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The Values of a Stream
Employing the Land Ethic as a moral code
for stream management and restoration
Mark Beardsley
That land is a community is the basic concept
of ecology, but that land is to be loved and
respected is an extension of ethics.
Humans are now,
decidedly, the
greatest geomorphic
and biological force
on the planet.
Our technological and construction power has reached epic proportion. Humans are now, decidedly,
the greatest geomorphic and biological force on the planet.
We are resourceful engineers with an abundance of tools and a desire to use them. One thing we are
certainly good at is manipulating streams to our benefit.
If we want them to stop meandering, we straighten them.
If we want them to stop migrating, we armor them.
If we want the banks high and dry instead of low and wet, we make them that way.
If we want them to store water, we dam them.
If we want their water somewhere else, we know how to take it.
If we want boating parks or fly-fishing parks, we can make them.
And if we just want them to be pretty, we can make them pretty.
We have lots of levers we can pull and lots of parts we can rearrange to make these systems look and
behave the way we want.
Why?
Ecosystem Services
Over human history, big-scale technical developments must come with commensurate big-scale ethical
development to guide our wise use of these powers.
There is a moral side to the equation.
The talk fits well into the topic of ecosystem services because we will be talking about stream
ecosystems and the services that they provide people. In Colorado, we are planning out our future
relationship with streams in a massive stream management planning effort. Seems like a good time to
seek a little moral guidance. What values are at stake?
In planning and decision-making, we talk a lot about stakeholders, which is good. I think we can go one
step deeper and look not just at the holders of stakes but at the stakes themselves. These are what
philosophers call values.
I will share some thoughts on this subject from one of the great environmental thinkers of all time, Aldo
Leopold, to see how he might weigh in. Although he has been dead for 70 years, his words about the
values of nature and people, and of living in harmony on the land, are even truer today than when he
wrote them in the 1940s.
Juxtaposing views at SCW Conference 2017
Stream
health?
People’s
desires?
We have a lot of tough decisions to make now and forever into the future about the values of streams
and about what is right and what is wrong when we manipulate them.
Two years ago, at this conference, the two plenary speakers shared their thoughts on this.
Peter Wilcock spoke a lot about the needs and desires of society. Peter Skidmore talked more about
stream health.
At first blush it appeared, to me at least, like we were getting conflicting advice.
Streams as infrastructure:
systems providing services and commodities that enable,
sustain, and enhance society.
SCW Conference 2017
Peter Wilcock said stream management and restoration goals ought to be based on "what people want,
and not expert opinion on what an ecosystem needs“ Social benefits, appearance, comfort, and safety,
he said, are the most important things to people and therefore what we should be focusing on.
When it comes to goals, his view is that we shouldn’t say stuff like “we want to reconnect the
floodplain” because who actually wants that? What’s important are the services that would supply to
people.
And we can’t just say “we want more complexity and better habitat.” Habitat, he said, is just a means to
an end. You have to find out what fish, or what birds, or what frogs people want so you can design the
habitat to suit.
And you can’t just say you want a “healthy, functioning, and mostly native ecosystem either.” Goals
must be stated in terms of social purposes or the specific services people will benefit from. Designs are
then tailored to meet those goals and evaluated accordingly.
In this view, streams are like infrastructure: They are systems that provide services and commodities
that enable, sustain, and enhance society.
I admit that, as an ecologist and lover of nature, this anthropocentric view at first made me a little
upset. But after thinking it over (and over, and over…) I started to see the wisdom there. At some very
basic level, we have to be sure our projects benefit the people who pay for them.
Streams as ecosystems:
A biotic community that functions with nonliving
components as an integrated natural system to sustain and
perpetuate life.
SCW Conference 2017
In the next talk, Peter Skidmore talked about rivers and streams as ecosystems and spoke about the
importance of maintaining ecosystem health. He called them the “biological engines of the planet”.
When viewed as an ecosystem, a stream is a complex organic community that functions as an integrated
natural system to sustain and perpetuate life.
Peter said that stream management goals should “promote and protect healthy rivers” and that doing
so will “benefit recreation and ecosystem function while also providing for consumptive uses.”
The value of a stream
People valuesNatural values
Ecosystem
health?
People’s
desires?
Seems like we have a dilemma on our hands.
Are we in this for ecosystem health or for services to meet people’s needs and desires?
Which values matter? Natural values or People values?
Can it be both? And if so, how do we weigh one kind of value against the other?
Where is an ethicist when you need one?
Stream
Health
Assessment
Stream
Needs
Alternatives
People
Needs
Actions
Stakeholder
Engagement
Prioritization
Monitoring
Societal
Outcomes
Ecological
Outcomes
Adaptive Management
Adaptive Management
Services to
people
Ecosystem
health
+
-
+
-
This diagram is something Brad Johnson and I made to show how ecosystem health and human values
can be integrated in stream management planning.
