How much is Yosemite valley worth? It is an odd question, but a crucial one to ask in the world of conservation. But what exactly are we asking when we ask that question? Should I tally up the price of all the bear fur, lumber, and freshwater in the valley? Should I ask the United States how much the national park makes in profit every year? Or should I ask one of the climbers on El Capitan how much emotional value the valley holds? It is not clear how we should place value on natural commodities or if we should even do it in the first place. However, in order to guarantee the longevity of the park, it is essential that it has an objective value placed on it. Placing a price tag on natural beauty might seem comparable to placing a price on human life–essentially blurring the lines between morality and monetization–but it is a necessary sin that must be made to preserve it, regardless of the original intention.
Firstly, we must ask ourselves why we even intend to conserve nature. Conservation, as a global pursuit, fundamentally works against the tide of human existence: our species’ progress has historically been intertwined with the utilization, exploitation, and sometimes destruction of natural resources. Since it invariably will include some limitations on human activity, conservation must necessarily have some grand justification. And how do we find a balance between limiting humanity’s destructive tendencies while protecting our ability to continue progressing socially, politically, and technologically? Richard Pearson labels the two primary systems of defending conservation as follows: for its utilitarian value and for its intrinsic value (Pearson). “The contrasting ideologies can be characterized as ‘nature for itself’ versus ‘nature for people’” (Pearson). Let us begin by focussing on the former.
The utilitarian view is a more modern view, sometimes labeled ‘New Conservation’, “which puts emphasis on the services that biodiversity provides for humans rather than only on the value that nature possesses regardless of human use” (Pearson). It requires a very human-centric view of the universe as it proposes that the value of nature is bound up in its usefulness to humanity. It is a response to the shortcomings of an entirely moral reason to protect nature which itself gives the impression that conservation is working entirely against the will and progress of humanity (Pearson). The utilitarian response is that conservation is easily included in the current world system which primarily consists of quantification and monetization. My aim is to portray a convincing argument as to why the utilitarian view is a modern and necessary solution for the modern problems posed by humans destroying nature.
The opposing viewpoint is the prospect that nature should be conserved because of its intrinsic value that exists outside of the scope of humanity. From this perspective, “any talk of utilitarian value plays into the hands of those that want to destroy nature – it implies monetization and thus that nature can be bought and sold to the highest bidder” (Pearson). Whereas the utilitarian viewpoint relies upon the objective market value of nature, this viewpoint is fundamentally subjective because it relies upon our morality. This is its greatest strength as people tend to view themselves as moral entities, yet it is equivalently disadvantageous because the subjectivity of morality means the foundation of this viewpoint is built on loose soil. Conservation is a global effort, a pursuit that will only reach its maximum potential if it is practiced by nations across the world. Let us look at what a world that relies upon the moral argument would look like.
In order to understand why American sentiment towards conservation is how it is, we first must understand the complex history of wilderness as a social entity. The shifts in how we have viewed wilderness are not only a reflection of American culture throughout the past few centuries, but they have significantly controlled the birth and trajectory of the conservation movement. If we intend to conserve what little nature we still have on earth–whether it is for our sake or nature’s sake–we must change the way in which we view nature. “The varying views of wilderness that have evolved in American environmental history have been organized into four comprehensive themes which have been chosen to help explain how wilderness as a place, an idea, and a quality has evolved over time. These themes are: Conquest, Romanticism, Nationalism, and Protection” (Swing).
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, conquest was on everyone’s minds. Westerners felt a sense of manifest destiny, that it was their imperative to conquer the Americas along with all of the people and nature that lay in the way. “When white Americans began to control and manage the land for the purpose of supporting human existence, they simultaneously announced their superiority over nature and, more importantly, defined wilderness” (Swing). Wilderness was conceived of as places that lacked human activity. As Europeans spread across the continent, people began to grow sick of city life and a romantic view of nature reigned supreme. This is truly the ideology that birthed our modern-day conceptions of conservation. Before this, there was so much wilderness that the only ones who felt a need to protect it were the Native Americans who called it their home and who already perceived the transcendental elements of nature. “The historical value placed on natural settings, as exemplified at Yosemite National Park, and the subsequent management practices enacted to capture these qualities, were the products of these places’ perceived value as physical, spiritual, and emotional qualities that Romanticism embraced” (Swing). Yosemite was founded on these principles. Its transcendent value–apparent through its grand granite walls, spectacular waterfalls, and enormous redwood trees–made it something that was worthy of being preserved.
