Newsgroups: sci.environment

Kevin Brown writes:
>But if what you say about biosystems is true, then I would imagine that
>the end result of any such action is a "tree of effects", and some of the
>nodes of that tree may be nodes that humans would care about.  And if
>*that* is so, then humans would be rather foolish to knowingly take such
>an action without having already weighed the consequences (your argument
>that humans *do* these things is irrelevant, inasmuch as I am already
>aware that there exist foolish humans).
>[...]
>And the argument that We Don't Know What We're Doing can be trivially
>shot down by observing that everything we do has an environmental
>impact *anyway*, and that we have few alternatives but experiment when
>it comes down to determining the consequences of our actions (but this
>is no reason for not at least *considering* the consequences of our actions
>before we take them).

Basically Kevin's argument boils down to a simple belief that any affect
which we could have on living systems, and which matters to us, is already 
known to us, -- or else is something we can't possibly hope to avoid anyway 
since everything we do has *some* impact.

However, all impacts are not quantitively equal, and we are much more likely
to cause the biosphere -- and thus potentially ourselves -- trouble by making
big impacts than by making little ones. Sadly, however, many little impacts
of different kinds can add up to big impacts of very general kinds -- such
as an elevated extinction rate. The biosphere, as I said, is being nickel-and
-dimed to death. We may not be able to say which nickel ought not be 
spent by predicting the exact consequences of spending it -- but we can 
certainly say that the *total* impact is way, way overboard: the mass 
extinction crisis we are perpetrating demonstrates that much.

The idea that we already take into account every living thing that matters to
us is not just silly because of our lack of knowledge of everything that works
to subsidize us, it is also silly because we *don't* take into account 
free goods until they are gone or degraded and have to be substituted: 
traditional economics begins when you have to do work to receive a good, 
not when it is supplied to you by nature for free. We don't always discover 
which "nodes of the tree" we ought to have cared about until it is too late 
to do anything about it, and those leaves have been shed. Thus a laissez-faire
approach combined with imperfect knowledge, and an inbuilt bias towards
growth, is more or less inevitably going to lead to degradation of the 
biosphere: our children are paying the bills for our consumption, and
our children are not represented in our markets. We are engaged in
biotic deficit spending. And, like the Reagan spending-spree of the 80's,
it intoxicates us with the belief that growth can go on forever. Why not,
so long as we aren't the ones who will suffer?

My suggestion is that we must limit the total extent to which we may shake 
the tree. That cannot be accomplished through market incentives
alone. It requires, at a minimum, generational justice toward posterity,
and savings of resources -- including the biodiversity resource -- which
have no purpose other than justice. If justice toward posterity is on
a long enough time scale to preserve the planet's normal evolutionary 
potential, it essentially amounts to justice toward the biosphere -- which 
is the ethic I delineated to "Conan". The longer the time scale, the more 
biodiversity we have to save at every step, and the more habitat area we 
have to reserve for it -- and the less there is for us, with all that that
implies. 

I'd recommend Edward O. Wilson's new book _The Diversity of Life_ as an
antidote to the belief that we have a complete picture of how ecosystems
work to subsidize us. The intensity of that belief seems inversely 
proportional to knowledge of ecology and evolutionary biology. 

------------
Alan McGowen

"By the faces we show each other and to the world... we force the spring."
--Bill Clinton
Newsgroups: sci.environment