Ecosystem Services

In my most cynical moments, I see a brightly lit, well-appointed marketing office with sleek, well-dressed communications people sitting in comfortable chairs pitching a new ad campaign to a group of equally scruffy biologists in Carharrts and flannel. “We’ll call it, ‘Ecosystem Services, making nature more useful again.’ It’s a new way of thinking about the natural world.”

A buzz phrase coined in the early Oughts, “Ecosystem Services,” identifies human benefits of the natural world and values them as we would price engineering projects. Really, they are not valuable unto themselves, but they offer us a range of goods and services that make them worth keeping. Our natural world has come to a marketing campaign to encourage people to believe that wild spaces are valuable. What of their inherent right to exist undisturbed?

“We have turned all animals and elements of the natural world into objects. We manipulate them to serve the complicated ends of our destiny.” Barry Lopez

Do you agree and sympathize with the abuser or reach the breaking point and snap? It happens both ways, doesn’t it? Where is the Earth on this spectrum? “Our Earth,” I almost said. Is it our Earth? Or are we its people? I think the latter. Yet, we enslaved it, and torment and abuse it. Is it ready to throw us back into the dust and goo from which we slunk? Who would blame it? Those who plundered its depths, mined its oceans, and leveled its mountains? Everything we take turns to waste and ash and anthropomorphic layers of plastic. When future archeologists uncover this epoch, will they wonder that we destroyed ourselves in the mindless, relentless pursuit of personal wealth? Will they see that we drowned in our own waste and called it Climate Change?

“But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.” Rachel Carson

Desert forest

Logging trucks roar past my house from the early, dark hours of the morning until, this time of year, long after sunset. We call them “logging trucks,” but they no longer transport logs. They carry toothpicks. The forests cut today are row crops. There is no time for them to become forests; timber companies would have us believe that there is no money in sustainable forestry. Yet, there are no longer jobs or community support in commercial cutting either. A single harvester and a handful of truck drivers can clear and move a cutting unit in no time. Mills are mostly automated, and much of what comes off the land is sent abroad to be returned as cheap products; the profit mostly goes to investment firms. Clearcuts are sprayed to kill all competing vegetation before the next crop is planted, despite evidence that trees grow better with various plant compatriots and mature trees nearby, regardless of aerial herbicide applications sometimes drifting (or sprayed) onto private lands and chemical runoff in the once-teeming salmon rivers and residents’ drinking water.

“Sadly, it’s much easier to create a desert than a forest.” – James Lovelock

The UN has declared the years 2021–2030 as the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. The common goal is not just to stop environmental degradation worldwide but to reverse it. I laud the initiative and the intent, but I question the feasibility. We spent centuries creating this mire. In a generation with eight billion inhabitants on the planet, we will need to put forth our most valiant efforts to dig out of the muck. For those without food or clean water, a safe place to rest, without educational opportunity, or sustaining income, will these people have the capacity to create more than a day’s worth of survival? Do those with enough have the will to bring the others along, support and encourage their well-being, and the habitats we all depend upon? Can we judge those pursuing deforestation in an attempt to survive when we skin our landscape in economic pursuit? We cannot cast stones.

“Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Rennaissance painting to cook a meal.” E.O. Wilson

Perhaps a new quote for the marketers and the decade on Ecosystem Restoration could be, “Ask not what your ecosystems can do for you – ask what you can do for ecosystems.”