Abstract
At the logical halfway point of the book, this chapter turns from what biodiversity is to the value proposition for it. Its discussion abstracts from any particular account of the source of biodiversity’s value insofar as this is possible. Before looking at specific accounts for how biodiversity might get its value (in Chap. 6), this chapter examines various implicit and explicit assumptions about how, more abstractly, the value of biodiversity relates to biodiversity itself. Section 5.1 asks such questions as: Does biodiversity admit of more and less – that is, increments and decrements – in a way that permits orderings – that is, more or less biodiverse states of a place or of the world? If so, do relative orderings in degrees of biodiversity – for example, one place or state of the world being more biodiverse than another – directly transfer to a directly varying ordering of values? Section 5.2 further explores value orderings, which a richly structured definition of biodiversity along multiple dimensions (as suggested in Chap. 3) might restrict. And finally, Sect. 5.3 explores the question of what these abstractly characterized relationships between biodiversity and its value imply about possible obligations with regard to biodiversity.
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Notes
- 1.
A complete economic accounting would include the costs of “acquiring” species (including foregone opportunities for development), as well as the benefits of “selling” them (including actual development). Most people would identify a fair number of species as beneficial to “sell” for the perceived harm that these organisms inflict on people.
- 2.
The Ehrlichs’ book comes from the dark age before the neologism “biodiversity”.
- 3.
Though, there is considerable disagreement about which point in time defines the ideal model and what constitutes a better or worse approximation of it.
- 4.
This general failure to examine or justify the starting condition for a biodiversity norm is disconcertingly reminiscent of a similar deficiency whereby a Pareto improvement is regarded as a good without reference to a starting condition that might be both abhorrent in itself and an obstacle to any reasonable means of remedying the source of abhorrence.
- 5.
The anthropologist Stanley Ambrose and others theorize – not without controversy – that a super-eruption of Toba (at what is now Lake Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia) a bit over 73,000 years ago induced a volcanic winter that reduced human populations, presumed still concentrated in Africa, to a few as 15,000 individuals. The major and eventually world-encompassing human diaspora out of Africa began after H. sapiens emerged from this population bottleneck.
- 6.
It is hard to imagine, that is, except within the framework of neoclassical economics, which (as discussed in Sect. 4.1.2, Measures and indexes) seeks to reduce a plethora of different types of diversity value to a single gold standard.
- 7.
I have in mind the cycliophorans mentioned in Note 24 in Chap. 4.
- 8.
One might think of the snail darter, a species that occupies a crowded genus in a crowded family of the crowded (Perciformes) order of perch-like fish and which comes up for discussion again in the context of Biodiversity options (Sect. 6.9).
- 9.
As discussed in Sects. 3.1.3.1 (Abundances) and 3.3.2.2 on (Abundances (again)), a conception of species diversity that combines species counts with the evenness of populations is well entrenched in scientific circles.
- 10.
See the example in Note 10 in Chap. 4 of how the commonly used Shannon-Wiener index can combine these conflicting factors to characterize the elimination of a species as an increase in biodiversity.
- 11.
See Sarkar (2005, 196–203). Sarkar (2005, 202) worries that there will still be so many elements in the non-dominated set that arbitrary (his word for “unjustifiable”) criteria will be required for choice. I am skeptical of this and have the opposite worry – that no two alternatives will satisfy Sarkar’s “non-domination” requirement. In the latter case, there will be as many non-dominated sets as there are alternatives and all will be singletons.
I believe that the my worries differ from Sarkar’s because he takes what I think is a hard-to-justify, restricted view of biodiversity that excludes many conflicts that a more open view would allow. In fact, at times he appears to reduce his set of basic biodiversity-establishing criteria to precisely one – one “surrogate”, in his terminology – and that criterion is rarity of species. At that point, he is talking about something that I cannot recognize as being about biodiversity. (See Sect. 4.2.2, Rarity.)
- 12.
See Sect. 6.7 (Biodiversity as value generator) for remarks on how rapidly adaptations can occur and Sect. 7.3 (Biodiversity value in human timeframes) for more reflections on, and implications of rapid evolution.
- 13.
