Biodiversity and ecological services

Two things that I forgot to mention in my previous article about services that are hard to value and quantify are among the most important: biodiversity and the services of a functioning ecology. This is a huge problem with capitalism that looks like it may well ultimately result in the extinction of people.

Most, if not all, organisms biologically treat the world as an unlimited resource. If you put bacteria in a petri-dish, they consume all the resources until their own wasteproducts and lack of resources result in the collapse of population.

People have treated the earth much the same way: throughout history, there is example after example of people writing about a biological resource as boundless or limitless (forests, buffalo, passenger pigeon, cod, etc, etc, etc) and then the surprised shock when it turns out that the limits, being exceeded, result in a collapse.

Currently, we're seeing the effect most prominently with respect to global climate change. But its not the only one: we're losing species after species in an unprecendented loss (in human time scales) of biodiversity. We know that ecology is a complex web of interactions where a small loss (like of a "keystone predator") can result in the loss of an entire ecosystem.

The effect is well known: it's the "tragedy of the commons". If one or two people monetize the environment, they get rich -- at everyone else's expense. But when everyone tries to do it, it causes the system to collapse and everyone is impoverished.

We're running countless huge, uncontrolled experiments with our own environment -- because it's more profitable to those who already have money to do it that way -- but with no ability to measure the actual potential costs, because they're displaced in time and are generalized to be imposed on everyone, there are no brakes on the train.

It worked for us (Western civilization) because we were the first to monetize the commons. But now that India, China, Brazil, and the rest of the world want to do it, the risks are becoming more apparent. Well -- that's not really true. Ecologists have known about the risks all along, but the plutocracy was willing to overlook the risks for their own enrichment. Many are still willing to overlook them to get a little richer in the short run.

Students often describe these as "problems facing the earth" or that "we need to protect the earth". Of course, the earth will be just fine. Human civilization, on the other hand, is much more delicate. As we've seen, it doesn't really take much for it to collapse.