People values and ecosystem services are on the right loop. Natural values and ecosystem health are on
the left loop. The two come together in the middle where management alternatives are evaluated and
acted upon.
Note that the ecological and societal outcomes are evaluated separately because ecological health
objectives often differ from social objectives, even when evaluating the same action.
Any action may have positive or negative effects on ecosystem health or social services. Responses
range from win-win, to win-lose, to lose-lose.
Because of this, our decision framework must be such that we consider human and natural values at the
same time. That’s what we were going for here. The crux is figuring out how to integrate these two
types of value where they come together in the middle where decisions are made. This is where we can
use a little help from the ethics community.
Streams provide
ecosystem services
Water storage
Stream
Health Our actions affect
ecosystem health
It’s a two-way street
Services to
people
Ecosystem
health
Water quality
Conveyance
Fire/flood
resilience
Recreation
Aesthetics
+
-
+
-
This diagram shows the provision of services by stream ecosystems.
The picture on the left represents a stream ecosystem. The list on the right represents human values or
benefits. Ecosystem services are ways that streams provide these benefits to us, represented by the
upper arrow.
This is obviously just partial list I thought up quickly – the real list would go on and on because there are
so many benefits we enjoy from stream ecosystems. It is worth taking a few minutes to think of some
other benefits important to you that I don’t have shown on the list.
The bottom arrow represents the ways people affect stream ecosystem health. Restoration actions are
those things we do specifically to improve ecosystem health, usually by undoing the harmful things we
did earlier. Other actions, like development, diversions, stabilization, and enhancement are aimed
directly at improving certain human benefits. They usually affect stream health negatively but could be
positive.
The way I see it, we should try our best to protect and improve stream health even while manipulating
streams for human benefit because that is the best course for both streams and people. Healthy
integrated systems may assure sustainable provisioning of the entire suite of ecosystem services now
and into the future.
But that’s just what I think. Let’s see what these guys say.
18th century philosopher and ethicist, Immanuel Kant, said that the value of a thing stems from either
price or dignity.
For goods, services, commodities, and resources, value is tied to price. It is derived from their utility in
serving needs or desires. They can (at least theoretically) be bought, sold, and exchanged. These are
the things whose value can be pinned down to dollars. We rightly treat them with economic
expedience.
Holmes Rolston III, a highly respected philosopher of modern times and one of the founders of
Environmental Ethics as an academic discipline (also the most influential teacher I had at Colorado State)
refers to that type of utilitarian value as “Instrumental value”
Other things, like people, are valued not just for their utility, but also for their dignity. You can’t put a
price on dignity. Things like people have value in and of themselves. In Rolston’s terminology, this type
inherent value that comes from dignity is “Intrinsic value”.
The philosophical test for this is whether the thing would have value even if there was nobody there to
appreciate it or make use of it. It’s kind of like “if a tree falls in the forest, does it still make a sound?” If
a thing has value and no one is there to value it, does it still have value? Philosophy is so fun!
Rolston also defined a special type of intrinsic value he calls “Systemic value”. Systemic value goes with
systems that create and sustain life. They are like fountains of intrinsic value. We’ll talk about this more
later, but this type of value goes with ecosystems because they are where life comes from—where it
evolves and has been evolving for 4 billion years.
Let’s take a closer look at that stream ecosystem.
I’m not going to try to summarize stream ecology on one slide. I wouldn’t even try to do it justice in one
semester! Or one academic career! The diagram is from Colin Thorne’s talk in the plenary yesterday. I
put it up to show that all the interactions (even in even a ridiculously oversimplified model of ecosystem
function like this one) are way beyond comprehension. Streams are mind-bogglingly complex.
For our purposes, it is enough to know that stream ecosystems are made up of communities of diverse
living things that interact with each other and with equally diverse geological, hydrological, and chemical
components in a web of almost infinitely complex bio-hydro-physico-chemical-processes that we
understand at only the most basic, elementary level.
When it comes to predictable cause-effect relationships, we are mostly ignorant about how they work.
The ordinary citizen assumes that science knows what makes this clock tick; the scientist is equally sure
that he does not. He knows that the biotic mechanism is so complex that its workings may never be fully
understood. Aldo Leopold said that.
In other words, a little humility is in order. Meddling with stream ecosystems is like rearranging the
parts of a really complex machine that we barely understand. We don’t know all the impacts and
repercussions of the work we do to them. It’s wise to be cautious. I’m saying that.
Intrinsic value —biotic community
Systemic value —source of life
Instrumental value —green infrastructure
Not only are stream ecosystems extremely complex, they are also extremely valuable.
They are instrumentally valuable to people as the green infrastructure that supports us and all our
beloved fish and wildlife.
But there is more! They are valuable in and of themselves.
