Anthropocene. Such achievements were permanent settlements, agriculture,
ploughs, networks, domestication and breeding techniques, storage, crafts and
medicine. Modernity can be understood as a shift from qualitative services to
increasing quantities (“more of the same”). It is a clever idea to catch fish via nets,
but now the nets have become miles long and deep, catching the marine food web
and influencing the development of fish species. As many narratives and figures
indicate, the increased metabolism collapses into systematic plundering of our
planet’s resources. The large-scale industrial metabolism with nature is exaggerated
in many respects and for centuries has led to a huge raw material stock and a
consumer culture (see Trentmann 2016).
Metabolic and dependency values are conceptually close to “utilization values”
within TEV and close to provisioning and regulating services within ESS. The
problem with TEV is that only factual preferences of individuals are recorded,
regardless of whether these preferences are well informed or not, which can lead
to underestimation of some ecosystem services. The entire cluster of reliance values,
direct utility values, provisioning services etc. apparently just requires simple
grounding in terms of (basic) needs, preferences, and demand. Utilization values
can be conceived as being demand-driven. Such conception, however, may block a
critical reflection upon current consumption patterns (in the Global North) and
aspiration levels (in the Global South). TEV and ESS do not ask for proper attitudes
with respect to the many “gifts” of nature, such as the attitudes of gratitude, frugality,
and humility. Environmental ethics should stimulate the idea that grounding such
metabolic reliance values should not be demand-driven but should become rather
virtue-based (see end of this section).
The perspective of mainstream microeconomics can underestimate basic dependency values for methodological reasons, too. Economists can admit that primary
goods such as oxygen, freshwater, fertile soil, photosynthesis, etc. are, as such,
beyond price. The price of planet Earth is infinite, but the economic cost-benefit
analysis evaluates local or regional changes at the margin. Thus, it is the method of
marginal assessment itself which underrates nature. Therefore, metabolic values are
dialectical as they shift between basic dependence on nature, marginal degradation,
and substitution processes. Fresh water and fertile soils are paradigm examples for
this peculiar dialectic. At the heart of this dialectics is the recognition that humans
basically remain reliant upon nature even under recent conditions of almost perfect
mastery of nature. Environmental ethics turns the economic perspective of
primary values upside down: Each and any part of nature counts as being a parcel
of primary values. The flip side of marginal increase in utility is the marginal loss of
primary values. Such dialectics turns into the political economy of strong sustainability (Daly 1996).
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K. Ott and K. C. Reinmuth
ploughs, networks, domestication and breeding techniques, storage, crafts and
medicine. Modernity can be understood as a shift from qualitative services to
increasing quantities (“more of the same”). It is a clever idea to catch fish via nets,
but now the nets have become miles long and deep, catching the marine food web
and influencing the development of fish species. As many narratives and figures
indicate, the increased metabolism collapses into systematic plundering of our
planet’s resources. The large-scale industrial metabolism with nature is exaggerated
in many respects and for centuries has led to a huge raw material stock and a
consumer culture (see Trentmann 2016).
Metabolic and dependency values are conceptually close to “utilization values”
within TEV and close to provisioning and regulating services within ESS. The
problem with TEV is that only factual preferences of individuals are recorded,
regardless of whether these preferences are well informed or not, which can lead
to underestimation of some ecosystem services. The entire cluster of reliance values,
direct utility values, provisioning services etc. apparently just requires simple
grounding in terms of (basic) needs, preferences, and demand. Utilization values
can be conceived as being demand-driven. Such conception, however, may block a
critical reflection upon current consumption patterns (in the Global North) and
aspiration levels (in the Global South). TEV and ESS do not ask for proper attitudes
with respect to the many “gifts” of nature, such as the attitudes of gratitude, frugality,
and humility. Environmental ethics should stimulate the idea that grounding such
metabolic reliance values should not be demand-driven but should become rather
virtue-based (see end of this section).
The perspective of mainstream microeconomics can underestimate basic dependency values for methodological reasons, too. Economists can admit that primary
goods such as oxygen, freshwater, fertile soil, photosynthesis, etc. are, as such,
beyond price. The price of planet Earth is infinite, but the economic cost-benefit
analysis evaluates local or regional changes at the margin. Thus, it is the method of
marginal assessment itself which underrates nature. Therefore, metabolic values are
dialectical as they shift between basic dependence on nature, marginal degradation,
and substitution processes. Fresh water and fertile soils are paradigm examples for
this peculiar dialectic. At the heart of this dialectics is the recognition that humans
basically remain reliant upon nature even under recent conditions of almost perfect
mastery of nature. Environmental ethics turns the economic perspective of
primary values upside down: Each and any part of nature counts as being a parcel
of primary values. The flip side of marginal increase in utility is the marginal loss of
primary values. Such dialectics turns into the political economy of strong sustainability (Daly 1996).
144
K. Ott and K. C. Reinmuth