[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out Temperate zones and tropic climbs and run through currents and thriving seas Winds blowing through breathing trees and strong ozone safe sunshine Good planets are hard to find yeah.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Hello K SQUID listeners. It's every other Sunday again and you're listening to Sustainability Now, a bi weekly K Squid radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. The notion of putting a monetary value on living things in nature is not a new one.
You might have heard that recently the Environmental Protection Agency reduced the value of a statistical human life from $10 million to zero.
Economic growth is deemed much more important than human health.
Over the past several decades, there's been a concerted effort by biologists, economists and others to put a value on nature services.
What would it cost, for example, to provide clean water the way nature does? Or oxygen or photosynthesis or soil?
Early estimates of ecosystem service values were around $30 trillion per year. Arguably today they're much higher, over 100 trillion.
But getting from hypothetical calculations to actual incorporation into real world policy and development projects is no easy task.
My guest today on Sustainability now has spent a considerable amount of time addressing these kinds of questions. He is Daniel Shoes Suarez, Assistant professor of Environmental Studies at Middlebury College in Vermont. He's just published Biologists Unite the Rise and Fall of Ecosystem Services, an account of why three decades of academic, activist and policy efforts have failed to incorporate ecosystem services into global economic accounting and action.
Professor Daniel Suarez, welcome to Sustainability Now.
[00:02:18] Speaker A: Thank you for having me.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: Why don't we begin with a brief summary of your book and how you came to write it, and in the process explain what ecosystem services are.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: Sure.
So the book Biologists Unite the Rise and Fall of Ecosystem Services.
I guess unpacking that title first.
The book tells the story of biologists, ecologists, life scientists, ecosystem service scientists, all in a word, uniting, right, pulling together, coalescing in a really remarkable way over a period of a few decades around this idea, this conceptual framework of ecosystem services. And the book especially investigates the ways that these ideas serve to give expression to a kind of political strategy. Folks would talk about it as the way forward for conservation.
Biologists really did unite around these approaches over a period of a couple decades, from the late 90s up until now. The subtitle, I think, gives away another important part of the story, which was the difficulties that these political strategies Ecosystem Services as a Theory of change, what it encountered and the various ways it got stymied, disappointed fell short of expectations. And much of the book explores the ways that many of the practitioners and proponents of this idea grappled with the disillusionments, the doubts and hesitations that this created.
[00:03:58] Speaker B: What are ecosystem services?
[00:04:00] Speaker A: The classifications and terminology has continued to evolve, but I think at its core, a simple way to talk about them would be the benefits people obtain from ecosystems. So that's the definition borrowed from the Millennium ecosystem assessment from 2005, which brought together hundreds of biodiversity scientists and others which helped to put this idea on the map.
We can think of an example from the west coast of Canada, where I grew up.
So there are a lot of forests, and there have been a lot of clashes and debates over what to do with the forests, whether to log them. Once you compare the economic values, let's say, of using them for timber and logging them, and you compare those to the ecosystem services, the array of different benefits people are obtaining from those forests, ranging from carbon sequestration to folks going in there picking mushrooms, non timber forest products.
There are filtering water, maybe there's eco tourism. Once you add up all of these different ecosystem services and you can get very detailed and rigorous and systematic about adding all of those up, you might find yourself with a very different and compelling rationale for arriving at what to do with these forests that could result in a case for conservation. So, ecosystem services refers to the science, the research, the methods and techniques that go into systematically measuring and analyzing those services. And then you can see how it gets folded into strategies that are used by environmental practitioners, conservationists, and others to try to influence decision making, and with the idea of helping to encourage smarter and presumably more sustainable courses of action with a more complete understanding of the costs and benefits of, you know, in this case, a decision about what to do with these forests on the west coast of Canada.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: But at the end of the day, you want to put a monetary value on these services, right? Because otherwise you're comparing them to other things that are actually being monetized. Like you can, you know, you can calculate pretty easily the value of the timber.
