...

Would we, as this argument claims, have to practice geo-engineering in such dire circumstances? We presume that part of the force of Schneider's "have to" is "ought to". He is saying that, if we were facing a catastrophe from climate warming, we ought to implement a geoengineered cooling experiment. But again, if experiments in changing the climate are morally unjustified and unjustifiable, why would our desperation in the face of catastrophe change this? Would it, for example, change the ethically relevant fact that we would be doing something whose real consequences may well result in greater catastrophe?

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Nuts to gray squirrels

In response to the October 9 post "One squirrel, two squirrel..." (http://environmentalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/10/one-squirrel-two-squirrel.html), we have this, submitted by a reader that identified herself only as the leader of the heretofore unknown organization Nuts for Nutkin:

If Sciuris vulgaris were lord,
Lots of nuts it could surely afford.
    And it could require,
    Under consequence dire,
That production of grays be offshored.

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Managing Baseball... Managing Nature

Or: A Tale of Three Species

Baseball

It's World Series time and I can't help but think about baseball. I grew up in a baseball-obsessed town with and even more baseball-obsessed father. Genotype + environment = phenotype. In other words, I grew up playing a ton of baseball. I don't know how our parents found the inner strength to let a bunch of six-year olds throw a hard ball at, around, and away from each other. But they did; and I'm forever grateful.

I bring up my baseball-playing early childhood because the salient feature of a story that I wish to relate about nature puts in mind a regular feature of our early games. With, say, "men" on first and second, the hitter would squib a ball on the ground to the second baseman. The field, more resembling a bombing range than a level playing field, would redirect the ball in interesting ways beyond the anticipatory acumen of the fielder. As the ball scooted away from him, the runner from second would round third and head for home. Gamely chasing the ball, picking it up, and eager to redeem his error, the second baseman would throw to the catcher to try to cut down that lead runner at home. The phrase "to the catcher" had to be inferred from the general direction in which the second baseman was looking — for the direction of the ball was quite different. One run. The third baseman and catcher would give chase to the errant ball. The catcher, arriving first, would pick it up, then throw to third to try to catch the runner who had started his journey from first. Unfortunately, the third baseman, who had joined the catcher in pursuit of the second baseman's errant throw, was not at third to catch the catcher's throw. Two runs. Out to the outfield went the ball — picked up there as the batsman, the last remaining base-runner, was rounding second and heading for third. It was about then that the parents of the fielding team would break into the memorable chant:

"HOLD THE BALL, HOLD THE BALL".

There was a wisdom to that urgently offered advise. Evidence was, with another throw from another frenetic fielder, another run would score, leaving the fielding team yet deeper in the hole.

From managing baseball we go to managing nature.

A short history of Opuntia spp. - H. sapiens interactions

Drooping tree pear (Opuntia vulgaris) was brought to New South Wales Australia in 1788 on the First Fleet to establish a cochineal dye industry there — a spirited bid to keep those British red coats red and keep the green in the Commonwealth.

No problem.

Sometime later, in the early 1800's) prickly pear cactus (O. stricta) was brought in — this time, for stock fodder. In drought-prone Australia, it seemed prudent to have a drought-resistant plant to feed stock.

Big problem. Very big.

By 1925, prickly pear was completely out of control. At that time, it infested some twenty-five million hectares in New South Wales and Queensland, and was spreading at the rate of half a million hectares per year. This was one of the most astounding biological success stories of all time — for the prickly pear. And one of the greatest agricultural disasters — for humans.

With the experiment in managing stock fodder not going according to plan, it was time for another management decision. Perhaps some chemical management? In Queensland alone, that state's Prickly Pear Land Commission reported that in just one year (1926), the amount of poison sold was enough to treat 9,450,000 tons of prickly pear. Chemicals included 31,100 (10 and 20 lb.) tins of arsenic pentoxide and 27,950 containers (ranging in size from 2 gal. earthenware jars to 100 lb. (5.5 gal.) steel drums) of Roberts Improved Pear Poison — a cocktail of 80% sulfuric acid and 20% arsenic. We are not aware of how many plants and animals — human and otherwise — were poisoned. But evidently, the prickly pear were not. They continued to proiferate. Another management decision had to be made.

