🚀 go-pugleaf

>
>   Steinn may not be able to calculate the "value" of what is lost in some
>   algorithm an economist or technocrat would sanction, but then, why should
>   that be surprising? His and their whole concept of "value" is founded on
>   the idea that there are always substitutes available, and always tradeoffs
>   that can be made. The living world doesn't work like that: there aren't
>   any substitutes for grizzly bears or redwood trees and there aren't any
>
>Ok, we have an example. In Europe the native bears and wolfs are
>mostly extinct and the ancient forest is completely gone. Now, what
>was the impact on human carrying capacity or the long term prospect of
>the European ecosystems?

Obviously the impact is completely swamped by the effect of fossil fuel
energy subsidies on human carrying capacity. Remove those subsidies, so that 
only the endogenous carrying capacity of the biotic environment is available,
and it would be severely depressed in most areas from what it once was.
Disentangling the exact amount by which the loss of bears or wolves had 
contributed to the depression would not be easy.  Forests often depend on 
browsers in many subtle ways, and browser populations are regulated -- and 
maintained vigorous -- in major part by predators. European forests have in 
many places become little more than tree-farms, so species-poor and intensively
managed that the effects of loss of predators would hardly be among the first
concerns of foresters attempting to make them more sustainable. 

Is Europe self-supporting in forest products, though? Or does it rely on
imports -- in effect, unsustainable fossil-fuel subsidized production --
as well? (as e.g. Japan does?) Again, if these imports were removed or became
prohibitively expensive so that only endogenous forest production capacities 
were available, would these be as great as they were before simplification of
their species composition? And will they prove as enduring? 

Instensive forestry is also rather fossil-fuel intensive, BTW.

In shifting back to autogenic forest ecosystems, browsers and eventually
reintroductions of predators for them will play an important role. The 
shift will be much harder in much of Europe than it will in North America,
because so much more has been lost.

Incidently, the effects of loss of biodiversity on humans should be
broken down further than Steinn does in the question he raises about
carrying capacity. There is not only the effect on endogenous carrying
capacity, there can also be effects of increased risks associated with 
artifical substitutes for lost biological functions, reductions in quality
of life, and reductions in future human opportunities. All of these 
considerations need to go into an ecological risk assessment. And, of course,
there can be no justification at all for Steinn's exclusive focus on *human*
carrying capacity. 

>   autogenic (self-perpetuating) substitutes for the ecosystem functions that
>   are provided by unique, irreplaceable species. The inadequacy of his concept
>   of "value" is the source of the difficulty here, not how to fit the biosphere
>   to it, as he imagines.  
>
>   The living world precedes all human fantasies about what is valuable and 
>   what is not, which are in general neither more nor less revealing of the
>   true sources and principles of life than is the value of the male peacock's
>   tail to the >peahen.
>
>Funny, I thought I was using your concept of "value". After all you
>have claimed that biodiversity was of "infinite value" have you not.
>Where did I provide a definition? It would be really nice if you at
>least attempted to provide your arguments on a consistent basis of
>assumptions, whether we agree with those or not.

I'm afraid that the "infinite value" confusion Steinn makes here reflects 
a complete misunderstanding of some past skeptical remarks of mine about the
value system he assumes uncritically. 

For the record, I do not think that the value of biodiversity is "infinite"
-- I don't even know what that statement means. But neither do I think that
the value of, say, grizzly bears, has some finite dollar amount. I regard the
question about the value of grizzly bears as comparable to the question
"what is the value of humanity?". I know there are many people who would
say that the value of humanity is infinite, but they are suffering the same
confusion. They think that the only way in which there could fail to be a 
finite dollar value for humans or grizzly bears would be if their value was
infinite. But there is another way, namely that the market premisses of the
value scale do not apply: the dollar value of humans and grizzlys is undefined
because we do not choose to subject them to market operations.

Perhaps an analogy will make the matter clearer. There are many things which 
are not for sale in the US. You cannot sell yourself into slavery, for any
amount of money. You cannot sell your right to free speech. And under the
Endangered Species Act, listed species are prohibited from being "taken" --
at any price. Freedom of speech and freedom from slavery are held to be
"higher" goods than efficent markets, they *trump* market considerations, as
the constitutional lawyers would put it -- again, using the ">>" notation 
for that idea,

	basic freedoms >> market efficiency,   i.e. considerations of basic
					       rights trump considerations of
					       market efficiency.

