Rethinking Ecosystem Services from the Anthropocene to the Ecozoic

* Article: Rethinking ecosystem services from the anthropocene to the Ecozoic: Nature’s benefits to the biotic community. By Joshua Farley , Rigo E.M. Melgar Danish Hasan Ansari, et al. Ecosystem ServicesVolume 67, June 2024, 101624

URL = https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2212041624000305?dgcid=coauthor

Abstract

"The Ecozoic Age is defined as an era characterized by the mutual flourishing of humans and the rest of Nature. The field of Ecosystem Services should be dedicated to achieving this goal. However, ecosystem services (ES) are commonly defined as Nature’s benefits to people, an anthropocentric concept. Many schemes proposed to assess and value ES are market oriented, thus focused on the satisfaction of subjective individual preferences, an egocentric approach. Yet modern science accepts that all complex species, including humans, are an inseparable part of Nature, incapable of surviving without the ecosystem services Nature generates. Nature is the whole, the economy is the part; we must internalize the economy into nature, not vice versa. This article builds on evolutionary theory, anthropology and ecological economics to explain the necessity of an ecocentric approach to ecosystem services embodied in economic institutions prioritizing Nature. We must create new economic institutions focused on the health of the whole system to complement existing institutions focused on the individual (e.g. markets) and on society (e.g. the public sector and other collective institutions), with the recognition that system health also depends on the health of system components. We therefore propose redefining ecosystem services as Nature’s benefits to the biotic community of which humans are a part. The relationship of humanity to nature should be the same as that of a cell to the human body: prioritize the health of whole and take only the minimum necessary for secure sufficiency."

Highlights:

• Current ecosystem service frameworks are anthropocentric and egocentric.

• We propose an ecocentric framework for ecosystem services that recognizes humans as part of nature.

• Humanity’s capacity for cooperation evolved to solve social dilemmas, like sustaining ecosystem services.

• Ecosystem services are co-created by all species; humans must stop free-riding.

• We redefine ecosystem services as nature’s benefits to the biotic community of which humans are a part."

Discussion

A critique of Ecosystem Services

Joshua Farley:

"In the first issue of Ecosystem Services, Farley (2012) published an article titled “Ecosystem Services: the Economics Debate” critically examining various applications of the ecosystem services concept through the ecological economics goals of sustainability, justice and efficiency. The article argued that ES are essential to the survival of all complex life and hence a prerequisite for sustainability. They are a shared inheritance from nature, so justice requires equitable access to the benefits they generate. Efficiency requires balancing the gains of converting ecosystem structure to economic products with the resulting loss of ecosystem services and ensuring that net benefits flow to where they generate the most welfare. In the vicinity of ecological tipping points (Pearce, 2007) or planetary boundaries (Richardson et al., 2023) that threaten the continued provision of these essential services, their value becomes immeasurably large, and marginal analysis—the cornerstone of market economics—becomes irrelevant. Since markets allocate goods and services to those willing to pay the most, regardless of physiological need, they are both unjust and inefficient. The goal of economics should not be to internalize ecosystem services into markets, but rather to develop institutions guided by science and ethics that provision secure sufficiency for all within planetary boundaries (see also Fanning et al., 2020, Melgar-Melgar and Hall, 2020).

Over 10 years later, we believe that these recommendations were inadequate to manage human impacts on the rest of Nature. Solving our current ecological and social crises—which have only grown worse over the past ten years—requires a radical transformation of humanity’s relationship to the global ecosystems that sustain all life, encapsulated by Thomas Berry’s notion of the Ecozoic, theorized as an era in which humans live in a mutually enhancing relationship with Earth’s community of life (Swimme and Berry, 1992, Vargas Roncancio et al., 2019). Suitable economic institutions must be based on the recognition that humans are an integral part of natural systems, no more capable of surviving apart from Nature than a human cell can survive apart from the human body. To ensure survival of the whole, cells evolved to prioritize the welfare of the body over that of the individual cell, many of which undergo cell-death (apoptosis) for the benefit of the whole organism (Ameisen, 2002). Humans must evolve a similar relationship to the rest of Nature.

Current definitions of ecosystem services are explicitly anthropocentric and utilitarian, focused on Nature’s benefits to people, which is equally true for IPBES’s alternative framing of “Nature’s contributions to people” (Pascual et al., 2017), as discussed in detail by Muradian and Gomez-Baggethun (Muradian and Gómez-Baggethun, 2021). The anthropocentric worldview holds that humans are separate from and superior to Nature (Ruder and Sanniti, 2019). In Aldo Leopold’s words, “we abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect” (Leopold, 1949, foreword).