Enter the cactus moth (Cactoblastis cactorum). Brought in from Argentina where it was observed to be a singularly well-evolved weapon of mass prickly pear destruction, it, or 2.25 million or so of its eggs, were released in 1926. Six years later, by 1932, the moth, or more precisely, its larvae, had eaten, indeed, gorged themselves to agricultural glory and immortal fame — virtually eliminating all major stands of O. stricta in Queensland and New South Wales. The spectacular biological triumph of O. stricta had been utterly and even more spectacularly reversed in one of the most astounding biological control success stories of all time.

C. Cactoblastus v. Opuntia — cactus moth larvae doing what sulfuric acid and arsenic cannot

An innocent and interested but unrepresented North American party — Leptonycteris curasoae

There's more to the Australian story (summarized at http://www.northwestweeds.nsw.gov.au/chronology_of_events.htm). But let's leave it to fast forward to the middle of the 20th century.

In the Caribbean, various Opuntia spp. are endemic (not invasive), but annoying — at least to H. sapiens. In the 1950's, the level of annoyance was high. With the spectacular success of C. cactorum in Australia, it was clearly time for the moth to be brought back for an encore performance. It did not disappoint. According to Habeck, D.H, and Bennett F.D. , "Cactoblastis cactorum Berg (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae), a Phycitine New to Florida", Entomology Circular No. 333, Florida Dept. Agric. & Consumer Serv. Division of Plant Industry, August 1990 (http://www.doacs.state.fl.us/pi/enpp/ento/entcirc/ent333.pdf):

In 1957 [C. cactorum] was introduced into the Caribbean, in Nevis, where the control of Opuntia curassavica and other Opuntia spp. was rapid and spectacular (Simmonds and Bennett 1966). Eggs and larvae, or infested cladodes, were sent from Nevis to Montserrat and Antigua in 1962 and to Grand Cayman in 1970 (Bennett et al. 1985). By 1963 it had naturally spread from the Lesser Antilles to Puerto Rico (Garcia-Tuduri et al. 1971) and is now present in Haiti, Dominican Republic, and the Bahamas (Starmer et al. 1987).

Unfortunately, this management decision failed to account for the proximity of these Caribbean islands to the mainland. And sure enough, C. cactorum rode winds or perhaps took a boat ride over to Florida. Six Opuntia spp. are endemic to Florida. Three of them, including O. spinosissima and O. tricantha, are rare and threatened. But they are just as tasty to the moth.

The moth did not sat tight. It has steadily, inexorably made its way up the east coast and, more alarmingly, around the Gulf coast towards the Southwest and Mexico. Since the year 2000, it has spread at the stunning rate of 130 km. (100 miles) per year — far faster than it did in Australia. Apparently, the moth is intent on eclipsing its earlier down-under performance, as spectacular as it was. Most recently (in the summer of 2006) and most ominously, it showed up at Isla Mujeres, just 8 km. (less than 6 miles) offshore from the Mexican mainland near Cancun.

Opuntia natural and cultural history

Opuntia spp. are environmental keystones in semi-arid and desert regions. They retain precious moisture in the soil, stabilize it, and prevent its erosion. Many semi-arid areas in Mexico would almost certainly become desert without Opuntia. Opuntia provides habitat (nest sites and protection from predators) for various birds, reptiles, and mammals — including bobwhite quail, cactus wren and curve-billed thrasher. Many herbivorous insects feed on the flowers, pads, or plant; and these, in turn are food for vertebrates. A number of birds, reptiles, and mammals also feed directly on the plant. The Texas tortoise (Gopherus berlandieri) , which is listed internationally as a CITES II (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species Appendix II — http://www.cites.org/eng/app/index.shtml) species and federally under the US Endangered Species Act, feeds heavily on Opuntia flowers and fruit. The also-endangered lesser long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris curasoae) — listed in both the US and Mexico — feeds on its nectar and pollen while Opuntia flowers, and its fruit afterwards. Opuntia spp. comprise more than half of the winter diet of white tailed deer and peccaries in south Texas.

The coat of arms of Mexico — a Mexican golden eagle perched upon an Opuntia cactus and devouring a snake

Among the mammals that sustain themselves from Opuntia is H. sapiens. Opuntia is a staple food for the Mexican rural poor.

