May I Lodge A Protest?

Rather than stick a note in the long open thread, I thought this story deserved a brief write-up.

Tony Juniper is a long time defender of the natural world who recently wrote a book called What Has Nature Ever Done For Us?

The main theme of his book involves putting concrete economic (monetary) values on ecosystem services. In this way Tony hopes to convince humans to stop destroying the biosphere. For example, see my post What Is The Economic Value Of Healthy Oceans?

Tony gave a Ted Talk of course, something I will never be given the opportunity to do [video below].

I transcribed Juniper's Obligatory Hope speech at the end (starts at the 15:54 mark).

[Our challenge is to see that] the economy is not something which owns ecology, but to see the economy as it truly is, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of ecology and the natural environment.

That obviously is a huge [monkey] wrench [in human thinking], and I think most politicians in this country find it very hard to see what is really quite an obvious set of connections, but I do believe there is a great deal of Hope for us in being able top navigate the tricky ecological crunches which lie ahead of us, not least because there is now so much understanding and so much information out there about the dynamic relationship between ecology and economics, and the extent to which we can now start putting numbers on one to inform the other.

I have spent much of my professional career campaigning for nature because nature is worth protecting for its own sake. It has intrinsic values that go beyond any kind of instrumental values we might place upon it. It does need protecting for its own sake. But I'm also convinced that the new research that's coming out now demonstrating the economic value of nature is absolutely vital for us to put into the mainstream debates.

[ my note: What debates? I dont' see any debates about making human economic systems subservient to Nature. ]

And I don't see that as an alternative to us taking a moral stance, or saying that nature has values that go beyond the prices we can put upon it.  I think these two things need to go hand-in-hand. We need to re-build our connections with nature, we need to have a spiritual education in this country and elsewhere indeed to put us back inside the natural world. But we also need to be building a different economic system and I think that economic system will not only come from the provision of good numbers, and putting good arguments together, but it will also come from the different kind of relationships we all have with nature, that profound re-connnection.

If I had one priority that I would put at the top of the national curriculum today, for ministers to thinking about in terms of how we rebuild our society, it would be to [make] natural history [compulsory in education programs for young people], to learn about birdsong, to learn about the  names of trees, to be able to identify butterflies, and to see humans in the natural world in their correct place, in the center of it, and not outside it.

Tony says there is now so much understanding and so much information out there about the dynamic relationship between ecology and economics. He believes that if that understanding and information is presented to politicians and the general public, and nature studies are included in school curriculums, there is hope that Homo sapiens will do the right thing.

That was a common theme on DOTE, the relationship between economic systems and the biosphere. I am very knowledgeable about that dynamic relationship, on both sides. I wrote literally hundreds of posts which dealt with that relationship, or touched upon it.

My experience of trying to get that information across to a general audience was in the main dismal, an appalling failure. Outside of a handful of people, humans generally had no interest in the subject. No interest.

By and large it seems that humans are entirely consumed by anthropocentric concerns, for example (to pick just one) whether there will be enough crude oil in the future to power their personal transportation, and what the cost to them of refined products made from that oil will be.

Typically, in my experience, if you tell a human that Nature has intrinsic value, they will stare at you in much the same way as a deer in the headlights (right after they ask you what "intrinsic" means).

So I would like to lodge a protest. To whom do I submit it?

Apparently there is no one to take my complaint, and that speaks directly to the problem.

I will not be invited to give a Ted Talk because I believe there is no hope whatsoever that humans will re-connect with the natural world in a meaningful way as Tony wants them to do. That's not who humans are, nor is it the sort of thing humans can do.

If you listen to the interview Diane Rehm does with Juniper, you will notice that he remembers to say several times during the broadcast—not just once, or twice—that his book "is an optimistic one." I don't know whether Tony is fully aware of the rules governing what is acceptable to humans and what goes on beyond the bounds of propriety, but he makes sure to follow those rules: you can not take pessimistic (realistic) position about how humans behave (and have behaved in the past) if you want them to listen to you now (or you want to get a book published, etc.).

A new re-connection with the natural world lies completely outside the human purview. Aside from my observations of the human-created world, my experience of writing DOTE, and the reception to it, tells me that is so.

 

Comments

[Jim]

The great irony is that he's giving the speech in a large air-conditioned auditorium with professional lighting and sound. The lights are dimmed in the audience, and they are watching a rather frantic and nervous speaker give a speech about appreciating nature in one of the most nature-less settings possible. Why? Because they prefer it.

Each generation is successfully becoming more and more detached from the natural world. Most kids don't even really play outdoors anymore - they're all already banging away in front of televisions, computer screens, and tablets - constantly. How can they have any appreciation of the natural world when their stimulus comes from the manufactured world?

I understand the appeal of trying to compute nature's services into economic terms. It's perhaps a way of getting the message into some people's rather thick skulls. But, at its core, it's still saying that the economy is more important. The message behind it is, "We have to protect nature, because we have to protect the economy." It's doomed to fail, because the emphasis is on ourselves and our own desires (the economy). Biomimicry = crude replication of natural processes for economic benefit.

Three thoughts for me that relate. I watched 'The Doors' again recently. I hadn't seen it in almost 20 years. Kilmer as Morrison quotes the Nietzsche line, "This world is a will to power - and nothing else."

Second:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/lab-grown-beef-taste-test-almost-like-a-burger/2013/08/05/921a5996-fdf4-11e2-96a8-d3b921c0924a_story.html

Costs $330 million and 'almost tastes like meat'. How's that for getting back to nature?

Third, Goldman Sachs runs an ad campaign called "Progress is Everyone's Business". It started in 2010, but I don't watch television, so this just came to my notice, anyway:
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20100929/FREE/100929811

There's a recent ad called 'Titan'. In it, two young ladies (Goldman reps) say how they're so proud to help create jobs in America. A company that 'makes the largest tires in the world' (for earth moving, coal mining, agriculture, and other industrial purposes) wants to grow, and Goldman is there to help. They take what was once just a soybean field and build an expansion on it.

It ends with a lady saying, "The people at Titan don't see a limit on Titan's horizon. I think that spirit will take us a long way."

So, what are the chances we'll either 'change our economy' or 'get back to nature'?