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Justin Chen Putting a Price on Nature? A Defense of Quantifying Biophilia In the past two and a half centuries, the total human population on earth has increased six-fold. Calculations by the World Bank suggest that the total population of the earth may stabilize at between 10 and 11 billion people, but other estimates have put the number as high as 14.5 billion (Kennedy 23). These strikingly rapid human population increases are most evident in developing regions of the world that lack contraceptive technologies. In fact, it has been estimated that between now and 2025, approximately 95% of all global population growth will take place in just two countries: Mexico and Nigeria (Kennedy 24). Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that Aldo Leopold has observed, �In parts of Mexico, South America, South Africa, and Australia a violent and accelerating wastage is in progress� (Leopold 235). The numbers cited here are telling, for they suggest that uncontrolled population growth is accompanied by disturbing levels of environmental degradation. And as we in the first-world have already discovered, increases in population density and advances in technology only serve to hasten the downward spiral. What is the reason for this apparent inverse relationship between human population growth and environmental well-being? Are we willing to simply accept that human beings cannot exist in a non-destructive relationship with the natural world? Some theorists and environmental ethicists have hypothesized that the degradation of nature can be directly linked to the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. According to this theory, the dominion over the earth that God grants to the human race in Genesis results in a utilitarian view of nature, ultimately making the environment something to be conquered or harnessed rather than understood. While such a view has some merits for the purpose of debate, insofar as it suggests the interesting possibility that ways of understanding the natural world can have cultural determinants, I would argue that the West has come to possess a secular, and not a religious, view of nature as a resource to be exploited, and that this capitalistic impulse is ultimately the main reason for the accelerating environmental degradation so clearly evidenced in the statistics quoted above. In this essay, I will discuss why I think the market-based utilitarian approach with which Western society, especially the United States, treats the environment has become entirely secular, and I will end with a discussion of how this type of thinking can be used as a tool for preserving the health of a delicately balanced world containing finite natural resources. The first proponent of a theory linking the Judeo-Christian religious tradition with environmental degradation was the ecologist Lynn White, who wrote in a 1967 article in Science magazine, �Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen� (White 16). This anthropocentrism, White went on to argue, is derived from scriptural indications in the book of Genesis which suggest that God has commanded mankind to have dominion over all the earth. White also asserts that the Judeo-Christian belief that man is formed in the image of God results in a hierarchical stratification in which humans occupy a unique position superior to the rest of nature. The end result of all this, White concludes, is that the Christian-dominated Western world almost uniformly views the environment as an exploitable tool to be subjugated for human ends. Yet White himself admits that Christianity as a specific institution can no longer be blamed as the direct culprit for environmental degradation. �Our science and technology have grown out of Christian attitudes toward man�s relation to nature which are almost universally held not only by Christians and neo-Christians but also by those who fondly regard themselves as post-Christians� (White 17-8), he writes. Thus, while White maintains that the pursuit of science, and especially of technological advancement, sprung out of the Latin Church�s exceptionally rigorous investigation of natural phenomena under the aegis of theology, he nonetheless concludes that in the current Western world, the scientific and exploitative manner in which people view the natural world has come to represent something entirely non-religious. In other words, White believes that an instrumentalist understanding of nature has gradually shed its Judeo-Christian roots to encompass a secular worldview in which the environment is subjugated to technological progress. I would argue that the link between religion and environmental degradation proposed by White�s article is both tenuous and uninstructive for the purposes of understanding our current ecological crisis. As the environmental scientist Lewis Moncrief puts it, �To isolate religious tradition as a cultural component and to contend that it is the �historical root of our ecological crisis� is a bold affirmation for which there is little historical or scientific support� (Moncrief 23). Moncrief points to the many attacks on Max Weber�s hypothesis linking Protestantism with capitalism as evidence of religion�s minimal effect on socioeconomic movements, and he instead ascribes the West�s rapid degradation of natural resources to �the forces of democracy, technology, urbanization, increasing individual wealth, and an aggressive attitude toward nature� (Moncrief 