Wendell Berry, an American literary icon,
scholar, farmer, just weeks ago gave the prestigious Jefferson Lecture sponsored by the
National Endowment for the Humanities. His words, which resonate in a place
inside of those that recall forays into the dirt and the water, are a timely
mirror in which to reflect on the state of our environment and the shift in
resource valuation in our age of globalized capitalism.
Over the recent past, it has become
imperative for the environmental and conservation movement to address the issue
of value. What is the value, say, in the
services that the upstream watershed provides? What is the value of a carbon-dioxide breathing,
oxygen emitting forest? How much are the
persistent pollination services of bees and butterflies worth to us? These may seem
like abstract or cosmic questions – but
more and more, these are requiring empirical answers. And furthermore, these
answers are guiding management decisions.
In a world connected by countless
invisible digital strands from the densest cities to the remotest villages, we
have been forced to adopt a universal language out of convenience, a way in
which to represent things and concepts that can be freely translated and
intercompared. This language is economics
– the almighty dollar.
Societies have forever used specific languages
to express feelings and emotions, to convey thoughts, to record history, to
trade and interact. Isolated groups had certain ways of saying things,
conveying meaning, and codifying symbols that were attuned to their specific
ways of life. Interacting or trading with communities speaking other languages
required a common denominator. Today,
our global common denominator is ‘the market’. Wendell is troubled, as we all
should be, when ‘the market’ “assumes the standing of ultimate power”.
The resources that once may have been
protected by local community based values, by intrinsic worth and local
memories, are now susceptible to evaluation based on transnational economic
costs and benefits. What was once a
small forest on the edge of some rice fields holding the spirits of the
ancestors is now worth a certain amount of dollars in carbon credits, or in potential
rice growing profits. But there is no market price for ancestral spirit homes.
In essence, we have a translation
problem. We are watering our valuations of certain resources down to a basic
unit that fails to capture the complexity and the nuance of human value. “Actual
value of some things”, Wendell
remarks, “exceeds human ability to calculate or measure, and therefore must
be considered absolute”.
So can society come up with a better way
in which to value what our economy is rooted in? It may not be possible for the peoples of the world to come
to an agreement on what should be valued and for how much. But it seems that we
have settled; we have adopted the most simplistic way to compare a finished
product to the raw part of an ecosystem that it once played a part in.
