Over the past decade a shift can be noticed from ecological restoration to ecological design, where ecological design stands for a technocratic approach that courts hubris and mastery rather than humility and self-restraint. Following Eric Higgs, this shift can be seen as a “hyperactive and heedless response“ to global environmental change, especially climate change. The new technocratic approach may be best characterized as enlightened anthropocentrism, where nature is only allowed that degree of agency which is required to deliver the services (...) that are essential for human well-being. It is not only questionable if we have the scientific and technical abilities to purposeful design ecosystems that will serve our needs, but also if the new approach will be sufficient to protect biodiversity in the long run. (shrink)

This paper is a preliminary treatment of the categories of agency and dependence in the context of ecosystem services discourse. These categories are discussed in terms of critical categorial ontology in order to articulate adequately the nature of humankind’s dependence upon the nonhuman natural world, inadequately captured by ecosystem services discourse. Following Val Plumwood, this essay takes ecosystems services discourse as an example of one type of failure to discern various forms of agency as well as dependence, and it goes (...) on to define diffuse dependence as the relation that corresponds to the form of agency expressed through ecosystem services. (shrink)

Existing literature on equity considerations for climate change mitigation and adaptation has almost exclusively focused on fair burden sharing between nations. However, disparities among regions a...

This paper addresses problems related to transferring market concepts to non-market domains. More specifically it is about fallacies following from the use of the commodity concept in environmental valuation studies. First of all, the standard practice tends to misconstrue the ethical aspects related to environmental choices by forcing them into becoming ordinary trade-off problems. Second, the commodity perspective ignores important technical interdependencies within the environment and the relational character of environmental goods. These are all properties that have made many such (...) goods escape the commoditisation pressure of markets in the first place. Further, it is shown that these interdependencies are the source of some of the ethical dilemmas observed. Finally, inherent characteristics of the environment tend to make the concept of the margin, so indispensable to economic calculus, either difficult or irrelevant to define. The commodity 'fiction' twists the perception of the environment from systems preservation to items use or transformation. This is a problem of increased importance as we approach potential systems perturbations. (shrink)

The services of ecological systems and the natural capital stocks that produce them are critical to the functioning of the Earth's life-support system. They contribute to human welfare, both directly and indirectly, and therefore represent part of the total economic value of the planet. We have estimated the current economic value of 17 ecosystem services for 16 biomes, based on published studies and a few original calculations. For the entire biosphere, the value is estimated to be in the range of (...) US$16-54 trillion per year, with an average of US$33 trillion per year. Because of the nature of the uncertainties, this must be considered a minimum estimate. Global gross national product total is around US$18 trillion per year. (shrink)