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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

Nature's Services Worth Trillions

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Forest Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises

http://forests.org/

2/18/97

OVERVIEW, SOURCE & COMMENTARY by EE

The annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of

Science brought scientists and economists together to hear the message

that ecosystems are "worth trillions." Given that without ecosystem

processes, life would not exist, this hardly seems surprising.

Nonetheless, this photocopy of the Environmental News Service article

makes the compelling case that the world's ecosystems are both vital

and critically imperiled.

g.b.

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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:

Nature's Services Worth Trillions, Scientists Told

Posted to the web: Mon Feb 17 17:28:07 EST 1997

The Environment News Service, Copyright, 1997

SEATTLE, Washington, Feb. 17'97 (ENS) - The goods and services

provided annually by natural ecosystems are worth many trillions of

dollars in conventional economic terms, and the prosperity of all

societies hinges upon safeguarding them, Stanford ecologist Gretchen

Daily informed her scientific colleagues on Sunday.

Speaking at a symposium on ecosystem Services at the annual meeting of

the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Daily

said, "Humanity came into being after most of these services had been

in operation for hundreds of millions to billions of years. They are

so fundamental as to make them both easy to take for granted and hard

to imagine disrupting beyond repair, as human activity threatens to do

today."

The session was organized by Daily, who is Bing Interdisciplinary

Research Scientist in Stanford's Department of Biological Sciences,

and AAAS President Jane Lubchenco. It drew together top ecologists and

economists to discuss the urgent need for government and industry to

incorporate these lifesupport values into policies and planning.

These services are the life support functions normally performed by

ecosystems, such as purification of air and water; detoxification and

recycling of wastes; generation and maintenance of soil fertility;

pollination of crops and other plants; regulation of climate; and

mitigation of weather extremes like flood or drought.

In the process, ecosystems also provide goods like seafood and timber,

whose harvest and trade represent an important and familiar part of

the human economy. And ecosystems support the vast diversity of life,

the species that are sources of key ingredients of our agricultural,

pharmaceutical and industrial enterprises.

Ecosystem services operate on such a grand scale and in such intricate

and little-explored ways that most could not be replaced by

technology, Daily said. "Ecosystem services are absolutely essential

to civilization; they are priceless. Yet their lack of a price - they

are typically not traded in economic markets - has contributed to a

widespread lack of awareness of their very existence, and to a

corresponding misimpression that the ecosystems that supply them lack

value."

"Just as one cannot capture the full value of a human life in economic

terms, it would be absurd to try to estimate the value of nature in

strictly economic terms," Daily said. "But estimates of the lower-

bound, marginal value of nature's goods and services - in the

trillions of dollars - are critical to informing decision-makers."

Renowned Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich agreed, using this winter's

disastrous mudslides in Washington and Oregon as a case in point.

These mudslides were partly traceable to overharvesting of timber,

which disrupted the natural flood controls that forests exercise over

flows of water, Ehrlich said.

"The loss of nature's services is not some hypothetical future

disaster, or something restricted to poverty-stricken regions of the

world," said Ehrlich. "Interference with nature's services comes home

to the rich in higher fish prices and loss of sport fisheries; loss of

real estate values; higher risks from 'natural disasters' like floods,

droughts and possibly other extreme weather events," he said.

When ecosystems are disrupted, affluent North Americans suffer

outbreaks of agricultural pests; diseases such as Lyme disease and

giardia; acidification and decline of precious forests; and rapid

siltation of reservoirs, threatening the sustainability of irrigation

and power generation.

"Expansion of the human enterprise is seriously damaging the natural

systems that provide the services that underpin our economic

security," Ehrlich warned. The damage is a product of population

growth, increased consumption of resources per person, and the

cultural, institutional and technical means through which each unit of

consumption is supplied. "Yet a flood of lies and misinformation is

being generated by anti-environmental forces that helps keep that fact

from decision makers and from the general public," he said.