Mexico is home for 76 Opuntia spp. 38 of them are not found anywhere else. According to Stiling, P., "Potential Non-target Effects of a Biological Control Agent, Prickly Pear Moth, Cactoblastis cactorum (Berg) (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae), in North America, and Possible Management Actions", Biological Invasions, 4:3 (2002), pp. 273-281(9), http://www.springerlink.com/content/lm432w8415149103/) Cactoblastis can be expected to attack at least 31 Opuntia spp. in the US and 56 species in Mexico.

Opuntia is also a Mexican cultural icon. The Mexican flag depicts an eagle perched on a prickly pear cactus. The Opuntia crop enables many subsistence farmers to stay on their land.

Opuntia economics

Economically, in the American southwest and in Mexico, Opuntia is a source of pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, fodder, cochineal dye (still!), hunting (for the peccaries and white-tailed deer that feed on it) and its lease revenue, and ornamental uses. The Mexican cactus industry is 2.5% of the value of its total agricultural production. (See the assessment in www.aphis.usda.gov/plant_health/plant_pest_info/cactoblastis/downloads/whitepaper.pdf.)

And now?

With the situation looking dire, we feel compelled to make another management decision. Ecologists are looking at importing the natural enemies of C. cactorum from its native home in Argentina. For example, Habeck and Bennett (cited above) recommend that:

Classical biological control should be considered. In its native habitat in South America several natural enemies are known including Apanteles alexanderi Brethes (Braconidae), Phyticiplex doddi (Cushman) and P. eremnus (Porter) (Ichneumonidae), Brachymeria cactoblastidis Blanchard (Chalcididae) [a chalcidid wasp], and Epicoronimyia mundelli (Blanchard) (Tachinidae) [all parasitoid wasps].

According to Peter Stiling, "Ecology, Theories and Applications", Prentice-Hall, 4th ed., p. 203,

Only about 16 percent of classical biological control introductions attempted so far qualify as economic successes (Hall, R.W., L.E. Ehler, and B. Bisabri-Ershadi, "Rates of success in classical biological control of arthopods", Bulletin of the Entomological Socoiety of America, 26: 114-14, 1980.) Usually, organisms are released in a hit-or-miss technique. Some authors believe that this approach makes the best economic sense, given the high cost of research into the biology of natural enemies (van Lenteren, J.C., "Evaluation of control capabilities of natural enemies. Does art have to become science?" Netherlands Journal of Zoology, 30: 369-81, 1980). Just release a bunch of parasitoids and predators, and hope that one of them does the job.

For the moment, put aside any moral or aesthetic responsibility we have to respect the natural complexity and richness of our world and to refrain from reducing it to a human-designed state of degraded simplicity. Forget for now whether we have a responsibility to live with, as well as from that richness. Just focus on our most narrowly defined, most mean-spiritedly selfish interests in wringing from the land living as much material wealth as possible as soon as possible.

Can anything be more clear? We have met the biological enemy, and it is us. We, the creature so highly endowed with a rational capacity, cannot bring ourselves to admit its limits. We cannot recognize our profound inability to understand natural systems well enough to avoid disaster in our nature-management experiments. Instead, we have an escalating spiral of management decisions — each successive one a "solution" to the mess left by the last, and almost always leading to a bigger mess. With Opuntia and the cactus moth, we have the biggest success... leading to the biggest failure.

Is this "merely" an dilemma that reflects the current state of our knowledge? Is our current helplessness in predicting the consequences of our natural management decisions a matter of the current, nascent state of the ecological science, which is clearly advancing as rapidly as some of the best scientific minds can make it go? Or is there some more fundamental barrier to this epistemological limitation? Is this distinction important?

As matters stand, with greater than 6 to 1 odds for failure and a significant chance for disaster for even "proven" management techniques, would a sober gambler place her chips on "going for it"? Do the odds in the nature casino, unlike those in Las Vegas, improve after an initial string of losses? With two runs across from two successive errors, and another threatening to score if the rubber-armed and frenzied outfielder throws away the ball again, I hear

"HOLD THE BALL. HOLD THE BALL."

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Paean to the study of ecology

And now for something completely different...