Even more problematic are applications of market principles to ES valuation and policy. A recent bibliometric study found that 49 % of studies estimating ES benefits used monetary values, and “consideration of non-monetary values relevant to decision makers…was rare” (Mandle et al., 2021, p.4). Markets and market values are based on private property rights, individual choice, and the private profit motive. Markets are dedicated to satisfying the subjective preferences of self-interested individuals. In other words, markets are explicitly egocentric. When individuals harvest raw materials from Nature, use Nature as an unrestricted dumping ground for waste, or convert natural ecosystems into agricultural fields and developed areas, the benefits flow to the individual, but ecological costs are collective. Situations in which society benefits from cooperation but cooperation is costly for the individual are known as social dilemmas. Social dilemmas can only be solved through cooperation (Gintis, 2011). Efforts to monetize ES to integrate them into economic decisions transform an anthropocentric concept into an egocentric one. It is based on the outmoded belief at the root of mainstream economics that everyone acting in their own self-interest creates an invisible hand that maximizes the welfare of all. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and the transgression of several other planetary boundaries are proof that this is not so. With social dilemmas, self-interest creates an ‘invisible foot’ that kicks the common good to pieces (Daly and Farley, 2011).

Innumerable societies, past and present, have recognized humans as an integral part of the biotic community and many fields of science (e.g. systems ecology, complexity theory, evolutionary biology, and ecological economics) are reaching the same conclusion: Nature does not revolve around humans any more than the sun revolves around the Earth. The sustainable, just, and efficient management of human impacts on ES will require an ecocentric (i.e. systems-centric) approach (Washington et al., 2017).

By itself, this is not an original idea. Focusing on valuation, Costanza (Costanza, 2020) argues that we must distinguish between efficiency values, fairness values, and sustainability values (E, F, and S values, respectively). E-values are based on individual preferences, can be measured in monetary terms, and are most useful for “those ES that are private, excludable and rival goods” (p.4) such as provisioning services, though he cautions that the underlying assumptions on which monetary valuation is grounded—rationality, perfect information, and fixed preferences—rarely hold. F-values should be based on community preferences and require deliberative approaches. S-values require whole-system approaches, such as integrated, dynamic systems models. Muradian and Gomez-Baggethun (Muradian and Gómez-Baggethun, 2021) call for “rejecting the dualistic, anthropocentric and utilitarian representation of human-nature relationships” and call for instead a “morality of care, a reallocation of property rights, and the extension of the community of justice to non-human entities.” (p. 1).

This current article complements both approaches. We call for rejecting both anthropocentric and egocentric approaches to ES in favor of an ecocentric approach grounded in evolutionary theory, ecological economics, anthropology, and other fields of inquiry. An ecocentric worldview accepts the scientific consensus that humans co-evolved with the rest of Nature, cannot survive without it, and cannot create adequate human-made substitutes (Pelenc and Ballet, 2015). We are all interacting components of a single system. Returning to the analogy of the cell and the body, an anthropocentric approach is akin to an economy of cells focusing only on the benefits the body provides to the cells without considering what the cells must do to support the body. We believe ecosystem services should be redefined as Nature’s benefits to the biotic community of which humans are a part, and we must forge new economic institutions capable of ensuring the restoration and provision of these services. As Muradian and Gomez-Baggethun (2021) suggest, these institutions must be based on a fundamental extension of morality, which includes the rest of Nature as subjects with moral standing. As Berry (2010) asserts, we must learn to see the world as a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.

However, there are times in which the component parts of systems must focus on their own self-interest. Cells must capture from the body the resources required to sustain themselves. We also need egocentric economic institutions like the market that are focused on individual welfare, and group-centric and anthropocentric institutions like families, communities, and governments focused on the well-being of the group. While Costanza (2020) distinguished between E, F, and S values, we distinguish between Ego, Anthro, and Eco economic institutions, geared toward the individual, society, and Nature, respectively. Following Daly, we believe markets (but not capitalism) can be efficient for settling matters of taste, but only after we ensure sustainable scale and a fair distribution of resources (Daly, 1992). While many critics of ecosystem services claim the concept is inherently utilitarian and market oriented, we note that public services are rarely provided by markets alone, and public service is work done for the public good. Analogously, ecosystem services are ill-suited to market allocation, and serve the needs of ecosystems. The phrase ecosystem necessities is perhaps more apt than ecosystem services."

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