Humanities

Values, The Commons, and Externalities 

• Inflation Reduction Act Cost

  • $4 Trillion by 2050 

• UN says 5.5 Trillion annually 

• Intrinsic Value 

  • Def: Nature has value in and of itself 

• Instrumental Value 

  • Def: Nature has value because it is important to humans 

• Productive and consumptive value

  • Value of natural resources that are consumed and/or harvested for humans needs 

• Non-Consumptive Value

  • Value of functions or services of natural systems

The Tragedy of the Commons

• Common-pool resources

  • Valued natural or human-made resources that are: 

    • Non-excludable: difficult and/or costly to exclude others from using

    • Rival: use by one person makes less of the resources available to others  

• The Tragedy 

  • Every user reaps full benefit of their private use

  • The costs of private use are distributed among all users 

• The Prisoner's Dilemma 

•  Hardin’s Claims

  • Those who restrain their us of a common pool resource loose out economically in comparison to those who continue unrestrained use 

  • Evolutionary processes (survival of the fittest) wills elect for those who exercise unrestrained use and against those who restrain their own harvesting 

• Hardin’s Assumptions 

  • Humans act as economically self-interested actors

  • Acting for individual gain is a natural human tendency 

• The Article

  • Humans do not always act in economically self-interested ways

  • Common pool resources do not exist outside of established institutions and norms 

  • Common-pool resources are often degraded when existing institutions and norms surrounding them change 

• Preventing Tragedies? 

  • Privatization as a Means of Regulation 

    • Individuals own or hold the rights to a common-pool resource and decide how to use and maintain it 

  • Government Regulation 

    • State owns and/or makes laws or regulation that govern use of a common-pool resource 

  • Social Norms as Means of Regulation

    • Users own and make collective rules that govern a common-pool resource (ex. littering) 

• The Regulatory Framework of the U.S. Environmental Law 

  • Derived from 4 resources 

    • Constitutional Law

      • Commerce Clause- govern interstate commerce 

      • Property Clause- congress can regulate public land 

      • Equal Protection Clause- life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness 

    • Statutory Law : legislation passed by congress

      • Clean Air Act

      • Clean Water Act

      • Endangered Species Act 

    • Administrative Regulations 

      • How federal agencies define and uphold laws 

    • Common or Case Law

      • How a law or regulation is upheld in court 

Endangered Species Act

 Concepts 

• Biodiversity

  • Biodiversity definitions

  • Historical context (extinctions)

  • Threats to biodiversity

  • Importance of biodiversity

• Endangered Species Act

  • Case studies/court rulings

  • ESA: criticisms, successes, future

Species 

• What is a species? 

  • Biological Species Concept: A species is a group of organisms that can or do interbreed in nature and produce fertile offspring

  • Phylogenetic Species Concept: defines a species as the smallest group of organisms that share a unique evolutionary history and can be distinguished from other groups

    • Phylogenetic species can be problematic 

• Population: a group of interbreeding organisms in the same area at the same time 

• Community: The collection of species (as represented by populations) that can be found at a particular place 

Biodiversity 

• Includes all the biota in a given area or region in terms of taxonomic and genetic diversity, the variety of life forms present, the community structure created, and the ecological roles performed 

• How do we measure biodiversity? 

  • Species composition accounts for the identity of the species present within a given area 

  • Species richness is simply the number of species present irrespective of identity 

  • Species evenness: a measure of how evenly distributed species are within a community 

• Diversity Index 

• Many examples 

  • Ex. Shannon Diversity Index 

    • Is based on mathematical probability of species within a given area

  • Diversity indices combine species richness and evenness and are usually thought of as a robust measure of diversity 

• In general more biodiversity in tropics, climate effects

• Conservation Risks

  • High population areas, high levels of resources extraction  

Extinctions

• 99.9% of taxa that ever lived are extinct 

• 5 Mass extinctions (mya is millions of years ago) 

  • End ordovician 444 mya 

  • Late devonian 360 mya

  • End permian 250 mya

  • End triassic 200 mya 

  • End cretaceous 65 mya 

• Potential causes of Permian Extinction 

  • plate tectonics: Pangaea

  • sea level dropping

  • climate change

  • volcanism

  • oceanic overturn

  • meteor/asteroid impact

• Are we in a 6th Mass Extinction? 

  • What is a mass extinction?

    • No consistent definition, we will use: 

      • When at least half of the world's biodiversity is lost within a short period of time 

• Causes of modern extinction (HIPPCOD) ***

  • Habitat destruction, degradation & fragmentation

  • Invasive/introduced species

  • Pollution

  • Population (Human populations)

  • Climate change

  • Overexploitation

  • Disease (not disease of humans)

• Traits that promote vulnerability to extinction

  • Low reproductive rate

  • Specialized feeding habits 

  • Feeding at high trophic levels

  • Large size 

  • Migratory patterns 

  • Behavior patterns

  • Human cause (ex. Rhino’s for ivory)   

• Why is biodiversity important?

  • Healthy environments, humans and economics 

Endangered Species Act 

• Part of an emerging environmental ethos in the early 70s

  • Clean air act, clean water act, etc.  

• Considered by many to be the most progressive piece of environmental legislation to survive congressional scrutiny

• One of the world strongest legal protections for biodiversity 

  • For endangered and threatened species and those with critical habitats 

• Case Studies 

  • Tellico Dam and Snail Darter 

    • One of the most important and first judicial decision on the ESA

    • Fish held up a dam production but they couldn't remove the fish because of the act  

• Criticisms of ESA

  • Taxonomic bias 

    • Focuses on vertebrates

  • Fails to provide adequate incentives and enforcement 

  • Imposes costs unfairly

  • Does little to prevent species from becoming threatened