Abstract
In this short case study we critically assess The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) framework in the light of an ecological-relational view of the source of value. This view takes all value to be generated by the whole range of relations between living beings. We show that whilst the TEEB has advantages over some rival frameworks, allowing limited room to assign value to the non-human, it still does not take seriously enough the participation of non-human life in the very processes of value formation.
Excerpted [with a very light edit] from our paper, “Where values reside”, Environmental Ethics 37 (2015): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290473224_Where_Value_Resides_Making_Ecological_Value_Possible
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Notes
- 1.
Full text available here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290473224_Where_Value_Resides_Making_Ecological_Value_Possible
- 2.
Wessseling: Welzel and Hardt, 2009; http://www.teebweb.org/Portals/25/Documents/TEEB%20for%20National%20Policy%20Makers/TEEB%20for%20Policy%20exec%20English.pdf
- 3.
See http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/644b1884-8c7c-11e0-883f-00144feab49a.html#axzz1O6Gtm2d6 & http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13616543. Bateman’s stance is thus better than the available alternatives, to date. But we want to look towards something post-NERC (and post-TEEB) that would actually be good enough. ‘Intrinsic value’ will always lose in the balance if it is the intrinsic value of, for example, a forest, something non-human. Instrumentalist CBA must be rejected/transcended, because of incommensurability (because of the reality of the infinite value of life, of the whole of nature (though our perspective in the present chapter also puts into question whether it can really make sense to ‘sum’ the whole of nature, at all)). We are trying to offer the schematic beginning of a viable alternative that could find its way eventually into a policy document that would transcend the TEEB (and the NERC work of Bateman et al.), an alternative that would be based on ‘placing’ value itself between. And that would thus overcome the dubious meaning that the term ‘environment’ has come to have, of something ‘out there’ to be ‘managed’, and would midwife a recovery of the earlier, better, encompassing, more ‘ecological’ sense of the term ‘environment’, a sense that is to some degree already afforded by the gap-dissolving concept of ‘affordances’.
- 4.
See https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/environmentalaccounts/bulletins/uknaturalcapital/monetaryestimates2016 for an up-to-date egregious example from the UK.
- 5.
Bateman’s argument (presented in ENV, UEA, on 31 March 2011) is reminiscent of the argument currently, tragically, being used to justify the destruction of the world’s greatest seed bank, which in older, perhaps better, days scientists died of starving from rather than consuming (see http://www.care2.com/causes/real-food/blog/historic-russian-seed-bank-faces-destruction/) in Moscow: “Under [a] mind-boggling quirk, the fact that the land is deemed as ‘priceless’ also gives developers a right to build there. To legally prove that we are using these lands, we need to put a value on the collection which is impossible. There are no methods for that. How can we put a price on a collection that is unique and only exists here” (http://www.expatica.ru/news/news_focus/Outrage-as-priceless-Russian-seed-bank-faces-destruction_92206.html). ‘Priceless’ becomes equated with valueless. This is an obscene turning on its head of our system of value.
- 6.
Moreover, ecological value is not just a function of the sum of all revealed preferences, but the outcome of complex interrelations and encounters between those preferring.
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Read, R., Greaves, T. (2018). A Micro ‘Case Study’: Critiquing the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity. In: Anderson, V. (eds) Debating Nature's Value. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99244-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99244-0_3
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