[00:06:13] Speaker A: Yeah. So that's a key part of the rationale. Now, an important caveat that I think a lot of ecosystem service scientists and practitioners and proponents would say is that it's not always monetary. There are many ways of quantifying, measuring, and systematically tracing what those benefits are. But a core part of the rationale, as it has been taken up and been disseminated, is to provide values that are commensurate with these much more conventional, established metrics, Things like Yield, fish catch, the economic value of timber. Right? So by bringing all of these ecosystem services into terms that are comparable, you can measure like with like and more accurately parse what these trade offs are and maybe find yourself at a different decision. Once you compare the giant pile of ecosystem services next to the smaller pile of benefits, economic value that comes from the short term revenues of say, clear cutting a forest or something like that,
[00:07:12] Speaker B: from an economic terminology, the ecosystem services are a positive externality, something which we receive but for which we don't have to pay. And I just wanted to invoke Marx's argument about the unpaid labor of women and others in the household which made capitalism possible. And I mean, I know there are arguments, I probably have made the argument myself that the value of ecosystem services, which according to some things I read recently, may be as high as $100 trillion or more per year, make capitalism possible. Without it, the costs would, would certainly eat into any kind of profits that you know, that were made in the economy. Now whether that's the case or not, I, I don't know. It's just, I think a point worth making.
[00:08:01] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, the terminology of ecosystem services emerges remarkably from being practically not used at all in the early 90s to being used a lot. This is one of the big stories of conservation over the last few decades. But the idea has much longer intellectual genealogies. Right. It definitely is in pretty neat alignment and emerges from long standing arguments about the need to, you know, internalize externalities. Right. And the way to do that would. Any way to do that would require some systematic understanding. Right. Of just where those externalities are and their degree. And quantifying those is, I think, a key part of this project. And it fits within that larger prescription, right. To internalize the, and pricing the unpriced, all of these important dependencies that humans have on the more than human world.
So it fits within that much larger intellectual context.
[00:09:04] Speaker B: This began as your PhD dissertation topic, right?
[00:09:07] Speaker A: Indeed, I've been working on this topic for a long time. So I first came across ecosystem services as an undergraduate when an excited environmental studies guest lecturer in one of my courses introduced this idea hot off the presses from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. And it was very appealing. I could see for myself and a lot of my classmates the first time we'd come across it. And it seemed to help to reconcile a lot of these critiques that we'd been encountering of conservation. Right. It's misanthropism, the fortress style practices of protecting nature from and against people, rather than with and for people. Right. Ecosystem services promised a kind of more balanced socio ecological framing.
And so I started very, very interested in what this project might bring about. And eventually I jumped on board and decided to study some of these debates and controversies around ecosystem services by looking at its meteoric rise, the spread and uptake and growing influence of these approaches across surprising diversity of different actors in conservation and beyond.
[00:10:24] Speaker B: Did the project change between when you started it and when you finished it? I mean, in terms of both your attitude towards the idea of ecosystem services and how you were writing about it?
[00:10:37] Speaker A: Yeah. So the dissertation notably was titled the Rise of Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity Conservation. And the title of the book is the Rise and Fall of Ecosystem Services. So my own trajectory, I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that I grew up with ecosystem services, kind of tracks the story of ecosystem services itself. So following its really, I should reiterate, the remarkable rise of this idea. And it was remarkable, right, for a time for people who were around throughout those decades when it was, you know, coming into public consciousness. It was everywhere. You would go to conferences and summits and it would be on the, you know, the tip of the tongue of everybody. There'd be celebrities and supermodels talking about ecosystem services, monarchs, heads of state, development bank technocrats, you know, the leaders of the big conservation orgs everywhere. Right. It really was something to behold, and it's worth remembering now, the falling motion that I think I had to attach to the subtitle of the book when I was thinking about how to characterize the story that I was documenting and wanting to narrate in the book.
The tremendous excitement and enthusiasm, the dynamism, the sweeping, game changing promise that folks had invested in this notion from many different quarters that gave way to, as I mentioned, a lot of disillusionment and disappointment, a host of different strategies and attempts, attempts to develop tools for decision makers to factor ecosystem services into important choices that governments are making, that companies are making, rhetorical strategies disseminating the ecosystem services and natural capital as metaphors, payment for ecosystem services. There's a whole raft of interesting policy instruments that were carried out under the banner of ecosystem services.