A brief paean to the joy of studying ecology and its Greek-inspired, Aristotle-approved vocabulary:

Bull's-horn acacia (Acacia collinsii) loving its ants (Pseudomyrmex spinicola) (Alex Wild, 2007) http://www.myrmecos.net/

To live as a myrmecophile
For some would seem utterly vile.
    But were you a plant,
    Defended by ant –
Your love would show staggering guile.

or alternatively:

Engaging in myrmecophily
To some would seem perfectly silly.
    But defended plants know
    That ants help you grow:
Don't shun or get eaten alive-ily.

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Manufactured Landscapes

Edward Burtynsky makes images of hidden landscapes. They are landscapes that are as divorced from our everyday experience as the remote wilderness areas that inhabit the framed confines of other landscape photographers. Some of them are as compellingly beautiful, even sublime, as the best of the wilderness genre.

The traditional wilderness landscape connects to our lives, if at all, as a testament to qualities in the natural world that astound us as utterly beyond and outside human creative imagination, let alone human capabilities. It is in that way that they enrich us and our imaginations. They are the work of forces and processes operating on a creative scale in space and time that transcends individual humans and even the human species. We recognize in them the antithesis of human artifice, which can and has often transformed this kind of landscape into something entirely different, and with stunning suddenness. In a fraction of the engendering time — something of enormous complexity and richness becomes far simpler, far less rich as it is reigned in by the limits of human imagination. We treasure the beauty of natural landscapes all the more because we are at least vaguely aware of their fragility — their susceptibility to being almost instantly and irreversibly transformed by even modest, well-intentioned human presence and "use".

Burtynsky's landscapes connect to our modern lives in some very different ways. They are, as he says, "manufactured landscapes". There's a pun in that phrase. His are the landscapes that we make in order to make things ... and eventually discard them. Like natural landscapes, they are created and shaped by forces and processes without teleological guidance. But with manufactured landscapes, the processes and forces at work are not entirely disinterested. They are ones that spring from the urge to satisfy specifically human material desires. Manufactured landscapes are literally sculpted by the economic engines that bring the objects of our desires into our life. While wilderness vanish, manufactured landscapes expand and increase in number — as human desires and the number of desiring humans increase.

Wilderness landscapes are the result of terribly enormous and complex forces -- shifting tectonic plates, vulcanism, visits by comets, meteorites and interstellar dust, huge shifts in tropospheric and oceanic patterns, and the interaction of all of these with the 100's of millions of different organisms that have inhabited earth since the first billion of its 4.5 billion year history. The forces of the economy, though a human invention and institution, are no less terrible — perhaps even more so. They are global in spatial scale. The time scale on which they act and perform transformations can be virtually instantaneous — literally, before anyone can understand what the changes mean. And the changes cannot be undone.

In front of Burtynksy's lens, manufactured landscapes have a beauty that haunts. Wilderness images haunt us at least partly by confronting us with what billions of years of creative energy have wrought without any human guidance. We feel awe, perhaps more so with the realization of the stunningly rapid disappearance and painful rarity of the subject. With manufactured landscapes, we are haunted by the prospect of their rapid incursion into our life and the realization that in the seemingly mundane details of how we live our daily life, we are the driving force behind this advance. Soon, inevitably, these manufactured landscapes won't be hidden. The formal beauty that Burtynsky achieves does, as it should, strike terror into us. The seductiveness of the images is metaphorically laden with the seductiveness of the things that are the objects of human desire — the things whose making and discarding unleash the seemingly inexorable economic forces that mold his landscapes.

Modest reflection on what's just outside the frame of Burtynsky's images deepens the feeling of looming specters. While many of us fuel the economic sculptor of manufactured landscapes by "expressing" our consumptive preferences, granite quarry workers breath granite dust and quartz; eWaste sorters wade unprotected through piles of electronic components and other electronic components laden with cadmium lead, mercury, and PCB's; shipbreakers in 40º C heat, wade in neck-deep crude oil, tear apart ship parts laced with asbestos, PCB's, lead, mercury, organic solvent, and crawl unprotected and armed with crude blow-torches, grinders, and cutting tools up, over, and around rust-weakened hulks. These people, we may surmise, are part of the landscape because it makes "economic sense".

