Priceless

“Priceless”Turkey Tangentialby Spencer Shaw, Brush Turkey Enterprises
For the purposes of this tale, let’s assume humans really are the centre of the universe – as the modern human asserts. Let’s assume everything, everywhere has a value a value judged by wether we can eat it, wear it, build with it and last, but not least, play with it. Given this simple philosophy, all those things named and needed by our culture have a value. These values are measured in cash; this cash is protected by law.  Unfortunately our brains are incredibly two dimensional and we tend to value only those things we call assets. We protect only the assets – not the natural processes that give rise to those assets. Here lies the fatal flaw. For example, if I were to ask you to put a value on your house or your car, you will have no problems in putting forward a figure. The builders and engineers who manufactured your house and car would also put a cash value on their services, the suppliers of the manufactured materials that made those items and the suppliers of the raw materials would also put a value on their goods and services. However, if I asked you to put a value on the ecosystems that gave rise to these products – that’s where we would struggle. We not only struggle with valuing the ecosystems that give rise to all our wealth, we almost regard them with disdain! In our naivety, our quest for wealth, for asset accumulation and for possessions has led us to a state of mind where we could be regarded as seeing nature as an obstacle to all the things we want. However, let’s progress this argument a little further before I start to sound like some 60’s rerun and you picture me writing this with flowers in my hair and fug of thick cannabis smoke rising from the joint hanging from the corner of my mouth. For starters I don’t have the hair to support the flowers these days!Take for example a water course, completely valueless in our consumptive society. You can dam it, drain it (build a supermarket on it), but the water has no value until it is drawn from the creek or river and becomes a consumable. The vegetation that lines the watercourses banks has no value; the fauna that calls the watercourse home has no value. Because they have no value to our society, society does not have to compensate or even cost into our activities the damage that we wreak on the very ecosystems that support us. Let’s go back to water. You’d have thought, that with the hindsight of recorded history and a long list of civilisations that have failed when the water ran out, that by now, we’d acknowledge the vast body of knowledge that we have accumulated on how our catchment systems work, how climate and ecosystems contribute to the health of these ecosystems and the most fundamental principle of all – the interconnectedness of all things (sorry, quick trip back to the 60’s there – man!). The modern “civilised” human requires vast quantities of water, piped into their abode to wash all those things you can’t do without and of course to flush away those things you’d rather do without. Cities in particular require rivers of water to flow through their pipes to keep industry and the consumer happy. On the driest continent on earth you’d think there would be some self moderation when it comes to using water. However, when the water in the river has no value (and will somehow always magically be there) and the water in the pipe has so little value that we can bathe our cars and backyards and fill our pools without any regard to an impact to our wallets – let alone the environment – then why would you even let thoughts of ecological impact, enter your head? Here’s where our inability to place a value on ecosystem services magnifies our impact on the ecosystems we call home. If rivers aren’t running and dams aren’t filling because catchments are damaged, unfortunately the first reaction of government is to build more dams and impact more catchments and damage more ecosystems. If an incredible fish such as the lungfish happens to be in the way of a dam that will provide the consumptive citizen of the city with water to bathe their shiny vehicles on the weekend – then farewell lungfish. Ecosystems are almost an afterthought when it comes to resource extraction. Once all the land is resumed, roads rerouted and construction of dam completed at a cost of hundreds, if not thousands of millions of dollars, the best that the ecosystem that has provided the very product that we are so eager to obtain, can expect in compensation is some token vegetation re-establishment in the immediate vicinity of the dam – where people can see it. What value can we place on a lungfish or a platypus or an ecosystem? Unless we can place a value on these very things and adjust our impact accordingly, we will damage the very source of all our wealth, our priceless ecosystems.