American wilderness has also always been a symbol of national pride. “Once Americans ceased to view wilderness as an inherent threat, the romantic appreciation of wilderness as spiritually valuable initiated the nationalistic response that claimed wilderness as a definitive symbol of American nationalism, pride, and superiority” (Swing). Notice how the grizzly bear is defining symbol of the California state flag despite the fact that wild grizzly bears have been extinct in California for decades. We love the idea of having a bunch of wilderness, but the reality is, that portion of America grows smaller and smaller by the year. The view that dominates our modern perspective of nature is one of protection. For most of us living in or near large cities, we view nature as something distant: something whose everyday existence is dependent upon our will to protect it. But even today, “management policies in designated Wilderness areas in National Parks and Forests still reflect the early conservation movement’s values” (Swing).
Notice how nothing has really changed in our perspective of and approach to conservation since its conception. It still relies heavily on the inherent value of nature and our moral imperative to protect it against ourselves. Historically, this has made sense and been effective because there has been enough free land to go around. But as the final bits of unprotected land is developed by humanity, capitalists will start looking at our national forests and parks. The pertinent flaw with a world system that relies upon morality as its governing entity is the inherent subjectivity of morality. In order to feel compelled to act in accordance with a particular system of morals, you must first subscribe to that system and believe in it. If nature’s only defense against human activity is the argument that it has intrinsic value, then all it takes is a few capitalists or politicians to not believe in that value and the war has been lost before it has even begun. Much like how the U.S. economy relies upon its citizens believing in the value of the U.S. dollar, the moral argument for conservation relies upon a collective belief in the sanctity of nature. The only difference is that the economy still works if enough people believe in it whereas the capitalists who do not believe in the intrinsic value of nature are usually the ones doing most of the damage. Likewise, conservation is a bigger deal now than ever because it is becoming scarcer by the day, and the number of powerful capitalists has grown tremendously.
Even without greed blinding us from our relationship with nature, there are many reasons why it is especially difficult to bolster moral judgment around conservation. “The climate science community has arrived at a consensus regarding both the reality of rapid, anthropogenic climate change and the necessity of urgent and sustained action to avoid its worst environmental, economic and social consequences” (Markowitz, Shariff). So what explains the strong dichotomy that has formed between the immense gravity of the issue of climate change and the lack of concern and action that many of us have? According to a cross-study analysis conducted by Markowitz and Shariff, “converging evidence from the behavioural and brain sciences suggests that the human moral judgement system is not well equipped to identify climate change — a complex, large-scale and unintentionally caused phenomenon — as an important moral imperative” (Markowitz, Shariff). They concluded that six primary factors of climate change make it especially difficult to bolster concern for: its abstractness, the blamelessness of unintentional action, guilty bias, wishful thinking caused by uncertainty, moral tribalism, and far away horizons (Markowitz, Shariff). This becomes especially alarming when we realize that because “climate change fails to generate strong moral intuitions, it does not motivate an urgent need for action in the way that other moral imperatives do” (Markowitz, Shariff). Conservation as a whole struggles with many of these same issues as well. Many of its goals are distant, abstract, or confusing and we do not feel guilty about destroying the environment because large companies will do that for us. There is a huge separation between our activities as individuals and the effects of our actions that makes us not feel responsible for the harm that we cause. For this reason, it is not that far-fetched to extrapolate this climate change study to all conservation issues where it becomes clear why strict moralism is insufficient to address the severity and immediacy of environmental destruction.
The problem is, far too often we rely far too heavily on the moral case for conservation which just means we are giving ourselves a handicap. Our historic American perspectives have always seen wilderness “as an ideal condition that is unknowable, unattainable, and is antithetical to civilization and culture” (Swing). We have relied too heavily on the view that nature has intrinsic value which is no less true today than it was in the eighteenth century but is not sustainable in our current world. It is no doubt that we have essentially completed our domination of nature since the birth of our nation and our new fascination lies with the inventions that we have contrived out of it–cars, phones, planes, the internet. I have even noticed that as my friends and I have gotten older and our lives more complicated, our desire to go camping, hiking, or sightseeing has dwindled. As a species, our fascination with nature has significantly dwindled which means maybe the magnificence and transcendence of nature is simply not enough anymore. It will be a while before Yosemite valley is under attack, but what about the redwood forests and rivers on its outskirts. The moral argument for conservation needs some help. The fifth view of wilderness must include quantification.