Needless to say, the broader trajectory of the global biodiversity crisis has remained basically unchanged and on schedule, so measured according to the basic rationale for embracing this idea as an encompassing framework for conservation.
It just has failed to materialize anywhere near the scale of the promises that prompted all of these biologists to unite around it. And it's in that kind of disappointment and disillusionment that I spent a lot of time just observing, documenting, and listening to the various reactions that the biologists who had united around this idea came to, which often involved having to grapple with the need to unite around something better, something with more coherent political assumptions, something with more plausibly transformational alternatives than the kinds of results that ecosystem services was putting forth.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is Professor Dan Suarez from Middlebury College in Vermont, who has just published Biologists Unite the Rise and Fall of Ecosystem Services.
So this is not about losing their chains, so to speak. Right.
I, you know, as I'm listening to you, and I want to go back to some of these things, but as I'm listening to you, it occurs to me what I remember is the movement in the 90s supporting the privatization of nature. And I think the pre. The. The premier exponent of that was a guy named Terry Anderson who lived in Idaho or something. He was an academic. Right. The argument being that if you privatize nature, the owners will protect it.
Right. Which is, of course, a dubious proposition at the end because lumber, timber companies own forest, and they don't really protect it. But land trusts actually pay for private property, you know, and put them under conservation easements. And, you know, the notional ideas, of course, is the. The value of the private property. Who knows exactly what that means? But they are banking the ecosystem services provided by the land, you know, the conservation easements. And in a way that does exactly what ecosystem services is or was supposed to do, albeit, I don't know, that there was privatization worked into the very. To the whole concept.
You don't have to respond to that. It is just something that, you know, I was thinking about now and what I wanted to actually ask was who came up with the idea, you know, what are the origins of this idea? I remember the original article by Bob Costanza et al. But, you know, what is the backstory to that?
[00:15:43] Speaker A: I'm actually tempted to respond to the kind of first aside that you introduced.
So there is a vibrant critical scholarship surrounding ecosystem services. And the prospect of ecosystem services getting taken up into precisely that kind of neoliberal political and policy agenda, for obvious reasons, became a lightning rod in terms of critiques and opposition from activists, academics, and many others.
So the commodification of nature, the commodification of everything, right, the transformation of nature and the manifold ways that we can represent and talk about that into economic valuations, for many seem to Pave the way for what seemed like not only a characteristically but audaciously neoliberal attempt to spread market logics, market thinking, market mechanisms to virtually any and every aspect of the living world.
Now, getting back to the kind of rising and falling of ecosystem services.
Ecosystem services has kind of failed to live up to expectations not only according to the hopes and aspirations of its proponents, but also from the perspective of the extremely worried expectations of critics. Right. So ecosystem services and the ways that it has actually been deployed often doesn't involve commodification. The actual policy instruments that have gotten rolled out payments for ecosystem services is the most example, most obvious example here.
They have gotten renegotiated into all kinds of different forms and shapes that are, you know, seem a lot further and further away from market mechanisms. I don't know if this is actually fit for this, this part is fit for broadcast. But I, um. But yeah, it's an interesting aside.
[00:17:50] Speaker B: Yeah, no, and it could be an interesting point to, to pursue if we have time. But, but let's go back. You know, where did this, this idea come from? Who, presumably there were, there were a few progenitors of the, the concept who, you know, who were they and how did they come upon it?
[00:18:08] Speaker A: So the year 1997 might be an illustrative year to focus on both because some central figures in what became the field of ecosystem services helped put ecosystem services on the map. And it also helps to highlight some of the different strands of ecosystem services in terms of the kinds of science that was happening, the different rationales, the objectives and purposes that people were envisioning for ecosystem services and what it could provide to conservation. So what happened in 1997? So a very widely circulated and heavily cited, I think there are 30,000 citations and counting now is a piece published in Nature by Bob Costanza. So they found that the total monetary value of the world's ecosystems using an ecosystem services approach was, I think they came to a figure of $33 trillion with some big error bars, which at the time was double gross global economic product.
That was certainly an attention grabbing finding.
