PeopleSystems and Sustainability

PeopleSystems and Sustainability: This Week in the Global Environment

Economists, those responsible for the “nomos” side of the “ekologos/ekonomos” dichotomy remain devoted to sophisticated mathematical methods that are in fact primitive and blunt-force when applied to the real world. Environmental economics has gone essentially nowhere since the initial realization that the fundamental problem is that nonmarket goods and services are the important ones. Since economists deal with markets, the best they’ve done in recent years is to find ways to monetize that nonmarket stuff—to bring it into the realm of quantitative prediction, understanding, and manipulation. 

Many non-market-to-market transitions are success stories, although most are at relatively small scales. Whale watching replaces the harpoon. The Galapagos become a tourist destination instead of providing plunder for seagoing merchant ships. Same for many African and some Asian and Australian landscapes. In some places, market produce causes clashes in the transition. Giant pandas, for example. Attempts at in situ ecotourism are shaky, and the quantity of money that comes with “leasing” pandas to zoos around the world brings in far more than the non-market struggle in their natural habitat. 

In the U.S., the National Park and National Forest systems provide many nonmarket goods and services in places that might otherwise have been dumped into the market mixmaster of forestry, damming, beachfront housing and farming. But there are more specifics coming into play. 

The Washington Post for 22 March ran a story under the byline of Juliet Eilperin discussing the plight of the shrinking populations of galliform prairie birds, particularly the greater and lesser prairie chickens. It turns out that some ranchers in parts of Nebraska, with some slowly developing support from other organizations, are realizing the ecotourist potential of the spectacular lek breeding event that the birds go through every spring. In territorial battles, pre-mating rituals, and various other behavioral activities, there is at least potential tourist gold in them thar hills. In other words, amateur ornithologists and wildlife enthusiasts are willing to pay for the opportunity to view the several-days-rituals that get the birds into nesting production every year. 

As both tallgrass and shortgrass prairie disappear, heading under the plow for maize and soybean production, here may be a way to save some. Ecotourist dollars can compete for agriculture dollars, and preserve many more nonmarket goods and services that would otherwise vanish with the native grasses.

It is too late for the ecotourism model to save the east-coast maritime subspecies of prairie chicken, the heath hen. But the lesson is here to be learned. Let’s get out our intellectual duct tape and make sure the ekologos and the ekonomos hang together. It’s important for our future, and even more important for our children’s future!

Stretch for the Meaning of Life

This is a re-post with permission from the weekly column regarding global environmental sustainability posted at http://www.aehsfoundation.org/ . See the AEHS web site for much more on environmental health and sciences!

Stretch for the Meaning of Life

Apr 23 2013 7:26AM Posted by David Ludwig, Ph.D.

You don’t have to travel to eat what many North Americans consider comestible oddments. Growing up in New Jersey on the Atlantic Coast, I regularly ate frogs, muskrats, and turtles. Since then, having been to Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Pacific Oceania, I’ve eaten things even the locals consider oddments in many places. Here’s a question—can we coin a term for the biodiversity of food consumption? Comestidiversity? Ingestiversity? Why pursue what is clearly a silly exercise? Because biodiversity might be linked more directly to sustainability than ecosystems theory presently holds, depending on what level of the system we explore. Jared Diamond’s indispensible Guns, Germs and Steel (1997, W.W. Norton & Company, NY) points out the pitiful few species successfully domesticated as a function of the total pool of potentially available biodiversity. Fourteen large mammal species domesticated worldwide of a pool of around 150 species. Similar ratios pertain to plants and small animals. Diamond believes inherent characteristics of the organism determine its potential for domestication. Successful domesticants share lifestyle parameters lacking in most species. Absent domestication, humans feed by hunting and gathering. Throughout the Caribbean region, a high diversity (well over 1 species per major island) of large rodents called hutia (see photo below) were eaten nearly to universal extinction—only a few species persist. Hunting and gathering is tough on both the humans who practice it and the organisms it is practiced on. It is hard to think of a more iconic domesticant than the cow, or a more difficult hunting target than its congener the African buffalo (see photo below). The word “sustainable”, from old French sustenir, “to hold”, incorporates the Indo-European root “-ten-“, “stretch”.  Diamond’s contention is that we’re constrained in our ability to domesticate, and therefore in our ability to derive sustenance by that route. He points out that modern attempts to domesticate more species continue, and with little success (ostriches, for example). It may be, however, that we’ve simply become too complacent and are not allocating the resources of time, effort, money and expertise that could overcome the inherent barriers to domestication that characterize much of the natural world. We’ll need multiple tools to deal with the growing human population of the biosphere. Tenidiversity—programs testing and developing further diversity of domesticated organisms—could be useful in that context. It certainly beats simply hounding the decreasing population of those creatures we favor for hunting and gathering. The lesson of the Hutia is clear. Better to domesticate than eradicate!