Mike Lofgren’s recent article on The American Conservative caught my attention.

It is essentially about the different worlds that people inhabit; a contrast made by comparing the ‘super rich’ to the ‘everyman’.

The article can be found here. I am no expert on American politics, and my interest in this piece is on its motivating idea that we can parse out the political economy of different worlds based on what people can afford and how they interact with the systems of which they are a part.

Karen Bakker, professor of geography at UBC and co-director of the Program on Water Governance has a new article in Science (subscription required) on the topic of water security:

Here is the summary:

“An estimated 80% of the world’s population faces a high-level water security or water-related biodiversity risk (1). The issue of water security—defined as an acceptable level of water-related risks to humans and ecosystems, coupled with the availability of water of sufficient quantity and quality to support livelihoods, national security, human health, and ecosystem services (2, 3)—is thus receiving considerable attention. To date, however, the majority of academic research on water security is relatively poorly integrated with the needs of policy-makers and practitioners; hence, substantial changes to funding, education, research frameworks, and academic incentive structures are required if researchers are to be enabled to make more substantive contributions to addressing the global water crisis.”

There is a new book coming out that is being launched in Hamilton just ahead of the faculty search for a Chair in Water Policy at McMaster University.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012, 9:30 a.m.
The Atrium at McMaster Innovation Park
175 Longwood Rd. South, Hamilton, Ontario

Earlier this year, United Nations University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) produced a book titled The global water crisis: Addressing an urgent security issue together with the Walter & Duncan Gordon Foundation and the InterAction Council, a group of former heads of state and government.

The book was presented to the IAC at their 30^th annual plenary meeting earlier this year in May and was well received by its members.

UNU-INWEH will be hosting an event on September 11, 2012 for the book’s official launch and wide release. The event is being held together with the Walter & Duncan Gordon Foundation and the InterAction Council.

UNU-INWEH is honoured to be welcoming The Rt. Honourable Mr. Jean Chrétien, former Prime Minister of Canada and co-chair of the InterAction Council, to be attending as the keynote speaker.

READ MORE…The itinerary of the book launch, including a list of all speakers and times, is available here.

In a recent article for the Guardian, George Monbiot argued that the idea of ‘ecosystems services’ is a prelude to the privatization of nature.

It didn’t take long for Robert Costanza, who has forwarded the idea of ‘ecosystem services valuation’ as a way to protect hitherto unvalued aspects of nature, to respond with this article (along with colleagues Simone Quatrini and Sive Oystese).

What are ecosystem services?

Generally speaking, and especially since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, ‘ecosystem services’ include all of the things that the Earth and its component parts and processes get up to that support human well-being. Examples would include the purification of water performed by some wetlands, waste assimilation, these sorts of things.

So that is what ecosystems services are. And, in general, these services are in decline. So a key question is: how to prevent their degradation?

A few years ago some of my former colleagues at McGill published a paper titled “The environmentalists paradox: why is human well-being increasing as ecosystem services degrade?” Their paper, which appeared in Bioscience, can be read here (pdf). Their terminology is a little imprecise; they are really probing the assumption that ecosystem services are linked to human well-being such that if the former suffers, so does the latter. Many environmentalists (i.e. envr. ethicists) already have their own theories on this, of course, but that is a different topic…perhaps one to write more on later.

These issues notwithstanding, one of the solutions to preventing the degradation of ecosystem services is to find ways to value them. Often this has taken the form of valuing them in market terms. Such as, for instance, calculating how much it would cost for us to produce the same benefits we now receive from a healthy wetland or watershed. Once we know how much it would cost us to do what a wetland or watershed does, then we have a ballpark for valuing the services it provides.

One of the concerns that people like Monbiot appear to have, is that ‘ecosystem services’ represent a way to enclose the value provided by a watershed (or some other resource ‘unit’ like a forest or bioregion) in a way that gets an increasing share of the Earth’s things and processes into the global economy. This is not uniformly the case, as Jessica Dempsey and Morgan Robertson argue in their new paper.

But not “uniformly the case” does not mean that it can’t happen. So there appears to be some room between the views of Monbiot and Costanza. There is certainly room to carefully consider whether the valuation of ‘ecosystem services’ is functionally dissimilar to the valuation of more discrete parts of the total environment – those things we like to call ‘natural resources’.

Furthermore, this is a political and ethical kind of dilemma, since it asks us to position ourselves, the world of things around us and the interactions of those things that have nothing to do with us in a particular sort of relation. But that relation cannot be determined apart from what sorts of things we are asked to consider. So there is a sense in which we entangled with our own ideas of what things matter and on what temporal and spatial scale. This anthropocentric assumption is one that I’ve been uncomfortable with for awhile. For instance, if we are to value a watershed then we need some semblance of the scale of the services that a watershed provides both spatially and temporally. In this sense, once we consider a watershed as an object, we are caught up with that object in particular ways.

Maybe that is too philosophical for some. But if you are interested there are some interesting thoughts on our relationship to things, and what (surprise!) the relationships of things amongst themselves might look like here and here. A good introduction is Tim Morton’s book, Ecology without nature.

More practically, it is hard to avoid normative implications once you make the move from acknowledging ‘ecosystem services’ to valuing them. And it is not just because ‘valuing’ is a normative category (since different folks argue there are ways around that problem). Rather, it is because ‘ecosystem services valuation‘ brings out the implicit environmental politic that sets us in relation to the world, and its things thereof, that we inhabit.

Charles Fishman, author of The Big Thirst, published this in the NY Times a few days ago.

Op-Ed Contributor

Don’t Waste the Drought

By CHARLES FISHMAN

Published: August 16, 2012

WE’RE in the worst drought in the United States since the 1950s, and we’re wasting it.

Though the drought has devastated corn crops and disrupted commerce on the Mississippi River, it also represents an opportunity to tackle long-ignored water problems and to reimagine how we manage, use and even think about water.

For decades, Americans have typically handled drought the same way. We are asked to limit lawn-watering and car-washing, to fully load dishwashers and washing machines before running them, to turn off the tap while brushing our teeth. When the rain comes, we all go back to our old water habits.

But just as the oil crisis of the 1970s spurred advances in fuel efficiency, so should the Drought of 2012 inspire efforts to reduce water consumption.

Read more here.

https://jeremyjschmidt.com/2012/08/17/360/

A new journal, Environmental Humanities, has been launched. Here is the blurb on the sort of high quality, interdisciplinary work they seek to publish:

“Environmental Humanities is an international, open-access journal that aims to invigorate current interdisciplinary research on the environment. In response to a growing interest around the world in the many questions that arise in this era of rapid environmental and social change, the journal will publish outstanding scholarship that draws humanities disciplines into conversation with each other, and with the natural and social sciences.”

The Center for Humans and Nature has revamped and relaunched their website. The new format looks very engaging, as does the work they have been doing for some time now. The Center also published its journal: Minding Nature. The journal is open access and explores issues of conservation, values, ecological democracy, economics, the place of people on the planet and so on.

There is a place to submit questions for the Center’s fellows and associates and it is great to see this platform for discussion.