Much of humanity tends to be oblivious to the role of nature in their lives. In North America, water comes from a faucet, food is gathered from stores, and toilets remove our waste. In less industrialized nations, much of the populace is too poor to concern themselves with natural ecological processes (though such processes may benefit their lives) as they deal more directly with poverty, hunger, and disease. But as the effect of humanity on nature has begun to deteriorate our lives and increase the need for engineering responses to our degradations, more scientists, planners, and citizens have begun to realize the value of a healthy, operational Critical Zone—various groups have gone as far as to estimate the financial value of such processes while others argue that such a move denigrates the natural world and attitudes toward it. You will read about this debate in the following activity.
Upon completion of the reading, you are to engage in a discussion of the readings with the rest of the class. The class discussion will take place during the week of this lesson in a discussion forum in Canvas titled "Lesson 10 - Ecosystem Value Discussion."
You will be graded on the quality of your participation. See the grading rubric [2] for specifics on how this assignment will be graded.
To learn more about valuing ecosystem services, read the original Costanza et al. paper published in the elite journal Nature:
Costanza, R., d'Arge, R., de Groot, R., Farber, S., Grasso, M., Hannon, B., et al. (1997).The value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital [3]. Nature, 387(6630), 253–260. doi: 10.1038/387253a0.
You may also find this Nature Comment by Costanza and Kubiszewski [4] equally provocative and interesting.
Most of humanity forgets that pollinators and trees and the sun work for free, providing some of the many ecosystem services that benefit us. Listen to Paul Sutton, a geography professor at University of Denver who has calculated a dollar price of these services, explain how he made the calculations on this June 2014 edition of Living on Earth.
Nature's Dividend: ”Pricing Global Ecosystem Services"
Living on Earth [5]
To learn about the concept of Critical Zone services, read the paper by Field et al. (2015) [6].
Links
[1] https://78462f86-a-512471e5-s-sites.googlegroups.com/a/idakub.com/www/CV/publications/2014_Costanza_GlobalValueUpdate.pdf?attachauth=ANoY7cou1-4uiW7cINrfJeUffVtUQiqsYEkZB56AasPSIGzU1bz88fb7y9CV8Zs5LALppP62pbowvYRjAx1g5DKFkg4nNWf411u69cFlUo4EOG3jQIjWtjNthlQlnBKuMXHBDKU4A-Cjoon1iPdcGBp9oj1hj1pxs6aHbCe8hcL-fVjmwUON6DWH4JXeHTGebLV5LfX0ymLXX3cT89tYEyZ0mo6A6jrlXNA_n0n_yy1k3oBNdBo-CIUjhc8eMnGwOPdfaM5FLhVw&attredirects=0
[2] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth530/node/1650
[3] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v387/n6630/pdf/387253a0.pdf
[4] http://staging.community-wealth.org/sites/clone.community-wealth.org/files/downloads/article-costanza.pdf
[5] http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=14-P13-00025&segmentID=4
[6] https://dl.sciencesocieties.org/publications/vzj/abstracts/14/1/vzj2014.10.0142