Let’s apply the philosophical test. If there were no people around to appreciate the health of this Eagle
River headwaters ecosystem would it still have value? Really, what do you think? Would it? I’m pretty
sure the entire rest of the non-human biotic community would think so. Well, that is if they think.
And what of that biotic community. Where did it come from? Holmes Rolston and other deep
philosophical thinkers speak of ecosystems as the fountain of life. A creative force. Peter Skidmore
called them the biological engines of the planet. Ecosystems are the theater on which the story of
evolution is playing out. It is where speciation and natural selection take place. The source of all life
forms and all biodiversity.
I think that calls for a little respect.
And heck, if respect for ecosystems is important to my shampoo company, by God it is important to me!
Streams provide
ecosystem services
Water storage
Stream
Health Our actions affect
ecosystem health
PeopleEcosystem
Water quality
Conveyance
Fire/flood
resilience
Recreation
Aesthetics
OK. Now let’s see how value fits into this system.
Let’s start with the people. Society. Obviously, intrinsic value. I’ll color that gold
The benefits we gain are instrumentally valuable. I’ll color those silver.
The upper arrow shows how streams function as the natural infrastructure (or GREEN infrastructure)
that provides ecosystem services. So, by extension, the stream ecosystems themselves have
instrumental value, so we can color those silver too.
And then there’s the ecosystem with its intrinsic and special systemic value. More gold!
So, we are left to ponder this bottom arrow. How we affect streams. Looking just at the values at stake,
we see two really good reasons to respect ecosystem health and manage for it.
Since streams are natural infrastructure that provide so much instrumental value, we need to make sure
they stay functional and stable for our own good. Healthy intact stream systems provide the full suite
od services in a sustainable way because we are allowing them to work more or less the way they
naturally evolved.
And since they are intrinsically valuable and irreplaceable, we are obliged to care for them out of respect
and dignity.
Examine each question in terms of what is
ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is
economically expedient.
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the
integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic
community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
A Land Ethic
Aldo Leopold
Here is what Aldo Leopold had to say about it in 1949…
Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is
economically expedient.
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It
is wrong when it tends otherwise.
This definition of right and wrong is about the health of ecosystems. It doesn’t mean that ecosystem
health trumps our moral obligations to people, but it does give natural value a seat at the table.
A Land Ethic
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single
premise: that the individual is a member of a
community of interdependent parts. The land
ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the
community to include soils, waters, plants and
animals, or collectively, the land.
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of
interdependent parts. The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils,
waters, plants and animals, or collectively, the land.
Again, Leopold is asking us to expand our moral horizon to include ecosystems.
Nature
Culture
A Land Ethic
In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from
conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of
it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for
the community as such.
If the sphere of ethics considers only human value, our relationship with nature and ecosystems looks
something like this. Nature is outside the community that matters. We are obliged to treat it with
economic expediency to make life better for people. It is a resource or commodity to be used. Here is
the stream as infrastructure.
Leopold goes on to say that this ethic was fine in the days of Abraham and Isaac, when people were
barely getting by and scraping together civilization out of a nature that seemed boundless. He said it
also made sense in the colonization of America and settlement of the west because culture was so small
and nature was so big. It seemed like we could never use up all of nature.
But that sure isn’t the case anymore.
Nature
Culture
A Land Ethic
In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from
conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of
it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for
the community as such.
Civilization is alive and well now, thank you very much. If anything, it is nature that is starting to seem a
little puny.
Leopold’s Land Ethic enlarges the sphere of what matters to the community of living things.
Ecosystems. We are ethically and morally obliged to care for their health – both for their own sake and
for the sake of future generations of people.
This doesn’t diminish our moral obligations to people, it just places them in a broader context that
accounts for all types of value.
In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain
member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community
as such.
Nature
Culture
A Land Ethic
When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may
begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for
land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap
from it the aesthetic harvest it is capable.
When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
There is no other way for land (that is to say, and no way for our streams) to survive the impact of
mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the aesthetic harvest it is capable.
He said that in 1949. It’s obviously even more true today.
A Land Ethic
A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration,
management, and use of these 'resources,' but it does
affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in
spots, their continued existence in a natural state.
A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these 'resources,' but it
does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a
natural state.
This spectrum comes from Peter Skidmore’s presentation from a few years ago.
The left side shows those few places left where streams still exist in mostly natural state.
The right side shows streams that are heavily altered to meet strict short-term needs and desires of
society.
Almost all our streams in Colorado are somewhere in between. Managing these streams requires a
careful consideration of both natural and human values.
It may be a question of degrees, but according to the Land Ethic, people’s needs and stream health both
matter across the entire spectrum.
We shall never achieve harmony with the land,
any more than we shall achieve absolute justice
or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations,
the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.
Aldo Leopold
Mark Beardsley
Mark.ecometrics@gmail.com
The important thing is to strive.