Wilderness landscapes disappear; manufactured landscapes emerge and expand. Photographic inspection and reflection follows, leaving us with these stunning juxtapositions of images of Ansel Adams / Burtynsky:


Bridalveil Fall / Oxford Tire Pile


Frozen Lake and Cliffs / Rock of Ages #4


Monolith / Rock of Ages #15


Canyon de Chelly / Shipbreaking No. 9a


Aspens / Uranium Tailings No. 12


Snake River / Nickel Tailings No. 34

For some time still, the richest among us will be able to escape from the sight of Burtynsky's hidden, albeit increasingly exposed and apparent, manufactured landscapes. But even now, not even the richest can escape their collusion and implicit responsibility in creating these landscapes, or in making them increasingly dominant on the planet.

Burtynsky's books include his "Manufactured Landscapes" (http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300099430), "Quarries" (http://www.steidlville.com/books/555-Quarries.html), and "China" (http://www.steidlville.com/books/134-China.html). Helioskiagrablog urgently recommends the 2006 documentary film, "Manufactured Landscapes" (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/manufactured_landscapes/). Despite its limitations, the film begins to suggest a central point of this post: Byrtynsky's images are not so much about isolated places, as much as they are about the power of the human institutions that create and connect them.

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One squirrel, two squirrel...

... red squirrel, gray squirrel...

... with apologies to Dr. Seuss, whose wonderful tale's logic may exceed the logic that has been applied to the matter of Britain's squirrel populations.

As we understand them, these are the facts of the matter:

The native squirrel of Britain is the red, Sciurus vulgaris or, in a country where lords have status, the "common squirrel". For their personal amusement in the early 19th century (and I should clarify that, so far as we know, this amusement involved nothing more perverse than the hunt), Britons imported the Yankee gray squirrel, S. carolinensis. Of course, the grays escaped and started amusing themselves — recreationally and procreationally. Which, for a squirrel, is pretty much the same thing. Ever since, they have thoroughly enjoyed themselves out-competing the reds. The scorecard stands at grays: 2,000,000 versus reds: 160,000. It looks grim for the home team. There is a high probability that the reds may vanish from Britain within a decade. But despite the decline of the British population and their immanent departure from that island, reds may still outnumber reds worldwide.

In the early 20th century, Britons hunted the still more numerous reds with abandon. That was an economic good -- simultaneously providing sporting pleasure and bolstering timber "goods" by reducing the number of bark-stripping rodents. In the 1930's, alarmed by the displacement of the home team, the government established a gray squirrel bounty. But that move failed to level the squirrel playing field. Now, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs sponsors such efforts as S.O.S. (Save Our Squirrels), which administers red squirrel preserves; and the Red Squirrel Protection Partnership. The latter organization doesn't exactly protect red squirrels -- at least not directly. Rather, "It shoots, or traps and then smashes on the head, every gray it can find" (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/magazine/07squirrels-t.html?pagewanted=all).

The current arguments for saving the reds seem to be heavily invested in Beatrix Potter. From the above-mentioned source, here is an account of the March, 2006 debate in the august House of Lords (no commons amongst the grays there):

Earl Peel rose to call attention to the decline in numbers of the reds and its significance. “To many,” he said, “the red squirrel represents an integral part of our woodland landscape — an iconic creature, immortalized by Beatrix Potter, through the charismatic character of Squirrel Nutkin.” But before turning his attention to Squirrel Nutkin, Earl Peel proposed conducting “a brief health check” of various other Beatrix Potter characters. “Starting with Tabitha Twitchit and Tom Kitten” — both cats — “they are truly on top of their game. . . . Let us now consider the status of Mr. Tod, the fox. On second thoughts, given that he has taken up 700 hours of parliamentary time, it would be somewhat hypocritical of me to prolong the debate.” He went on: “That brings me on seamlessly to the other really controversial character that graced the class of 1912 — and that of course is Tommy Brock,” Potter’s badger. “Hasn’t he done well?”

Peel continued: “Despite suffering from and carrying tuberculosis, he has successfully managed to establish himself in the hearts and minds of the nation as being more important than dairy cows or, indeed, farmers’ livelihoods, and like Mr. Tod, has managed to secure his very own legislation.”

Peel concluded his health check: “Squirrel Nutkin must look back on his alma mater and think to himself, ‘How could it have all gone so wretchedly wrong for me?’ ”

[Lord Rupert] Redesdale rose to congratulate Peel. [Lord Redesdale is the founder and leader of the concussing Red Squirrel Protection Partnership.] “My Lords,” he said, “I thank the noble earl, Lord Peel, for initiating the debate and commend him for his bravery. It takes a brave man to initiate a debate that had Radio 4 saying this morning that he would be calling for an immediate cull of gray squirrels. I hate to say that his postbag will immediately be filled with letters from irate people who love gray squirrels.”