Another figure, Gretchen Daly, she is based at Stanford and was one of the co founders of the Natural Capital Project. She published her foundational volume, Nature Services, which also started to provide the evidence base and which is interesting to revisit in the kind of ways that it thought about, the kind of rhetorical basis, the ways that new metaphors, new language were needed to engage with decision makers and the public. So already we see these two strands, one of just Thinking about ecosystem services as an evocative metaphor, as a way to reach the public and decision makers, but also ecosystem services as a way to quantify economic values as a means of rationally or as an input into rational decision making.
And then there were some other developments too, that maybe speak to the policy side of things. So Costa Rica launched their famed Payment for Ecosystem Services program, so compensating landholders to provide and produce ecosystem services on an ongoing basis through direct payments.
And there's of course, this very also widely circulated case study published by Chichilniski and Heel about the Catskills watershed, which highlighted the tremendous cost savings, right, the economic value of allowing nature to provide things like water filtration, as opposed to using gray infrastructure kinds of solutions. So behind each of these figures, behind each of these texts are a range of different rationales and also a set of networks that were coming together at this time, which themselves were bringing in various research programs from the life sciences, from ecology, but also from long standing work in resource, environmental and ecological economics.
And they started to come together around ecosystem services as a named framework. And I guess the rest, the rest is history.
[00:21:40] Speaker B: So the idea then of, of doing this was that it could be used persuasively, right? That it would, by doing this, you know, how, how to incorporate it into policy is one question. Right. But there is the, the other issue, which is how to, how to generate support for pursuing the concept. Right. And what were the assumptions behind that? You know, what did the people who were, were developing this think that, you know, succeeding with their project would achieve?
[00:22:16] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I would often hear the phrase, economics is the currency of policy making, right? So ecosystem services was meant to offer, and this was another phrase I would often hear, a business case for conservation. So as opposed to making plaintive ethical lamentations, I think again about the clashes over forest conservation on the west coast of British Columbia, where I grew up, rather than making all of these other kinds of pitches and rationales, emotional appeals, by making a hard nosed business case, right, with dollars and cents, you could finally reach maybe the finance minister or the hard nosed CFO of the company at issue here.
So yeah, it promised new arguments, ways of resonating with folks that might be responsive to market discourse and market incentives, new allies, more resources, operationalizing markets for ecosystem services.
Land based carbon offsets is one obvious example. But there are many of these that were very much top of mind in conversation during the heyday of ecosystem services, when it was coming online and getting disseminated in those early years and just an encompassing, a compelling framework for just aligning conservation within the multiple competing priorities of sustainable development, keeping it relevant, keeping it a part of the conversation, keeping it a priority. Amid all of.
[00:24:09] Speaker B: These rival projects, did the progenitors of supporters of ecosystem services ever recognize that they were engaged in a political project?
Because you mentioned, right, the business case for policymaking, sort of as an assumption that policymaking is made on the basis of, as we're often told, cost benefit analysis.
Right. I mean, if you go to public policy school, that's probably what you get taught. I mean, I never went to one, but certainly I saw a lot of that going on, that if you're doing public policy, you want to figure out, you know, what, what the results are, whose interests are involved, and, and make a case that doing X will benefit you more.
But nobody ever really questions the, the, the, the sort of, again, the backstory to policymaking, what motivates people in the positions of making policy to develop those policies.
And in your book, I think you make this point, right, that this is really a political project, but it wasn't recognized as such.
[00:25:22] Speaker A: Yeah, that was a fascinating and recurring observation that resonated across a lot of my experiences and observations hanging out with ecosystem service practitioners and advocates, folks who are trying to make it work, trying to use it to get better results, better outcomes from the kind of decision making that was horrifying everyone.
So it was simultaneously a political strategy. Right. It was a way to induce policy change, but in a way that. And this is where the, you know, my fascination peaked in a way that seemed to want to avoid and disavow carefully bracket out having to confront the politics involved. Right. So I think this is one of the really critical shortcomings of how ecosystem services got operationalized as a theory of change, as a political strategy that disavows being a political strategy.