Historically, it never made sense for quantification to be a part of conservation. Our reasons to protect nature–romanticism and nationalism–are ideological in nature and cannot necessarily even be quantified. However, the dominant force in today’s world is capitalism. It is stronger than any leader, any nation, or any religion: it is the law of the land. It is also nature’s biggest foe because money will become a stronger incentive than morality–as it inevitably always does–and nature will stand no chance. But there is a way we can reframe this issue. Capitalism may be the biggest threat to wilderness, but it is also its only hope. Since climate change and other environmental issues are likely “the greatest externality the world has ever seen,” and capitalism is the primary way we deal with externalities, is it possible that capitalism can actually protect nature (Storm 7)? Since “capitalism is, in essence, an ‘externalizing machine’”, can a long-term externality like global warming can “be stopped while capitalism remains the dominant system?” (Storm 7). It turns out economists and theorists have given many different propositions for how this could be done with varying levels of regulation and planning.
Servaas Storm theorizes that the primary manner to analyze economic theories about climate change is the extent to which they have ‘faith in the capacity of the invisible hand to adjust the natural thermostat’” (Storm 7). On one side of the spectrum, there are economists with faith in the free market who speculate that as the consequences of pollution become more concrete or if the costs of such pollution are constructed through tradeable permits, companies will inevitably move towards cleaner energy and the environment will balance out once again. Critics, who believe this is overly simplifying the problem, argue that “Capitalism does not work when it comes to protecting our climate, because it is ‘flying blind’: it lacks the sensory organs that would allow it to understand and adjust to the climate system” (Storm 6-7). Storm enumerates and describes five separate concerns that show how an unregulated free market will fail to address climate change: fossil fuel technology lock-in; problems of measurement, verification, and monitoring; inherent market failures; negative over-spill effects; and distributive concerns (Storm 9-11). So it seems that unregulated capitalism will not solve the problem for us, but how can we change the way we perceive nature so that capitalism works in our favor?
Capitalism speaks the language of numbers, so in order for something to have value–which presumably we want nature to have–we must quantify our assets. But as I asked in the introduction, what determines nature’s monetary worth? And how can this decision ensure that putting a price on Yosemite will protect it instead of simply bringing it closer to capitalists’ grasps? “The frequent translation of the problem of value in nature into an epistemological question is revealing. It reaffirms that value and nature remain on opposite sides of some sort of chasm” forged by economics (Gallagher, DiNovelli-Lang). When we aks “what is the value of nature?”, we tend to reflect on the intrinsic, subjective, and qualitative value of nature. This is merely a side-effect of centuries of ideologies that lack the ability to place a quantitative value on nature outside of its material value. Obviously placing a value on Yosemite based on the price of its redwood is merely an invitation to logging companies to come cash in; but there is another way of valuing nature quantitatively that if placed in the central American dogma will do a great service for conservation.
This “opposition between value and nature is closely related to the opposition between ‘exchange-value’ and ‘use-value’ in classical political economy” (Gallagher, DiNovelli-Lang). We must not ask what we can use nature for but rather what it does for us. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment project answers the question “what does nature do for us” by enumerating the four metrics of an ecosystem whose values can be quantified. These ecosystem services are “provisioning services, which are tangible goods and typically have well-defined markets; cultural services, based on aesthetic or amenity value, which also often have markets; regulating services, which stabilize the supply of either of the above or in other cases reduce the risk of natural disasters; and supporting services, which are ecological processes without which none of the above would occur but which are not themselves directly used by people” (Scholes, Smart). This model is especially important because “the latter two service classes seldom have existing markets,” so they are entirely left out of economic decision making (Scholes, Smart).
Provisioning services are those which are already overrepresented in the economy. These are usually nonrenewable, one-time use, or exhaustive resources that we extract from the environment such as “food, fresh water, renewable and nonrenewable energy resources, genetic resources, biochemical, natural medicine, ornamental resources, etc.” (Scholes, Smart). These services are the invitation to capitalists that I mentioned previously, but they are necessary for the functioning of society, so they must be included in our full picture of ecosystem quantification.
