UKNEA was Britain’s national environmental assessment. It was made and not given a screenplay and used as a five year plan or whatever the House of Lords and Commons might have made if they were particularly inspired one day by Vladimir Illyich Lenin.
Not being a Brit, its challenging for me to say why the nation that invented the industrial revolution doesn’t go whole hog for neo-socialism- after all Britain also invented homosexual marriage for the planet, and much of the ecosystem services officialdom seems to be caught up in promoting divisive social agenda as riders with ecosystem services. Incidentally democracy and political pluralism include free speech and different opinions- that isn’t corruption at all. If Brits are more concerned with riots, the Ukraine war and football when not buying up foreign markets should the poor and downtrodden Brits be expected to act like King Canute and order the ecosphere magically repaired straitaway?
If the ecosystem services approach hopes to evolve to be a rational use of ecosphere movement and/or its conservation I would think that defining meta-structure parameters concerning the needs that the ecosphere must meet for humanity should be made, found, discovered or whatever. SInce people can and have used about every material thing they can get their hands on for economic purposes, an ecosystem services approach that is continuously ad hoc and reactive to contemporary demands to use the environment and seeking to serve as a dumbed-down Solomon apportioning half of the baby to various claimants will be presented with contemporary values and axiological criteria evolving regularly. As Parmenides and Heraclitus could discuss if a river ever or never changes, ecosystem services could consider comparative values of commodities locally and neolocally on a vary unstable scale with subjective values. Setting values for things humans demand yet don’t need probably occurs within traditional paradigms of supply and demand. For sustaining a healthy planetary ecosphere the entire planet need be considered instead of billions of arguments and demands over portions of the ecosphere.
If the quantity of food needed to sustain ten billion people is F, and the area required to produce F is F divided by area A at a certain rate of production, then ecosystem servicing of F need be hypothesized and located in the minimally disturbing area A of Earth. When the area is determined then the economic policies and methods to produce F within A can be considered. Other non-food use of an ecosystem inclusive of all empirical material should be determined and quantified too. WIth the quantification surveyed, and necessary locations with Resources R plotted in the least disturbing locations the combined areas of F and R could be added up and set aside for humanity to develop in the most efficient way possible.
The remainder of the planet should be made into a park with a natural ecosphere and people would live within artificial mountain ranges; hollow inside and vegetated outside. People would be free to live in space of course, at a faster pace if electro-magnetic linear accellerators were developed to replace chemical rockets for heavy lift as frequently as a machine gun fires bullets down a fifty mile tube to reach orbital escape velocity.
WIthout a macro approach humanity will defeat itself in detail like as not, as it wars upon itself and its environment through consumption. Each nation probably should develop a theoretical optimal approach of land and ecosphere resources for sustainability just to have such data for comparative purposes with the real world.
In Piketty’s book Capital in the 21st Century a point was made that as private capital increases public capital tends to decrease. The total value of U.S. government debt is more than 30 trillion dollars presently; are all of the resources held by the public sector today even worth 31 trillion dollars? Problems like that tend to undermine public power to control the ecosphere as parks and land areas owned publically are reduced.
Piketty also pointed out that Brits had vast public debt from the American Revolutionary war that wern’t paid off until near the start of the FIrst World War. SInce Piketty also noted the well known fact that capital increases faster than wages and tends to socially concentrate- Britain had 1% of the subjects owning 99% of the wealth until taxes rose to finance the Great War to End All Wars it may be that the woke set are hand waving on the idea of gay government bureaucrats running the environmental services of a decadent world socially and ecospherically. Plutocracy may let the nominal democracy play with that to serve its politically controlling agenda.
In Farley and Daley’s book Ecological Economics explanations of the way natural resources can be said to equate to natural capital was explained. I think it can be a danger though to forget he ideas of Edmond Wilson and his students about the interdependence and co-development of the biosphere- especially well exxemplified on how some Arctic Islands evolved from bare rock to places with plants and animals living when the ice receded. The entire ecosphere is a complete living mechanism, perhaps biological fractalized in some respects of dittoing services at scales great and small, yet there are numerous irreplicable parts.
If people have good comparative surveys of the way things are and what is actually required to sustain human life then people can look at that and make dead reckoning kinds of volunteer judgments and works to get some of that done. I don’t believe there is a systems approach that could be politically enforced today in any nation without a dictatorship, and who wants that, ants?
Garrison Gibson: books and blog 