I think it. By not addressing, by not intelligently and rigorously answering in many of the dominant forms that I encountered at these really fundamental questions of power and political economy and social struggle and social conflict as critical dimensions of how social change actually works, ecosystem services proponents, in effect, put themselves in an impossible predicament. They avoided the things on the most decisive questions around which the thing that they are trying to do, which is to arrest the drivers of the global biodiversity crisis around which those revolve. So this is really core to the, I think, the story that the book tells and where I ended up. So while I am actually still pretty positive on ecosystem services as an idea, I have no Inherent problem with the Notwithstanding various methodological and theoretical debates that are internal to the field, I think the critical question that the book poses to just interested observers, but also ecosystem service scientists and practitioners themselves, are the ways that the framework does or does not answer these questions of the defining power relations that are deeply implicated in driving environmental degradation in general and biodiversity loss in particular.
[00:27:54] Speaker B: You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is Professor Daniel Suarez from Middlebury College in Vermont. He's written a book called Biologists Unite the Rise and Fall of Ecosystem Services. And we're just been talking about scientists aversion to politics, which I think, you know, is a shorthand way of saying what we were talking about before we why do scientists think that discovering the truth will trump politics?
Right. Why do, why do you think that scientists have an aversion to recognizing the role of power and politics in policymaking?
[00:28:40] Speaker A: I mean, to a significant extent I sympathize with the, I guess, intuitive logic of what brought them there in a way. I mean, I would spend a lot of time listening to biologists explain the reasoning for embracing ecosystem services as a pragmatic way to engage with policymaking. And you know, they would often describe the study systems where they worked. Right. Just seeing the utter devastation, the kind of planetary transformations that they have a horrifying first row, front row seat witnessing.
So to me it's, you know, it while it's incomplete and I would say insufficient as a strategy that can realistically engage these questions of power and politics. Right. So that those definitely need some answering just given how bad it is. Right. I think the idea that good faith clarification of what was at stake to decision makers, given just the catastrophic results of proceeding with business as usual, if you're able to quantify that to a degree, I kind of understand how this kind of hope and this hypothesis that just in effect using ecosystem services to shake the lapels of decision makers and trying to get them, you know, to do something else and just making it so obvious in the plainest terms possible, you know, how bad a decision they are making that surely they must, they will make a different decision right now, didn't work out that way. So decision making as folks, I was trained as a political ecologist and so, you know, critical scholars of the environment and conservation folks who in all kinds of adjacent fields, decision making is not just an outcome of who has the best and correct arithmetic in terms of what is nominally going to result in the best aggregate benefits in total for Society, it is a consequence of history and uneven power relations. Who wins, who loses, and who controls the decision making about what happens with whatever ecosystem you're talking about, whether it's in west coast of B.C. or any number of these other places where people have been trying to make that business case to decision makers that are really responding to all kinds of other things much more than they are, a rigorous accounting of the aggregate net benefits and costs of what they're doing in a general societal sense.
[00:31:32] Speaker B: What, you know, I mean, you mentioned theory of social change, right? What would you, how would you describe the, the supporters, the, you know, again, the advocates of ecosystem services, understanding how social change occurs.
You know, what, what is that theory?
[00:31:51] Speaker A: Yeah, so I think there's a pretty good body of research and, you know, the sociology of science and science and technology studies sts that I think it's, it goes by many names, but there's a kind of information deficit assumption here, right, which is that there are decision makers who are kind of crying out for just better knowledge, enough data to finally make the right choices, and they're just kind of waiting there to.
And this is actually a turn of phrase that I heard a lot from some of the ecosystem service scientists that I would hang out with.
It almost seems to conjure into mind an Olympic relay race or something where you pass the baton to the decision makers and the scientists have done their job and then the decision makers run with it.
So I think there's probably more complexity to it than that. But I would say that at its heart is this hope, slash expectation that once you make these tools and once you make this knowledge more readily accessible in terms that are relevant to decision makers, that they'll take it and they'll run and they'll start making better decisions.
[00:33:14] Speaker B: Basically, they'll have no choice but to make better decisions once they understand the consequences of not doing this.
Right. Indeed, I think, I think that's how, how one would, would frame it.
Right?
[00:33:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
So if, assuming that they are rational actors, right, then they will pursue the rational course of action, which, once you've crunched the numbers, is irresistible. So the reasoning went.