He continued: “One of the problems in the public perception is that gray squirrels are the only squirrels they see. They see them in parks and gardens, and they are sociable and friendly animals. Yesterday, I walked through St. James’s Park and watched tourists feeding gray squirrels crisps by hand. In Regent’s Park, a gray squirrel came up to my son and me and actually climbed up my leg to look in my pocket.”

Lord Hoyle soon cut off Redesdale: “My Lords, perhaps they are friendlier in Regent’s Park than they are in St. James’s Park. One that ran up my leg bit me.”

Redesdale resumed: “Efforts involving buffer zones have been undertaken to halt the advance of the gray squirrel. It is unfortunate that in Northumberland, when there was talk of a cull of gray squirrels, there was such public outcry that much of that work had to be deferred.”

Lady Saltoun of Abernethy, the 21st to hold that title in Scotland, then spoke to point out the inherent superiority of the red over the gray squirrel: “Red squirrels,” she said, “are rather like quiet, well-behaved people who do not make a nuisance or an exhibition of themselves or commit crimes and so do not get themselves into the papers in the vulgar way gray squirrels do.” She continued: “Red squirrels do not strip bark from trees; damage arable crops, market gardens and garden plants; dig up bulb and corms from recently sown seed; eat birds’ eggs; or eat telephone wires and electricity cables, as gray squirrels do.” Lady Saltoun suggested some research be done on whether gray squirrels tasted good. She foresaw a fight at the dinner table: “I have a nasty feeling that . . . children in particular would say, ‘Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly eat that,’ just as they say they cannot eat dear little bunny rabbits. But this is worth having a look at.”

Lord Inglewood concluded with a call to action. “We have been far too intellectual about this and tried to be far too clever,” he said. The matter was simple: “There has to be at least some killing of gray squirrels.” To Inglewood’s mind, British governments over the years, regardless of political persuasion, were guilty of “squeamishness.” And “as far as the red squirrel is concerned,” he went on, “squeamishness spells nemesis for this lovely and iconic creature. Those involved with trying to preserve the red squirrel in this country have adopted a policy of appeasement towards the grays. The red squirrels have had Chamberlains and not Churchills, but it is Churchills that they need.” Inglewood finished with a dark prediction: “Unless something radical and imaginative is done . . . Squirrel Nutkin and his friends and relations are going to be toast.

In its way, this is an examplar of how humans manage and justify their management of other species. The elements are familiar from many similar stories. Included are a familiar economic justification for (initially) casually decimating the natives, the intentional import of an alien, the alien's subsequent rise to ascendancy, and now the sentimental justification for trying to decimate the aliens on the grounds that they are inexorably displacing the natives -- not worldwide, but in one geographical and cultural zone. In this case at least, there is no issue of alien individuals suffering as the result their natural fecundity. Nor is there any question of extinction. The gray is simply Sciurus non grata in the sceptred isle.

Ethical considerations are conspicuously absent -- unless morals are defined by economics and shifting sentiments. With what confidence can we say that Britons were at one time morally justified in culling red squirrels for economic benefit? And now that the reds are the sentimental favorite amongst Britons, with what confidence can we say that they are morally justified in culling their competition? Could they have been justified in the first instance, but not the second? Or is, perhaps, the reverse true? What is, after all, the moral weight of these kinds of economic and sentimental and cultural reasons?

Should this give us pause in viewing ourselves as the rightful or even wrongful but competent manager of other species?

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Aristotle shows up in Ecology 101

(The second in a series of exclusive interviews with the great philosopher)

Following up our first, history-making interview with Aristotle ("An Interview with Aristotle", http://environmentalvalues.blogspot.com/2007/08/interview-with-aristotle.html), we've brought The Man back to get his reactions to some startling and revelatory recent developments in practical reasoning. They are so fundamentally important and now so well understood and widely accepted by our best thinkers, that they are ensconced in the basic texts of our finest academies. We are talking about nothing less than bringing mathematical precision to practical reasoning — particularly when it comes to reasoning about our environment. Because now, we can put a precise value on places and decide which to keep and which to, well, trash.