23). And while he acknowledges that the Judeo-Christian tradition has likely influenced the character of each of these forces, he nonetheless maintains that the direct causal correlation implied by White�s hypothesis simply is not supported by any evidence. To take Moncrief�s argument one step further, I would assert that White himself implicitly admits the inadequacy of his schema when he suggests that a scientific or utilitarian view of nature is held by Christians and �post-Christians� alike. Just because the Judeo-Christian religious tradition almost certainly played a role in developing this sort of exploitative view of the environment does not mean that it continues to dictate such a view in the present. The best evidence of this assertion can be found in those non-Judeo-Christian countries that have been exposed to the �Western� movements identified by Moncrief, including �the forces of democracy, technology, urbanization, increasing individual wealth, and an aggressive attitude toward nature.� Despite the lack of a dominant Christian influence, many of these countries—including China and most of Southeast Asia—are currently beginning to face exactly the same environmental crises that plague developed countries. This observation strongly suggests that a wholesale importation of Judeo-Christian beliefs is not at all necessary for the exploitative utilitarian treatment of nature that has been so clearly linked to environmental degradation. If we can accept that religion is no longer an important determinant of a country�s attitude toward nature, then there seems to be more hope for the possibility of using secular tools to shape environmental outlooks. Because of its emphasis on maximizing profitability through the efficient utilization of resources, capitalism is the single strongest determinant of an exploitative ecological attitude. In societies that did not possess such intensely market-minded policies, such as the Native American nations in the pre-colonial Americas, environmental degradation was limited or even nonexistent because there was no need to exploit natural resources for personal gain beyond the exigencies of daily life. Theorists such as White might choose to explain this observation in religious terms, citing the Native Americans� pantheistic and nature-based spiritual beliefs as the primary reasons for this more cooperative symbiosis with the environment. Yet I would again argue that capitalism is a stronger force than religion in this regard. As White himself observes, �the cutting of forests by Romans to build ships to fight Carthaginians or by Crusaders to solve the logistics problems of their expeditions have profoundly changed some ecologies� (White 14)—this despite the fact that the Greco-Roman mythological tradition actually shares many of the features of the Native Americans� animistic beliefs. Beyond the notion that natural phenomena could be explained by the actions of a pantheon of human-like gods, the Greek and Roman mythologies also countenance the existence of a wide variety of nature spirits that reside within nature, including naiads (stream nymphs), dryads (wood nymphs), sylphs (air nymphs), etc. Furthermore, one of the most important mythological figures within the array of gods is Bacchus (Dionysus in Greek), the god of wine and of an orgiastic religion celebrating the power and fertility of nature. White argues that �by destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects� (White 17), but as he himself has suggested, a warring Roman society primarily led by animistic beliefs was culpable for widespread environmental degradation well before the emergence of a Judeo-Christian belief system. Given the assumption that technology-driven capitalism necessarily determines an ecologically exploitative value system, what, then, is the best way to combat the environmental crisis that will ostensibly come to plague all the societies around the world that follow in America�s free-market footsteps? Does capitalism have to represent a one-way street toward environmental suicide? To paraphrase Derrida, I would argue that the Master�s tools can and must be borrowed to reconstruct the Master�s house—that is, the capitalist paradigm already so familiar to Americans should be utilized to first of all comprehend, and second of all resolve the crisis of environmental degradation. This solution is the obvious secular corollary to White�s recommendation that Western society approach environmental issues with the same attitude as St. Francis of Assissi, a Franciscan monk who emphasized an understanding of nature throughout his life�s work. In other words, because I believe that the underlying cause of environmental degradation has more to do with efficiency- and technology-driven capitalistic impulses than any sort of religious predisposition, I also believe that a secular system must be installed to effectively combat the ecological crisis before it worsens further. It has already been well-documented that humans derive certain physical and directly quantifiable benefits from nature, �principally in the form of new and improved foods, medicines and drugs, raw materials for industry, and sources of bioenergy� (Myers 1996). In the capitalist paradigm, the corporation that can utilize these natural resources with the greatest degree of efficiency will emerge as an economic success. Yet as environmental scientists have pointed out, nature also provides more intangible benefits in the form