That does not mean that basic freedoms have an infinite dollar value. It
means that we organize our society in such a way that they are *NOT FOR SALE*.
Period. At any price. Their value -- which is part of securing social justice
-- has a higher ranking than market values have. 

I mean the same sort of thing when I say that

	ecological justice (including e.g. the right of spotted owls to a 
	fair evolutionary chance, unbiased by humans)
	>> (trumps)
	social justice (including e.g. the right to freedom of speech)
	>> (trumps)
	market efficiency.

I.e, just as freedom of speech is not for sale -- cannot be bargained away in
a legally binding contract, so the right of owls to be there is not for sale, 
and moreover trumps all human rights of social justice. It does *not* trump the 
parallel human right to a fair evolutionary chance, but in the present 
allocation of the world's resources, ecological justice requires less for 
humans and more for spotted owls, and at the *very* least requires that humans
not take the last habitat areas of owls. 

It doesn't surprise me at all that the only sense Steinn could make out of
this sort of position would be that I somehow think that "biodiversity has 
infinite value". 

In practice, this sort of approach could be carried out as follows. We would
decide as a society what level of risk to other species is acceptable based
on considerations of ecological justice. In that decision, we would naturally
want to protect not only human survival but also human comfort and freedom from
severe dislocation. 

If, as seems very likely, even a minimal allocation of "fair chances" to other 
species would require us to restore a considerable amount of what we have
taken as wilderness, this would have to be phased slowly enough to allow for
human adjustment. The fairness goal might not be reached for some time,
many decades or a few centuries. In the interim, there would be interim levels
of risk allowed for other species in various different places, not necessarily
the same everywhere -- i.e. there would be zoning of levels of allowable risk
to other species (and to ecosystem processes) resulting from human activity.

Ecological risk assessment would be the tool used to maintain the risk levels.
Ecological risk assessment differs from a standard environmental impact
assessment in that the risks *to the ecosystem* are assessed, rather than
the risks *to humans*. I.e. ecosystem risk assessment is the ecocentric
equivalent of an environmental impact study. The risks *to the ecosystem*
are analyzed. Ecological risk assessment is a new, exploding field, as the
anthropocentric biases of the past in environmental science are increasingly
being discarded. 

An ecologically just society would simply be one which mandates by law enough
protection against anthropogenic risk to permit recovery of basic evolutionary
potential of almost all species -- enough to end the extinction crisis. 

Steinn's problem is that he insists on viewing the extinction crisis as
a crisis for human *survival*. This it might conceivably become if we fail
utterly and allow things to reach such a horrible pass. But our task is to 
make the extinction crisis a *moral* crisis, which leads to a transfomation of
human political and social systems onto a track which leaves us an immense
margin ---  not only for *error* but for *opportunity*, a margin of biotic
richness. 

So long as we allow technocrats to present it as a question of our survival, 
it will inevitably continue until it becomes a question of our survival. We
have to stop it as far short of that as possible, and that means that the
battle has to be fought over *ethics*, or as close to ethics as we can come. 

In traditional conservation battles, the debate is between *ethics* and 
*economics*. It is interesting that in sci.enviroment there are always
spokesmen (gender intended) for *survival*. It's no accident at all that
these are invariably the same people who fantasize living on space colonies,
and who have puerile notions that science is all a business of cloaking their
brutally destructive attitude towards the living world (and, as it would
turn out, towards the human part of it) in silly talk about things like
"integrated extinction rates", without the slightest grasp of even just the 
human suffering that already exists in the world as a result of biological 
impoverishment... and can it really be a surprise that where there is not 
even a grasp of human suffering, there is no concern -- not even ability
to *imagine* concern -- for nonhumans? 

Dr. Strangelove is alive and well and aching to walk. But if he can be 
unmasked for what he is early on, he will never be anything more than
a figure of fun, a bedtime bogey for the children of a future age.

-------------
Alan McGowen