BROWNLASH "PREPOSTEROUS" ERLICH SCOFFS

Ehrlich coined the term "brownlash" to describe the efforts of those

trying to confuse the public about the findings of environmental

science. Brownlashers, whose ideas are a backlash against the "green"

findings of the scientific community, make a wide variety of claims

that he calls "preposterous." These include assertions that the ozone

hole is a hoax, that concern about global warming is unwarranted, that

there is no extinction crisis and, most outlandish of all, that

continued human population growth can be supported for 7 billion

years."

"Those claims are diametrically opposed to the scientific consensus,"

Erlich said.

"Those generating the brownlash are willing to risk nature's crucial

services to continue on a business-as-usual course - a course that may

be congenial to their personal financial interests. Nature's services

are supplied free of charge by ecosystems, in which biodiversity -

populations of plants, animals and microbes - are vital working parts.

The trees, shrubs and herbs growing on a Washington State hillside,

for example, not only help to control erosion and flooding, but they

also are involved in maintaining the balance of gases in the

atmosphere, cleaning the air and recycling wastes.

"That's why scientists are so concerned with the mass extinction of

populations and species now under way," Ehrlich said. "A balance

between human activities and safeguards for the natural systems that

provide economic prosperity is essential to human health, happiness

and survival."

Humanity is causing widespread losses of biodiversity through

destruction and alteration of habitats, transporting organisms to new

locations, and overharvesting living resources such as fishes, Ehrlich

said. "Loss of biodiversity is the most irreversible of the kinds of

damage Homo sapiens is inflicting on its environment."

Releasing enormous quantities of toxic substances, failing to conserve

soils, overexploiting non-living resources such as groundwater, and

modifying large-scale biophysical processes - especially altering

climates, thinning the ozone shield and disrupting biogeochemical

cycles - also add greatly to the assault that Homo sapiens is mounting

on its own life-support systems, he said.

Humanity causes the extinction of at least one species and thousands

of populations of other organisms every day, Erlich wearned. At the

same time humans are using up goods that crippled ecosystems will be

unable to replenish, for example by causing the annual loss of some 25

billion tons of soil, and overpumping the southern part of the

Ogallala aquifer at roughly 100 times its recharge rate.

"We are busily sawing off the limb on which we are perched - yet that

is never mentioned in the brownlash literature that attempts to

persuade people that environmental problems are relatively minor or

nonexistent," Ehrlich said.

Ehrlich called Daily's new book, "a critically important effort. He

hopes it will encourage decision makers to incorporate the value of

nature's services into policy-making. "For instance, the Forest

Service should include the costs of floods and mudslides in their

calculations of fees for timber harvesting."

"But the dollar value clearly only sets a lower bound on the worth of

the services. The value of our ability to feed ourselves or to avoid

catastrophic floods cannot be fully expressed in monetary terms. What

is the true cost of hundreds of millions of lives cut short or lived

in utter misery?

"Although many scientific uncertainties remain," Ehrlich continued,

"more than enough is known to allow humanity to start developing and

implementing steps to sustain its life-support systems and thus

preserve civilization.

Ehrlich outlined measures that would help preserve those systems by

reducing the scale of human activities:

* Foster the social and economic conditions that will bring an end to

population growth "as quickly as is humanely possible" and begin a

slow decline in human numbers.

* Make U.S. consumption sustainable, since we're the most

overconsuming society, and the most culturally influential. "We must

set an example for the rich, and simultaneously help the poor find

ways to increase necessary consumption."

* Wherever possible, develop and deploy more efficient, less

environmentally damaging technologies.

* "Most important of all, more equitable social, economic and

political arrangements should be sought to allow the implementation of

these goals, "he said. "Everyone can help, first by learning how our

life-support systems work, then by becoming politically involved and

pushing leaders in the right direction, and always by fighting the

racism, sexism, religious prejudice and gross economic inequity that

make it so difficult to preserve and restore the natural services upon

which humanity depends.

"To provide a reasonable chance of averting disaster, much more effort

will be required of natural and social scientists to find paths to

sustainability," Ehrlich concluded. "Scientists must also put more

effort into countering the brownlash. It now threatens seriously to

retard progress toward protecting nature's services and thus menaces

our grandchildren and the future of our species."

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