H: Welcome back to helioskiagrablog, Aristotle.

A: Whoa, man, did I hear you right?

H: Well, yes. Take a look at this: Robert Constanza's study on "The value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital" (http://www.uvm.edu/giee/publications/Nature_Paper.pdf) is the centerpiece of the first section ("What is Ecology?") of the first chapter ("Why and How to Study Ecology") of P. Stiling, "Ecology: Theory and Applications", 4th ed. — the text for Ecology 101 at Stanford University. This is nothing less than the list of what we should and should not value in the world's ecosystems -- and even more incredibly, exactly how much value we should place in pretty much every single hectare on the planet.

A: Let me take a look at that.

H: Sure, here's the scorecard: Swamps 19,580/Deserts 0.

A: Wow, swamps kick ass.

H: Yeah, who would have known?

A: Hey, the ones with crocs might even eat ass. Hah! Ok, Alexander the Great would have laughed at that. And that's 19,580 what?

H: That's $19,580/hectare/year.

A: In other words, more drachmas than I ever earned teaching at the Lyceum. You know that was pretty much the Stanford of my day?

H: Yeah, well, Stanford professors don't do much better. But those swamps might do even better on the scorecard if it weren't for all those bloody mosquitoes.

A: I would imagine so. Even so, they're doing way better than the deserts in the ecosystem value sweepstakes.

H: So what do you think, Aristotle?

A: Let me see if I get this straight. Swamps of just a few hectares are worth a whole lot more than any Stanford professor. So you might suppose that you should treat them (the swamps, I mean) with a lot of respect. On the other hand, deserts are places full of nasty flora (have you hugged your teddy bear cholla lately?), and even nastier animals that wouldn't hesitate to sink their fangs into your toes. Of course the snakes are the ones with fangs; a gila monster does just fine with its lower teeth. But in any case, a desert isn't worth even a buckaroo; zilch; nada; zero. So, you may think, there's just no need to consider these places when we decide what to do. We might as well pave it over (and I hear that greater Phoenix, AZ is doing a pretty good job of that), have fun plowing it up with our ATV's (and I hear that there are a lot of folks doing that in Arizona and Utah, for example), or for goodness sake, at least dump our radioactive and other toxic wastes there (how about Nevada?) It would be worth at least something, then. Right?

H: Mr. A, you sure catch on fast. Maybe we could get you a job at Stanford. It might pay better than the Lyceum.

A: But there's more, right? Remember that so far as I could tell, practical reasoning is fundamentally inexact compared to, say mathematical reckoning, so...

that the whole account of matters of conduct must be given in outline and not precisely, as we said at the very beginning that the accounts we demand must be in accordance with the subject-matter; matters concerned with conduct and questions of what is good for us have no fixity, any more than matters of health. The general account being of this nature, the account of particular cases is yet more lacking in exactness; for they do not fall under any art or precept but the agents themselves must in each case consider what is appropriate to the occasion, as happens also in the art of medicine or of navigation.

Aristotle, "Nichomachean Ethics", Bk. II.2, tr. W.D. Ross (http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/digitexts/aristotle/nicomachean_ethics/book02.html)

That would mean that we moral agents would have to develop and use forms of practical reasoning that admit no formula to weigh the multiple and complexly interrelating and conflicting interests, duties, and implications for our own character. That's a pretty scary prospect for us moral agents to face. But Constanza and his buddies say, "not to worry" -- least of all when the environment's at stake. Deserts are worth exactly nothing. They're never "appropriate to the occasion" — any occasion, when considering how to act. And all other landscapes and seascapes demand a degree of consideration proportional to the value of the goods and services they provide. There's nothing more precise than that — a precise calculus for computing decisions of policy and individual action. Conflicts? None. Just add up the values and you have THE answer — a complete ordering of all the alternatives that you can imagine, with just one sitting at the top. Pretty satisfying, huh?

H: Really?

A: Sure, deserts ... and let's see, tundra, too. Constanza says tundra has zero value. Thumbs downville for the tundra, man. Might as well turn all that useless, treeless, mosquito-infested bog into oil fields. A few oil derricks would at least give some eye relief. And glaciers — zero goods; zero service value; so might as well chop them up into ice cubes and throw into the ocean to cool it down. Good fix for that pesky global warming, I would think. Think of the anxiety relief. No more worries about cooking the planet with fossil fuels. Now surely that's a good.

