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Publication year : 0
Thematic : Marine Resources
Language : English
Note
Conservationists commonly have framed ecological concerns in economic terms to garner political
support for conservation and to increase public interest in preserving global biodiversity. Beginning in
the early 1980s, conservation biologists adapted neoliberal economics to reframe ecosystem functions and
related biodiversity as ecosystem services to humanity. Despite the economic success of programs such as
the Catskill/Delaware watershed management plan in the United States and the creation of global carbon
exchanges, today’s marketplace often fails to adequately protect biodiversity. We used a Marxist critique to explain
one reason for this failure and to suggest a possible, if partial, response. Reframing ecosystem functions
as economic services does not address the political problem of commodification. Just as it obscures the labor
of human workers, commodification obscures the importance of the biota (ecosystem workers) and related
abiotic factors that contribute to ecosystem functions. This erasure of work done by ecosystems impedes public
understanding of biodiversity. Odum and Odum’s radical suggestion to use the language of ecosystems (i.e.,
emergy or energy memory) to describe economies, rather than using the language of economics (i.e., services)
to describe ecosystems, reverses this erasure of the ecosystem worker. Considering the current dominance of
economic forces, however, implementing such solutions would require social changes similar in magnitude to
those that occurred during the 1960s. Niklas Luhmann argues that such substantive, yet rapid, social change
requires synergy among multiple societal function systems (i.e., economy, education, law, politics, religion,
science), rather than reliance on a single social sphere, such as the economy. Explicitly presenting ecosystem
services as discreet and incomplete aspects of ecosystem functions not only allows potential economic and
environmental benefits associated with ecosystem services, but also enables the social and political changes required
to ensure valuation of ecosystem functions and related biodiversity in ways beyond theirmeasurement
on an economic scale.
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Keywords : Symbionte
Encoded by : Pauline Carmel Joy Eje
