Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Yet another service industry
From the RoundTable blog
Read the latest entries
Robert Giles
Giles, of Blacksburg, is a retired professor, formerly with the College of Natural Resources at Virginia Tech.
In a very predictable turn within agencies every 10 to 20 years, there is an attempt to redefine natural resources or major programs within that realm. It probably occurs to open new channels of agency funding and alternative pools of research dollars. That observation gives a lot of credit to thoughtful strategic efforts not seen in other areas of agency responsibilities, so I'm thoughtful about whether such attempted changes are random, a phenomenon of social memory, or expected sparks from wordsmithing by people climbing a career ladder. There are reports that someone believes that we can market somehow each of all of the named services of nature.
The current quest seems to be to put aside "resources" as worn out or confusing and to replace it with "ecological services." The U.S. Department of Agriculture was creating an Office of Ecosystem Services and Marketing. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change proposed a new group to raise the public profile of declining natural services. Jane Lubchenco and John Holdren, "services" advocates, are President Obama's science advisers whose confirmations are being delayed.
Examples of the services being proposed are clean water and air, wildlife habitat, carbon storage and scenery. These are natural resources and have been named and classified as that for well over a century. Calling them something different confuses the public and its educators, allows agencies to split or coalesce at will with the current party power and interrupts programs designed for sustained benefits to the public.
We can say that a forest is a resource and that, besides wood and paper, it may provide a service of reducing the turbidity of stream water. It may also perform the service of retarding erosion (about the same). The stream (one form of the natural resource called "water") provides a service of watering the rooting-volume of trees of the forest. The roots provide the service of collecting and transporting soil nutrients in water to the tree. The roots are rarely considered a resource, only a normal expected part of the forest resource. Only the mysteries of the isotope world can specify whether roots take in water or water moves around them and is then taken in. There is no service, nothing purposive.
Forests may help reduce some floods. That may be a service ... among a long list. The same water, if in a lesser flood with small human damage, is serviced (as by trees of the forest) by flat lands, dams, dense pastures and fewer impenetrable acres of roads and built structures. Trees grow, producing wood for people and woodpeckers, but such growth shades out the understory, limiting plant growth and food for deer and other game. Such a single named function has at least two services.
We're confusing classical "form and function." We've mixed general systems, "processes" and "outputs" and probably "inputs." We've gotten words and meanings scrambled. In a human analogy, we cannot separate "heart" from "pumping." For wild fauna we cannot and do not want to separate the animals (typically the resource) from their food (their "habitat," said to be a service.) Some people, anticipating funding, have named 200 "ecosystem services."
"Services" is just another word for the human benefits or system outputs likely to be gained from modern natural resource management and the classical "conservation," which means more than "preservation." Calling actions (or things) services is more than the naming of system processes.
We have to get this forming chaos cleared up fast. "Services" will not serve us well.