H: Are you sure?

A: Of course -- at least until someone commissions a brilliant Stanford ecologist to figure out how to do a study that convinces us that deserts and tundra and remote ice fields perform some other valuable services for us. Of course, those kinds of places would have a long way to go to beat out those nifty swamps. Those swamps are something else, aren't they? Let's see, according to Constanza, they regulate gases, disturbances, and water; they treat all the waste that our consumptive habits produce so, thank Zeus, we don't have to curtail our consumption; they are habitat refuges, albeit for some creatures of dubious reputation; and they produce food, are a source of raw materials, a fun place to spend a mosquito-filled day dodging alligators, and are part of our culture. Hmm, that last one is kind of interesting. Constanza says it comprises "aesthetic, artistic, educational, spiritual, and/or scientific values." Too bad neither deserts nor tundra nor ice fields have any of those values. Or maybe there aren't enough Stanford ecologists around to help us figure it out.

H: I don't know, Mr. A...

A: But even swamps ... think about it. $19,580/hectare/year. That's peanuts. Why, speaking of peanuts, RompInASwamp DevCo could fill it in with those packing peanuts — felicitously using some part of the enormous mountain of garbage that our consumptive habits create. They could easily fit at least 10 condos/hectare. With the nice landscaping for which it's famous, RompInASwamp would have folks lining up to pay $1,958/year in association dues in "Mangrove Manors" — completely covering the cost of the undeveloped swamp's goods and services. That irrefutably shows that the destruction of the swamp for Mangrove Manors is good. In fact, wouldn't that show that we're obligated to encourage it? Of course, part of the appeal would be RompInASwamp DevCo's environmental sensibility. That they would demonstrate by setting aside one plot for a community nature center complete with film footage and sound tracks of the birds for whom the swamp had been home or a stopover on a migratory journey. Air conditioned and mosquito-free (not to mention alligator-free), it would be far more appealing to just about everyone than the dismal swamp it was built on.

H: But Aristotle, we thought that you might have a different take on this.

A: Yes, well, back at the Lyceum, the reasoning that I've just sketched would have stood as an unassailable reductio ad absurdum — no further elaboration needed. But I see that times have changed. So I'll gladly stick around to explore what I would consider to be some critical questions: What kind of a person, what kind of people would destroy a natural place on the basis of this kind of reasoning? What kind of society would condone it? What kind of assumptions and accepted norms have we embedded in our social institutions that makes it "natural", even inevitable that people should appropriate swamps or any other remaining unclaimed place? Why is our society fundamentally stuck on the question of how we should use and manage the environment as a resource for any and all human preferences — rather than examining how we should manage our own behavior to best live our life and flourish as the sole ratiocinating species among 20-30 million others with whom we share our earth-home and its resources?

H: We'd greatly appreciate your helping us with that!

A: No prob. But first I think that I may need to quaff a pint at a local pub. O, "Immanual Kant was a real pissant..."

H: Ok, I think that Aristotle is off to bolster his spirits. But we promise he'll be back to tackle some of those tough questions. Hey, Mr. A, wait up...

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Helioskiagrablog is back...

... from...

• the land of amber liquid and dingos
• where ladies, gentlemen, boys, and girls smear vegemite on their bread — even when under no apparent duress
• where football (aka "footy") is played without an offsides rule by men in shorts and tanktops who brutalize anyone spotted carrying an oblate spheroid, and who are apparently distinguishable from rugby players by having necks, a predilection for oval fields, and for passing said oblate spheroid forward as well as backward — though rarely before being brutalized
• the only country aside from New Guinea with extant representatives of monotremes (the egg-laying, most ancient order of mammals), as well as marsupial and placental mammals, the latter absent any native primate and restricted to bats and rats
• the only continent in which the "foxes" fly (and are really mega-bats) and give a new meaning to "hanging out"
• the only continent where there are no native hoofed species or, for that matter, carnivores aside from mice and rats
• the only continent where half the mammals are marsupials — compared to North America's single species and South America's single family
• the only country where cedars (Toona) are not cedars, pines (Araucaria)