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Ecosystem Services and the Value of Places

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Abstract

In the US Environmental Protection Agency, the World Wide Fund for Nature and many other environmental organisations, it is standard practice to evaluate particular woods, wetlands and other such places on the basis of the ‘ecosystem services’ they are thought to provide. I argue that this practice cannot account for one important way in which places are of value to human beings. When they play integral roles in our lives, particular places have a kind of value which cannot be adequately conceived in terms of service provision. Since it is in this respect limited, the ecosystem services framework can, I suggest, be criticised on grounds of justice.

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Notes

  1. Like those who adopt the ESF, I focus on places that are natural, in the sense that their current states are not substantially the intended products of human action. Yet that choice should not be taken to indicate a commitment to some fundamental ontological distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘non-natural’ places. My argument presupposes no such distinction.

  2. Bernstein 1998, Chapter 1, especially p. 14. Bernstein refers to ‘obligations’ rather than ‘duties’. In this context, however, the difference is irrelevant.

  3. No doubt places have instrumental value for some nonhuman beings. In what follows, however, I focus on their value for human beings.

  4. Incidentally, Evans’ statement seems to presuppose an inaccurate reading of Kant’s views on our moral relations with nonhuman animals. See further, O’Neill 1998, pp. 212–3 and Wood 1998, p. 191.

  5. Similar interpretations of what it means to have instrumental value are provided by Greene (2007), p. 579), Kupperman (2005), p. 660), Carter (1999), p. 54) and Kagan (1998), p. 287).

  6. The distinction between instrumental and constitutive value is discussed in more detail by Moss (2014), p. 39), Maier (2012), pp. 15–16), Dworkin (1988), p. 80) and Regan (1986), p. 203).

  7. For a detailed defence of this claim, see Attfield 2011, p. 36.

  8. Kahn 1996, pp. 167–8; cf. p. 178. Examples of this sort need to be regarded with a critical eye. Rootedness can, and often does, go hand in hand with small-mindedness and xenophobia. But it would be a very jaded commentator who concluded that all those people who enjoyed such intimacy with the places they inhabit are small-minded or xenophobic. In any case, suppose, for the sake of argument, that some of them are not. My concern here will be to assess the kind of value places can have for those sorts of people.

  9. The claim that the Vale benefits Michael by constituting his identity raises a non-identity problem. For if Michael would not be who he is were it not for his relations to the Vale, then in what sense could he be better off on account of those relations? However, we are here considering the claim that the Vale benefits Michael by (partly) constituting his sense of identity. And that claim does not raise a non-identity problem.

  10. See (1) Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) Ecosystems and Well-being: A Framework for Assessment (Washington, DC: Island Press), p. 59; (2) http://jncc.defra.gov.uk/default.aspx?page=6382 (accessed 12 March 2015); (3) p. 4 of the Synthesis of the Key Findings of the UK National Ecosystem Assessment: it is ‘in our environment where we find recreation, health and solace, and in which our culture finds its roots and sense of place. Scientists refer to these services that our environment provides as “ecosystem services”…’ (http://uknea.unep-wcmc.org/Resources/tabid/82/Default.aspx - accessed 12 March 2015), and (4) Roy Haines-Young and Marion Potschin, Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services (CICES): 2011 Update (see page 6 of http://unstats.un.org/unsd/envaccounting/seeaLES/egm/Issue8a.pdf - accessed 12 March 2015).

  11. But not perhaps in all such cases. A particular place could conceivably be of constitutive value to a person even if she regards it as hostile or repellent. Think of the way in which the way of life of people on a frontier can be shaped through their efforts to subdue the surrounding, ever-encroaching wilderness.

  12. On the psychological effects of displacement, see Fullilove 1996.

  13. A remark from Coles’s interviewee is relevant here. In the course of explaining how it is only in the place he lives that he feels truly himself, he considers the objection that, given his straitened circumstances, that might not be a cause for celebration. His words call to mind Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal recurrence: ‘[A]lthough I can’t say I’m a happy man here… if I had to choose… I don’t think I’d know what to do but tell the Lord that I’ll take this one, this life, all over again, with the pain and all.’ (1971, pp. 16–17)

  14. On the marginalisation of Cumbrian hill farmers, see Mansfield 2008.

  15. Ernstson and Sörlin 2013 arrive at a similar conclusion. For a very different assessment of the ESF’s potential for helping marginalised peoples, see Ramirez-Gomez et al. 2015.

  16. For a useful, if now slightly dated, overview, see Kiker et al. 2005.

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Acknowledgments

I owe a special thanks to Andy Hamilton and two anonymous reviewers for the detailed comments they provided on drafts of this paper. The ideas and arguments presented in it were first aired at the 2013 meeting of the International Society for Environmental Ethics, and I am grateful for the helpful feedback I received from audience members on that occasion. Finally, I would like to thank the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council for awarding me the 6-month fellowship which, amongst other things, enabled me to write this paper.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3HN, UK

    Simon P. James

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James, S.P. Ecosystem Services and the Value of Places. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 19, 101–113 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-015-9592-6

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