NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #26/NN_1992_26.iso/spool/sci/environm/12575

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-08 | 6.2 KB

From: [e-mail] (Alan McGowen)
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1992 01:28:34 GMT
Subject: Ecosystem "Services" or Functions?
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Let's be crystal-clear about one point concerning biological usage of
the term "degradation".  Degradation is loss of functions -- *period*.
Not just loss of the functions some or all humans like.

            *    *    *

Apparantly I've succeeded in getting across the concept that degradation
is loss of ecosystem function -- at least to some extent, and to some
people. Dean prefers to speak of ecosystem "services" -- which has an
anthropocentric, economic ring to it -- but then adds that he means services
"to all inhabitants" of the ecosystem. That's a crucial caveat which
Steinn failed to notice, or perhaps he thought "inhabitants" meant
"humans":

Dean:
>>
>>   It would seem to me to that a definition of degradation should
>>   be based more on lost services than the cost of restoring the services.
>>   If the goal is to shorten Alan's definition, then we would be speaking
>>   of the loss of services to all inhabitants of the ecosystem that has
>>   been degraded.  In that sense I would say that degradation is the
>>   accumulated loss of natural services (or functionality) to all of
>>   these inhabitants.  An important aspect to keep in mind is that the
>>   loss does not occur at the same time as the action causing the
>>   degradation.  Many effects will take time to work their way through
>>   the food chain and there are other types of delay effects, also.

Steinn:
>
>Well, arguably net degradation should be measured, eg loss of
>wetlands entails loss of some services, but the resulting drylands ;-)
>will in general provide some different services. The problem of
>comparing apples and oranges then arises, how is loss of one service
>to be balanced by gain of another. The situation is even further
>complicated in that in addition to loss of biotic services there is
>anthropocentric gain, and there is often anthropocentric elimination
>of harm, some motivation for wetland destruction was elimination of
>malarial swamps.

The crucial point is that Steinn tacitly orders the functions in
terms of some scale of "importance" -- anthropocentric utility --
and compares two different ecosystems with different lists of
functions on this scale of "importance". No ecologist would ever
do that, for a few reasons: 1) the functions that are subjectively
"important" are coevolved with functions that are subjectively
"unimportant", 2) we don't know all the interdependencies, so we don't
in fact know all the functions which it objectively takes to support
the ones that are subjectively important, and 3) biology doesn't
revolve around human values any more than the heavens do -- using
what's subjectively important to humans as a yardstick for what's
actually important for keeping an ecosystem running isn't likely to
lead to improved understanding.

[What would astronomers make of the idea that our subjective sense of
the stability of the Earth should be the first consideration in
cosmology? Just as we have found it necessary to reeducate our subjective
sense in that case, so it is necessary to reeducate the subjective sense
of humans that whatever is "obviously" important to us about an
ecosystem's "services" is where that ecosystem begins and ends. That
necessary reeducation is what ecocentrism is all about. Ecocentrism is
to evolution by natural selection what the intellectual and social
Copernican Revolution was to heliocentrism in past centuries. The biggest
difference is that the Copernican Revolution is over -- even the religious
right won't try to reverse it -- while the Darwinian Revolution is alive
and ongoing and actively opposed on many fronts.]

Consequently, though biologists (I think beginning with Ehrlich)
often speak of "ecosystem services" to convey to the public that many
of these functions are important to humans, there is the deadly danger
that the economic analogy will be pushed too far, as Steinn has done
here: the idea that we can pick and choose economic services and
intersubstitute them at will doesn't apply here, because *these*
"services" go to make up living systems. With ecosystems, if you like
*some* of what they do, you had better leave their species inventories
pretty much alone. (What is the exact Aldo Leopold quote? "If evolution,
in the course of eons, has built something we like but do not understand..."
[we'd better not disassemble it. And in any case, even if we can't bring
ourselves to leave well enough completely alone,] "the first rule of
intelligent tinkering is to keep every cog and wheel". Something like
that.)

For this reason I think it is better to bite the bullet and just try
to teach the biological function concept outright -- hard as that
is (it's one of those concepts which is learned from learning lots of
context in different areas of biology) -- rather than emphasize
potentially dangerous and misleading economic analogies. [Besides, such
analogies are fundamentally backwards: ecosystems don't imitate human
societies -- human societies, to the extent that they work, are made
up of successful, coadapted social functions, and effectively imitate
ecosystems. This is not just an accident or a rhetorical point -- it's
a result of the fact that human sociality is an outcome of 500 million
years of social evolution. We've got a novel adaptation for rapid social
change: symbolic representation of acquired traits. But we still have
to come to an adaptive equilibrium with respect to our environment,
just as any other social (or nonsocial) species does.  Human economics has
to become part of the ecology of a successfully coadapted species H. Sapiens
-- rather than ecosystem ecology becoming part of human economics, as the
"ecosystem service" language intimates.]

Particularly in a soi-dissant "sci." group we shouldn't have to make use
of these verbal tricks which were originally intended to get around the
scientific illiteracy of policy makers. After all, that isn't a problem
among the posters here. Right?

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