[00:33:41] Speaker B: But of course, of course you have to put all kinds of assumptions into the numbers you're crunching, which, as we've discovered with, you know, the algorithms that, that basically make up AI, depend a lot on who writes the algorithms and what kind of, you know, assumptions they come to it with.
And so in a sense, you know, there isn't. There, there isn't that much difference.
It seems to me when You're. When you've got these, this data, right. And you're trying to put it in a particular way, you're making certain, certain assumptions about how to do it and, and you know, what form you'd like it to come out in.
Right.
[00:34:24] Speaker A: Yeah, this, this would be a point that maybe would be worth pausing on and, and I guess revisiting in a way, like I, I made a point along these lines a moment ago. But, you know, there are longstanding kind of methodological, conceptual, ethical, theoretical debates, and those were what drew me to ecosystem services. And indeed, a lot of those critiques remain pretty valid. Pretty.
They're the subject of ongoing debate within the field and certainly what prompts a lot of critiques from those leveling objections from outside of it. But I think that the book actually largely sidesteps some of these. Again, there are many methodological absurdities that the assumptions are definitely worth lingering on. But I guess the. What became the real preoccupation of the book were on the kind of strategic and political questions embedded in ecosystem services that I think sometimes get eclipsed by, I think, what can be the very legitimately distracting silliness. Right. That comes from actually digging into some of the ways that these numbers are arrived at. So, you know, I think the. Again, the language and the methods and techniques, they continue to evolve. There's ongoing debate around that. But for me, what is ultimately most at stake in ecosystem services, why it's worth kind of continuing to engage with it, is, you know, the possibility of attaching the people who do work in this field to better and more expansive kinds of answers that can better address.
[00:36:07] Speaker B: Right.
[00:36:08] Speaker A: These defining power relations that can connect ecosystem service analyses and science and research and findings to these really critical questions of political economy that are again, often bracketed out in those spaces where I saw ecosystem services getting deployed. So, again, methodological silliness aside, I think the core questions of power and political economy are, for me, they, they stand out as something that we should hold centrally in in our conversation about it.
[00:36:45] Speaker B: Do you have. Well, there's two. Two things that occur to me.
The first one I forgotten.
Right. Senior moment. The second one is, do you have. How. I mean, how would you go about internalizing politics, political considerations into this approach? I mean. Oh, I know what the other question had to do with. With scientists, you know, striking out and becoming political commentators, so to speak, for which they then get attacked. Maybe we can come back to that. But the second question about, you know, did you come out with any ideas about, you know, how you could go about actually getting this project to have some kind of bite or impact.
[00:37:36] Speaker A: I'm remembering in this moment that I think Howard Zinn quote about how you can't be neutral on a moving train. How things, you know, already taking this deadly direction. I forget the exact.
[00:37:49] Speaker B: But that's gravity and momentum.
[00:37:51] Speaker A: Right?
[00:37:52] Speaker B: Right. I mean, it's true the train is being driven by. By human intent, but I'm not sure Zinn got it. Right. But go on. Sorry.
[00:38:01] Speaker A: Right. But, you know, but I think this sort of neutrality that I think ecosystem services tries to maintain. Right. As scientists trying to do impactful research that can help change decisions and create sweeping social change.
Right. I think where that runs into a lot of trouble is in the ways that it takes for granted and often just takes as given existing systems and structures, the parameters within which decision making happens.
I think there is a kind of acquiescence and complicity unstated that comes with just optimizing within business as usual parameters, within existing power relations that optimizes trade offs within those. Rather than thinking about the kinds of alliances and the kinds of solidarities and the kinds of coalitions. Right. That might point the way towards more transformational strategies that do not take as given those what could otherwise be taken as fixed constraints, as given political and economic structures that became entrenched during and through the neoliberal era. So I confess this is not an especially concrete kind of suggestion here, but I do think there's a key difference in orientation between this logic of optimization, optimizing what I think many ecosystem service scientists themselves would agree is a catastrophic status quo, and thinking about strategies that could challenge the parameters within which decision making can happen. For example, why are powerful decision makers, what allowed them to be powerful?
