A question of values

It will possibly be my last book, but Not Your Usual Science is going to be HUGE, close to 1.5 million words, equal to a dozen 'airport books', the thick tomes you buy to read on a long flight. It collects together many of the articles and essays that I have generated over the past 35 years, covering science, how science works and how what we now call science was put together. It even includes some of the blog entries that have appeared here. In due course, it will be released as an e-book.

Here's a small taste of it...

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According to Edward O. Wilson, there are three kinds of value: commodity value, or how much you can sell something for, amenity value, or the dollar value of the pleasure and benefit you get from its existence, and morality value, which has no dollar value at all, but relates to our responsibility to those species less able than us to protect themselves.

Consider a property owner who rents out a house. There is no economic gain, no commodity value in doing repairs, there is no pleasure in doing repairs when you don’t have to live with the mess that the house is becoming, but maybe there’s a morality value in making sure there’s something left for the owner’s heirs. Those of us who are parents and grandparents may see some merit in that line of thought…

A different set of values. [Peter Macinnis]

From the viewpoint of short-term economic gain, old-growth trees have no dollar value because they are producing nothing, but they are in fact extremely valuable because they offer places of shelter for animals that help to control pests and maintain balance within the forest. They have immense background value, like grandparents.

Old trees and grandparents are both often seen as unproductive, and you can’t taste the egg in a cake, but old trees hold ecosystems together, grandparents hold societies together, and the egg holds a cake together. I think there is a case for factoring in the background value of things. I plan to call this “future value”, a sort of investment in a future for our species and our world.

A forest is much more than trees, and a plantation of the same species, all of uniform age, is far less diverse and offers a much poorer habitat all round. In most cases, when old growth forest is logged, it is clear-felled and replaced with a plantation. At the very least, the area should be left dotted with islands of old-growth forest, and these should be linked by old growth corridors, so forest biodiversity can be retained.