BEYOND MERE COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF THE VALUE OF NATURE

David Keith, A Case For Climate Change Engineering (Boston Review Books) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London. England, 2013) ("The language of environmental advocacy has become increasingly technocratic. Calls for action rely almost exclusively on (seemingly) objective quantitative measures of cost and benefit that amount to a crude appeal to self-interest. We are urged to protect natural landscapes not because walking through them brings pleasure, but because of the ecosystem services they yield, services like oxygen and clean water. These arguments have merit, but I think they obscure much of what actually drives people's choices. If we are protecting a rainforest because it stores carbon or yields wonder drugs, then we should be happy to cut down the forest if some carbon storage machine or molecular biotech lab can better provide these services. If we are protecting a wetland for its ability to hold and purify water then we should be happy to replace it with a housing project development if that development includes technologies for water storage and filtration that does these jobs better than the wetland. For me the utilitarian benefits of nature are a grossly insufficient measure of its value. Id. at xv-xvi,).