What are the.
There's a big difference between making very good, notionally compelling arguments to decision makers and then building sufficient counterpower with an alliance of movements and other actors that could force those decision makers to change. So that can play out in all kinds of different ways, in all kinds of different contexts. But I think we're talking about two different things there.
[00:40:38] Speaker B: We probably shouldn't get into retail politics either.
You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is Dan Suarez, professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, who's just published Biologists Unite the Rise and Fall of Ecosystem Services.
I'm wondering, Dan, is Biologists unite? Does that have any. Is that any allusion to workers of the world unite?
Or was this, or is that an unconscious, so to speak, no, it was, it was intentional.
[00:41:12] Speaker A: The original title was Biologists of the World Unite. But one of the reviewers for the book who had a lot of really, really great suggestions, mostly constructive and positive, they did not like the title at all. So I think it was intended as a cheeky, ironic turn of phrase in that, you know, there's a contrast, there's a juxtaposition between what were the very earnest, very sincere invocations of radicalism, of revolutionary change, right? So on the one hand, right, Ecosystem Services was going to revolutionize, right, the humanity's relationship with nature and all of these other things. But the irony, right, is that it was in fact, not really that interested in revolutionizing a whole lot, right? Building on the previous exchange that we had about the logic of optimization within kind of existing power relations, given an array of existing powerful decision makers, Ecosystem Services is about making a pitch appealing to what makes sense, what is legible, what is interesting, what is in the interest, right, of folks that are embedded in that configuration of political and economic life around the world.
So the, the Biologists Unite is Which, you know, I think is a less obvious shout out to that notion. I think it communicates the. What to me was not only an amusing irony, right, just this contrast between how, how substantively non revolutionary what they were talking about was and how revolutionary their aspirations were. But there was a kind of.
To me, I actually found this predicament quite poignant, right? These biologists seemed to know that what was needed was something revolutionary and radical, structural and systemic in its scope. But they were left with this option of just having to quantify the value of tigers in ways that often disgusted them. But, you know, because they, they have, they have learned this sense of realism and pragmatism that just stop well short of what they knew was necessary, right, but what else are you going to do? So to me, the, the title Biologists Unite is, you know, a bit funny in the way that I just mentioned, but it also, I think, speaks to a yearning, right, that I definitely detected among biologists. There is an incipient kind of radicalism that emerged sometimes from the dissonance created from knowing what they do, which is just a planet, just utterly transforming itself catastrophically, in many cases, into something else.
And what they were simultaneously being told was politically possible in terms of what acceptable responses to this might be. So biologists were caught in this impossible predicament that getting torn, pulled in these two directions. So to me, the hopeful kind of conclusion of the book and a lot of the observations throughout have to do with folks caught in that bind starting to think, learning to think much more expansively about the kind of a problem that they were in, what might be necessary, and the need to go well beyond some of these very constrained political assumptions that involved just kind of optimizing decisions within very tightly circumscribed parameters that they often could see transparently, we're not going to solve the problem.
And again, this isn't just an ecosystem services story. I think it tells a very familiar tale that certainly I could relate to, that many of the rest of us relate to, of just playing along with common sense solutions that don't go nearly far enough in terms of dealing with the actual problems that we're perceiving, which might even be a bad idea. But what else are you going to do? Right there is this defeated shoulder shrugging and these sad sighs of resignation where folks who knew that ecosystem services or had a very strong suspicion that ecosystem services weren't going to work. But what else are you going to do? For me, the more enlivening and exciting conversations I got to have with some biologists, and in my observations of them in some meetings in particular around this UN body, that I was setting the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on biodiversity and ecosystem services, I got to see that pattern getting interrupted. I got to see them under certain circumstances, using these years of failures and disappointment as invitations to think differently and to consider alternative alliances and alignments outside of just, you know, the kinds of assumed bedfellows, I think, that come with mainstream conservation and, you know, the conservation establishment.
[00:46:25] Speaker B: Does ecosystem services have a future then?