of so-called ecosystem services, to include �generating and maintaining soils, converting solar energy into plant tissue, sustaining hydrological cycles, storing and cycling essential nutrients (notably in the form of nitrogen fixation), supplying clean air and water, absorbing and detoxifying pollutants, decomposing wastes, pollinating crops and other plants, controlling pests, running biogeochemical cycles (of such vital elements as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, and sulfur), controlling the gaseous mixture of the atmosphere (which helps to determine climate), and regulating weather and climate at both macro and micro levels� (Myers 1996), to name only a few. Clearly, the direct benefits that humans reap from the natural world are enormous. Yet as the Myers study points out, �whereas the benefits of material goods tend to accrue to individuals, often as producers or consumers in the marketplace, the values of environmental services generally pertain to society, and hence they mostly remain unmarketed� (Myers 1996). Despite the apparent difficulty in valuing ecosystem services monetarily, an international study published in Nature attempts to do just that. According to the study, �For the entire biosphere, the value (most of which is outside the market) is estimated to be in the range of US $16-54 trillion (1012) per year� (Costanza et al 1997). While the authors themselves admit that their calculations are speculative and prone to a number of �conceptual and empirical problems� (Costanza et al 1997), they are nonetheless instructive for the purposes of this discussion. Given the capitalistic underpinnings of the environmental crisis, it is only logical to explicate the extent of the problem through an honest and rigorous utilization of the capitalistic model. The major task that remains in the coming years for environmental ethicists who choose to operate within an economic paradigm is an institutionalization of the capitalistic factors outlined above. Just as White encourages society to amend its view of nature from a religious standpoint, I would argue that the most effective and practical way of understanding the environmental crisis is by utilizing our familiar economic framework. While some might argue that any attempt to quantitatively value ecological benefits does violence to the notion of biodiversity and an indivisible environmental whole, I would maintain that this kind of an appeal to some vague notion of nature as an individual entity is far too abstract an argument when taken alone to guide concrete policymaking. It has been well established by Stephen Kellert at Yale, Edward Wilson at Harvard, and others that humans have an innate feeling of connectedness with nature, which they classify as a genetically inherited biophilia. Yet every species on the planet disrupts its surrounding to a certain extent, and a prohibition on all forms of natural resource utilization is obviously untenable for the human species. My point here is not to suggest that an excess of biophilia necessarily results in a mindless adoration of nature to the extent of human extinction. In fact, I strongly believe that an appeal to a shared innate feelings of concern for the environment is extraordinarily important at some basic level, and that a love of nature should be inculcated from an early age in an attempt to promote a gradual change in fundamental cultural views. Yet even should this system be successfully implemented, it nevertheless remains the case that corporations within a capitalistic society will always pursue the course of action that yields the greatest profit margin. And because ecosystem services are almost never valued monetarily, as pointed out by the Myers report, the course of action chosen is nearly always the most environmentally unfriendly one. Thus, my main point in this essay is to emphasize the impracticality of broad appeals to biophilia or other genetic affinities when it comes to actually deciding how to manage our dwindling natural resource supply. Given the impossibility of leaving responsible environmental policies to the initiative of profit-driven corporations, it seems to me that the government must take on an active role in promoting the economic valuation of ecosystem services and enforcing their preservation. The Costanza report in Nature is a good first step toward that end. By systematically attempting to understand and quantify the benefits that a healthy environment affords life on earth, we can help slow and ultimately reverse the ecological degradation that currently grips countries on every face of the planet. The creation of government policies that place a concrete value on natural resources will be challenging, but will ultimately prove to be one of the most important steps that we as a society can pursue for the sake of our planet and future generations.
Sources Cited Kennedy, Paul. �The Demographic Explosion.� Preparing for the Twenty-First Century. RIS Course Packet. White, Lynn. �The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.� Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application. Wadsworth/Thomson Learning. 2001. Moncrief, Lewis W. �The Cultural Basis of Our Environmental Crisis.� Ibid. Myers, Norman. �Environmental services of biodiversity.� Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol. 93. April, 1996. Costanza, Robert et al. �The value of the world�s ecosystem services and natural capital.� Nature. 387(6630). May 15, 1997. |