Biodiversity, ecosystem services, and the market
For many readers of this book their first encounter with the concept of ecosystem services will have been the 2005 report of the MA (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005b), and their first reaction may well have been as instinctively cautious as that expressed in 2006 by Douglas McCauley, then a graduate student at Stanford University. Writing in Nature, he characterized the approach taken by the MA as “selling out on nature”:
The underlying assumption is that if scientists can identify ecosystem services, quantify their economic value, and ultimately bring conservation more in synchrony with market ideologies, then the decision-makers will recognize the folly of environmental destruction and work to safeguard nature. But market-based mechanisms for conservation are not a panacea for our current conservation ills. If we mean to make significant and long-lasting gains in conservation, we must strongly assert the primacy of ethics and aesthetics in conservation. We must act quickly to redirect much of the effort now being devoted to the commodification of nature back towards instilling a love for nature in more people.
(McCauley 2006)McCauley’s reaction was not wholly surprising. After all, the conviction that other species have infinite intrinsic value had been defined by Michael Soulé as a quintessential feature of the field of conservation biology (Soulé 1986). That conviction is one that is shared by many in the ecological sciences, and finds ready echoes in the works of the most important precursors of the field, Aldo Leopold (1949) and Alexander von Humboldt (1850).
Yet the concept of ecosystem services has nothing to do with market ideologies. Nor does it imply the commodification of nature. Some ecosystem services that are important today are certainly provided through markets. Many foods, fuels, and fibers are in this category. Other services will surely be provided through markets in the future. The identification of new pharmacologically active compounds, for example, is likely to lead to the emergence of markets for the species that are the source of those compounds. But there are many ecosystem services that are not now, and never will be, provided through markets. What the concept of ecosystem services does is to give us a way of characterizing the interests that people have in their environment. Whether an ecosystem service can be provided through the market depends on its properties, and not on the fact that it is important to people.