[00:46:29] Speaker A: That is an interesting question. Yeah, I was really stressed out at first as I was starting to write up the book and getting it ready to put out there for public consumption that is this relevant anymore. Is the time of ecosystem services come and gone and it still is everywhere. So I think an easy critique of the book is to note that the terminology is still ubiquitous. I think there are some competitor terms that are beginning to nip on the heels of ecosystem services. You'll often hear about nature based solutions, or the un, I think, is starting to dabble with nature's contributions to people, green infrastructure. So you'll sometimes see these terms instead of ecosystem services. And I think part of that is maybe in response to the years of heated debate and the trenchant critiques, maybe they're trying to disassociate these ideas from those connotations.
But I think more relevantly, the, you know, the enthusiasm around ecosystem services as a strategy, as A way forward conservation, I think that has followed a pretty familiar life cycle in the kind of history of conservation discourse. There have been, you know, hot topic after hot topic. And in some ways ecosystem services follows a long standing and familiar pattern of conservationists trying their best, right, to adjust and to fit the project of conservation to all kinds of more powerful hegemonic projects. And so the science, the tools, the scientists who are using those tools, I actually think there is a lot of potential and promise still embedded in the kinds of expertise that are bundled up in there. But again, the key question, which to me remains an open question, is whether that science can get directed towards more plausibly transformational political programs and strategies and sets of actors beyond just the usual suspects and the, you know, the very familiar ruts where mainstream conservation has been grooving along with for many decades while presiding over just this catastrophic loss of life on planet Earth. So I think that potential is there.
So I wouldn't count ecosystem services out or whatever we choose to call them. But to me, the really relevant question is whether all of these biologists can get re enrolled and maybe reappropriated around more spicy, critical, subversive, transgressive kinds of causes and even stranger bedfellows than the economists that they had previously been hanging out with during the ecosystem services era.
[00:49:30] Speaker B: Last question.
Are you working on new project and what might that be?
[00:49:35] Speaker A: Yeah, thank you for that question.
So the falling of ecosystem services and just thinking deeply about the ambivalence and the doubts and the hesitations of the biologists who, you know, went all in on ecosystem services, found themselves having to consider uniting around something else.
I have continued exploring those questions in some other contexts. So I work at Middlebury College, which is a very teaching focused small liberal arts college in Vermont, in New England.
And it takes teaching really seriously. I was really, I found it quite jarring coming from the UC system, how earnestly everyone was just into teaching and learning. You know, my colleagues and students and I saw a very similar dynamic there, both among environmental educators and students, right, of just being caught between what they are all recognizing is necessary in terms of forestalling these cataclysmic prognostications about what's coming and then in turn the kinds of solutions that tend to dominate in terms of, you know, what we can do about it.
So I think there's a similar kind of incipient, sometimes activated radicalism that is inherent to, I think some of these engagements that I've since brought to questions of environmental education and pedagogy. And the ways that environmental education, as usual, has started to get disrupted in ways that are interesting, potentially encouraging. And and I have similar work looking at the evolving theories of change among the environmental and climate movements in the US Where I look at the formulation of strategy through theory of change, model design and formulation. And similarly, there, there are these this push and pull between them, whiteboarding out what needs to actually happen, being startled by the radical implications of where those conversations go, but then being constrained by, you know, their sense of pragmatism and realism. So, so the book lives on in these two other projects, but in two other, in these two other contexts.
[00:51:48] Speaker B: Okay. Well, Professor Suarez, thank you so much for being my guest on Sustainability Now.
[00:51:54] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:51:56] Speaker B: You've been listening to a Sustainability now interview with Professor Daniel Xu Suarez of the Environmental Studies Department at Middlebury College in Vermont. He's just published Biologists Unite the Rise and Fall of Ecosystem Services, an account of why three decades of academic, activist and policy efforts have failed to incorporate ecosystem services into global accounting and action. If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] Sustainability now, as well as Spotify, YouTube and Pocket Casts, among other podcast sites.
So thanks for listening, and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make K SQUID your community radio station and keep it going.
And so, until next every other Sunday, sustainability Now.
[00:52:50] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out Climbs and through currents and thriving seas Winds blowing through breathing trees Strong o zone safe sunshine Good planets are hard to find.
[00:53:11] Speaker B: Yeah, good.