Regardless, the next three services are the unspoken and invisible positive externalities of keeping ecosystems intact. These are the values of ecosystems that we have consistently ignored. Firstly, ecosystems are the Earth’s regulating system. Humanity is nowhere near as effective as nature at regulating air quality, climate, water, erosion, disease, pest, pollination, decomposition, and flood mitigation (Scholes, Smart). It is because nature had a four billion year head start in selecting a balanced and homeostatic system. Secondly, nature is a crucial element of our culture. It aids in “cultural diversity, spiritual and religious values, aesthetic values, educational values, recreation, and ecotourism” (Scholes Smart). To some, the wilderness is home to various deities; to others, it gives a sense of national pride; and to others, nature gives a transcendent sense of purpose and guidance. Finally, nature is valuable because of its supporting services such as “soil formation, photosynthesis, primary production, biogeochemical cycling, [and] water cycling” (Scholes, Smart).
This system is importantly comprehensive: it covers all of the historic views of nature and more. Provisioning services cover humanity’s tendency for conquest and cultural services cover the romantic, nationalistic, and protective views. But now we have two more quantifiable values of ecosystems: their regulatory benefits and their supporting services. These are qualities that, once destroyed, will be impossible to replicate with human machinery. Furthermore, since these are both essential mechanisms for society’s functioning, every single person who is alive benefits from the preservation of nature. In fact, the very definition of ecosystem services is “the benefits (goods and services) provided by the ecosystems that contribute to human well-being” (Scholes, Smart). Human wellbeing, as described by Scholes and Smart, is comprised of security, basic materials needed for a good quality of life, health, social relations, and right to choice and action” (Scholes Smart). Every element of wellbeing is aided by at least one ecosystem service, so it is evident why nature is a valuable commodity, and not just as fuel for your car.
My aim for this paper is to convince you of the need for conservation to use the utilitarian value of nature as a weapon to complement the intrinsic value weapon. But like most things in life, a middle ground is likely the best place for conservation to reside: somewhere between ‘nature for nature’ and ‘nature for humans’. Because nature has always had and will always have value in both contexts, but different situations require different approaches. “Different arguments for conservation are suited to different spatial extents and levels of biological organization, such that seemingly opposing viewpoints are not necessarily in conflict” (Pearson). It is true that “if the services provided by nature for human societies are not assigned a monetary value then biodiversity is prone to be excluded from decision-making” (Pearson). But it is simultaneously true that sometimes we should reject “monetization because putting a monetary value on nature implies that it can be destroyed for the right price, and makes the market value of nature subject to market processes and fluctuations” (Pearson).
Some combination of the utilitarian argument and the moral argument is the ideal vision for the future, but ultimately it comes down to a case by case basis. It especially depends upon the level of natural organization that is being threatened: is it genetic diversity, a particular population, an entire species, or a whole ecosystem (Pearson)? As we traverse through this list, the latter elements warrant a more quantitative approach, but it is inherently difficult and almost futile to attempt to place a value on a particular population of lizards or the particular genes that they carry. Not all things can be described with numbers, but conservation will ultimately see a prompt death if it does not adapt to the times and incorporate them.
“For the first time in human history we are faced with a human population size and consumption rate that fundamentally challenge the well-being of both people and nature at a planetary scale” (Pearson). Conservation desperately needs every tool that it can get its hands on to spare the last natural places of this earth from humanity. It is saddening to see aging capitalists and politicians see nature as more valuable as a material than as an investment because unfortunately, it is likely true for them. This is why conservation must combine the utilitarian view with the intrinsic value view, and we must use quantification to recruit capitalism while also regulating it through policy.
Ask yourself, are you worth more dead or alive? So why do we assume that nature is worth more when we exploit it for resources? Yosemite is nature’s artwork. It is a place to camp, a place to hike, a place to climb mile-high granite cliffs. It is an air purifier. It is a water-recycler. It is home to millions of animals. It is an inspiration. But it is none of that once it comes out of your car’s exhaust pipe. Nature is the best resource the world has to offer, not as a material, but as a friend. Nature is worth more dead than alive, so let’s keep it that way.
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Markowitz, Ezra M., and Azim F. Shariff. “Climate Change and Moral Judgement.” Nature Climate Change, vol. 2, no. 4, Apr. 2012, pp. 243–47. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1038/nclimate1378.
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Swing, Alison E. (2011). Cultural Wilderness: How the Historical Evolution of American Wilderness Values Influence Cultural Resource Management within Wilderness Areas in National Parks. (Masters Thesis). University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.