Why Try to Preserve Biodiversity?
There are, of course, many reasons why
much of the natural world is useful to us. There are also good arguments to the
effect that there are probably many benefits to us of which we are as yet
unaware. Since a third of prescription medicines have been produced from chemical
compounds found in plants and fungi, especially those of the tropical forests,
it is more than likely that many of the thousands of species unique to very
small areas of habitat in the rainforests – those that are disappearing daily
before they can be discovered – will prove of pharmaceutical value in time,
provided they survive.
However, the most recent trend in
argument for conserving biodiversity is prompted by the recognition that it is
economists who really run the world. One has the impression that for many
environmentalists this is a sad recognition, born of disappointment. For some
environmental scientists admitting that it is not scientists who rule the world
is a bitter pill to swallow. Others are disillusioned idealists who have transformed
themselves into hard-nosed players in the capitalist global marketplace.
In any case, we hear increasingly the
slogan that people only value what they can put a monetary value on. It has
spawned the extraordinarily ambitious attempt to evaluate the benefits of the
biosphere, in other words to put a market price on what are called ecosystem services.
Ecosystem services are the direct and
indirect services provided by ecosystems. Take, for example, the humble dung
beetle, whose services to humanity we probably do not often think about. Dung
beetles are invaluable to cattle-farming. ‘They prevent fouling of forage,
promote dung decomposition into useful plant fertilizer, and reduce the populations
of pests and flies.’ According to my source the ‘value of this service amounts
to $US 380 million annually at 2006 prices’.[1] But in many cases it is
not just the contribution of one species that counts, but the services of whole
ecosystems. Forests soak up a lot of the CO2 we emit. They remove
pollutants from the atmosphere. Vegetation and soil biodiversity reduce
flooding and release clean drinking water. Released in October 2010, the UN’s
report known as TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) calculated
that the real cost of damaging nature is at least ten times greater than the
cost of maintaining the ecosystem as it is so that we can reap the associated benefits.
For example, setting up and running a comprehensive network of protected areas across the world would cost US$45 billion a year globally, but the benefits of preservation within these zones would be worth US$4–5 trillion a year. This report trumps the Stern report which did the same thing for climate change. TEEB claims that the financial case for preserving biodiversity is even stronger than the financial case for tackling climate change.
There are problems with such
calculations (even if we could really suppose that they are more than wild
guesses). Although they seek to play economists at their own game, for them to
make any difference within the free market requires a revolution in the ways
humans – not to say corporations – think about and do business. According to another
report only two of the world’s hundred biggest companies believe that declining
biodiversity is a strategic threat to their businesses.There is also a question
about what kinds of biodiversity would benefit from taking these reckonings
seriously as the basis for conservation. Consider the flagship endangered
species, those that easily engage many people’s concerns.
Would it make any significant difference
to the ecosystem services if the Yangtse river dolphin, the giant panda or the
tiger disappeared? Even if one threw the profits of tourism into the
calculations, would the monetary value of the ecosystem services be appreciably
affected?
It is sometimes pointed out that these
species, at least, have ‘existence value’ for many people. In other words,
people just feel good about knowing such creatures exist, even if they never
see them. What this really means is that people recognize intrinsic value in
these creatures.
They recognize that it is good that such
creatures exist, much as the Genesis creation account does. But the prevalent
discourse that requires everything to be put into terms of human benefit and
interest states this in the form of a value for people – existence value. It is
somehow good for us that such creatures exist. As an attempted appeal to
self-interest this seriously distorts the fact that people are actually
recognizing some objective good, something that is good in itself and for its
own sake, whether any of us feel good about it or not.
Here the believer has a big advantage,
because the world of Genesis 1, for example, is not a human-centred world in
which everything has to be justified as somehow in the interests of humans, but
a God-centred world in which everything created has value for God. God’s appreciation
of the natural world and all its members as good bestows intrinsic value on his
creatures. That is also where human worth comes from.
I do not mean that believing that God
values other creatures leads us to recognize value that we would otherwise, if
we did not believe that about God, not recognize at all. I think, on the
contrary, that people do recognize intrinsic good in other creatures,
especially when it so to speak overtakes us, jolts us out of our more familiar
egocentric attitude to the world – when, for example, the beauty of a landscape
strikes and absorbs us, when the majesty of a tiger enthralls us, even when the
cuteness of a giant panda charms us, when we marvel at the
intricate design of the smallest and
ugliest of insects seen under a microscope.
For whereas many of us most of the time
are not particularly entranced by the majority of the members of ecosystems –
the
bugs and the microbes, the algae and the
molluscs – they all have their admirers and inspire passionate interest in the
scientists who specialize in them. What belief in God and God’s valuing of all
his creatures can do for us is to draw us out of the egocentric perspectives
that so often prevent us from attending to the manifold worth of other
creatures.
Attending to God should enable us to
attend more to his creatures and vice versa. As creatures of God the creatures
are literally priceless and we degrade them by setting a price on them. Compare
how we think of other humans. In a commercial world we may set some sort of
price on the services other people perform for us but we do not set a price on
the existence of other people. The economic arguments for conserving biodiversity,
even if we decide they are needed in a world controlled by economists, are
nevertheless regrettable and misleading because they reinforce the
human-centred illusion that everything else has value only if we think it has
value for us and marginalize the real intuitions of intrinsic worth that all of
us actually have. It would be better to foster such intuitions and to use them
to challenge the world-view of the economists.
There is a more adequate way to think
about the so-called ecosystem services. It is not just that the natural world
does a lot of things for us, but that we ourselves belong to the natural world.
We depend on the intricate web of planetary life just as other creatures do. Because
we have spread ourselves so widely and developed such complex and demanding
ways of life we are even more intimately interconnected with everything else
than most creatures are. We are even more dependent on the health of the whole
biosphere than many other creatures are. Destroying any more of the biosphere
than we have done already will not just cost us a lot, as though it were just a
matter of financial profit and loss. We shall impoverish human life in
the process of impoverishing the planet.
[1]
Ken Thompson, Do We Need Pandas? The Uncomfortable Truth about Biodiversity (Dartington,
Devon: Green Books, 2010), p. 59.
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