Though none of these see-in-the-dark creatures strictly constitute new species, they are surely new phenotypes. And it is not hard to imagine some cases in which sexual selection – for examples, females rejecting the advances of phosphorescing males – does lead to speciation.
- 14.
The issue of polyploid speciation is somewhat complicated by the fact that gene flows across “ploidy levels” might continue after the creation of hybrids. See Slotte et al. (2008).
- 15.
For example, Sax and Gaines (2008) provide an account of how immigrations have generally increased species richness on oceanic islands. This is consistent with the disappearance of some “native” species, which, in the case of these islands, were just earlier immigrants.
- 16.
See Vellend et al. (2007) for some of the various ways in which speciation can result from species immigrations.
- 17.
See the example of P. albicaulis (whitebark pine) in Sect. 3.3.2.1 (Features). This is typical of many examples of exotics thriving more in their new home than in their “homeland”.
- 18.
Ellis, in particular, emphasizes the human creative role as a source of human responsibility for nature. This is an important topic that I take up later in Sect. 8.1.2 on Responsibility for nature.
- 19.
The research of Hayes et al. 2003 suggests the approach of developing a strain of amphibians that resist the expression of the aromatase gene, which demasculinizes and feminizes males, and is responsible for declines in reproduction.
- 20.
This creative suggestion is due to Darren Domsky.
- 21.
The Hanford Site was established as part of the Manhattan project to produce plutonium. It contains an immense amount of radioactive nuclear waste from its years as a production facility. It is now largely a preserve comprising the Saddle Mountain Wildlife Refuge and Hanford Reach National Monument. Chernobyl, of course, was the site of history’s first horrific nuclear disaster in 1986.
- 22.
See also http://www.quaggaproject.org/.
- 23.
Of course, “uncanny resemblance”, which might involve morphology and phenotype more generally, might not suffice to justify “resurrected species”. That depends on how one defines “species”.
- 24.
This is not to say that resurrection projects are not very hard. And it is safe to say that the obstacles for resurrecting long-extinct creatures are probably very formidable, given the unlikelihood of finding sufficiently intact chromosomal material older than a few tens of thousands of years.
- 25.
The inspiration for this project goes back at least to paleoecologists Paul Martin and David Burney (1999) whose exhortation to “Bring back the elephants!” channeled the “reintroduction” strategies espoused prior to that by conservation biologists Michael Soulé and Reed Noss.
- 26.
The biologist Tim Caro (2007, 281), for one, senses this underlying basic agreement. He identifies the “target date” – before or after 1492 – as the crux of the controversy, while pointing out that “restoring past ecological and evolutionary processes, [is] something that conservation biologists [generally] acknowledge to be important.” The date of re-creation plays a critical role in the minds of conservationists, who regard any creature who did not live at a certain geographical coordinate after the “correct” date as an “alien” and therefore creatura non grata. The debate about the status of Gopherus flavomarginatus (the Bolson tortoise) with respect to Big Bend National Park, where the Pleistocene rewilders wish to re-introduce it, largely hinges on just this question. Something like that particular terrestrial member of Testudinidae (but larger) evidently lived at that location, but not since the late Pleistocene/early Holocene.
- 27.
See, for example, Diamond et al. (1989) who recount the fascinating evolutionary history of two species of myzomelid honeyeaters with initially non-overlapping ranges. A volcanic eruption-induced “chance meeting” of populations of both species best explains a dramatic increase in the size difference between the birds in sympatric populations. In each other’s presence, birds of the larger species got larger while birds of the smaller species got smaller – over the course of just three centuries.
- 28.
All contributing authors were Monsanto employees at the time of publication.
- 29.
This is not to deny that figuring out how to selectively fertilize to achieve greater biodiversity would require some effort beyond deploying an already-proven ability to fertilize everything, everywhere.
- 30.
I do something very much like this in Chap. 8. But this is part of a move to push biodiversity off the table, not salvage it, as the principal emblem of nature’s value.
- 31.
One striking example comes from recent attempts to save Leptodactylus fallax (Montserrat island “mountain chicken” frogs), as described in Aldred (2009).
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Maier, D.S. (2012). The Calculus of Biodiversity Value. In: What’s So Good About Biodiversity?. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, vol 19. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3991-8_5
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