Ecosystem Services Practice Model 1

 Ecosystem services are a way to evaluate (find value) of natural ecosystem services like providing air to breathe, clean water, etc. In the course I am taking on line one of the exercises is to make a theoretical model where ecosystem service are being valued.

In theory different groups use different ecosystem services impacting one another. Although ecosystem services are naturally free and given by God as the ecosphere, people spend it as the natural capital that it is often depleting the resource. Sometimes selling natural, publicly owned capital to private economic interests for a fraction of what it is worth to the public in providing ecosystem services needs to be given monetary values for the public to really understand what is going on. 

That is, ecosystem services need to be monetized and commodified or quantified for scientific reason concerning human survival and for the public to learn how in some respects it is the modern equivalent of native Americans that sold Manhattan Island for 24 dollars and some few trinkets. My project example follows (we were limited to 300 words).

Conserving or Developing the Lower Stikine River Wilderness?

The lower Stikine River is a rich natural ecosystem. Its services providing habitat for king salmon, eagles, wolverine, minks, moose, brown bear, seals, sea lions and vast numbers of migratory wild birds, fresh water and forests absorbing Co2 per hectare is had to surpass in much of the northern latitudes, yet some hope to transform it into a rich agricultural zone with abundant mining upstream in order to provide local jobs as well as one-time logging operations.

Plan A- Development would clear-cut the forests, dike, berm and dry usable wetlands, form terraces on hillsides for produce, creating chicken ranches in place of economically useless wild birds and build structures for human living, business, tourism and trade where only Farm Island private property and a few remote cabins presently exist in addition to innumerable rat-like wild birds. Instead of a few trappers, tour guides, adventurers, smugglers and drug transporters exploiting the route to Telegraph Creek in Canada from Wrangell Alaska, thousands of workers and tourists would reside at least part of the year in the delta. Developers argue that local agriculture would reduce global warming by reducing the need to import farm products to S.E. Alaska on carbon emitting barge tugboats.

Plan B- Conservation, would restore the Stikine River from it’s dwindled salmon stocks; just 80,000 Chinook return to spawn each year and only 10,000 in the lower Stikine, and otherwise protect the river from clear-cuts, agriculture and mining pollution to keep the environment in as wild of a state as possible. Ecosystem services are valued at 145 trillion dollars globally each year. The Stikine comprises an especially productive portion of that, as coastal rivers and waters are  prime suppliers of nutrients to the oceans and plankton life-cycles. Wolves, eagles, wolverine, minks and other species are endangered in the ecosphere living locally. Even crab eat salmon carcasses when there are surplus, uncaught salmon that spawned and died to drift downstream. Fishing for wild salmon will be directly harmed with the destruction of Stikine River salmon habitat.

Police Reform Might be a Race Issue

 Police reform in the U.S.A. is a hot topic for Democrats and particularly blacks. Federal reforms tend to be universal fixes that break a lot of eggs to make minority omelets. My ideas on the topic are general and inexpert. Yet I will write them, or summarize them anyway.

White people are fairly satisfied with the state of police departments. Before racial integration mostly white communities worked very hard to eliminate police corruption. Internal affairs and F.B.I. investigations tended to square things away, and like military units with old lineages they tended toward stability. Integration changed that. J. Edgar Hoover being a homo may have been hot on undermining white police corruption and the strait world order in order to make a kinder, gentler society where one day he and his kids might be openly queer. History sometimes make silk purses out of sow's ears...it's all in the timing.

f course police departments in the old south served to arrest an enable convict labor of blacks. In the modern era racial integration made more white police interaction more like that of political peers with blacks yet the policing was arm's length and cautious because of the recent history of radical black activism, rioting and criminal behavior of undereducated people in slums. Blacks today are still the driving force in modern police reform primarily to benefit themselves understandably. For white people police are satisfactory, even so they would generally prefer quality poling of blacks in a way that black Americans are satisfied too. 

Hispanic Americans don't complain about policing too much. In Mexico and other Latin countries police departments are sometimes expected to have a high percentage of corruption and good cops are sometimes killed by drug cartels. The Mexican Marines and years ago the Federal police are regarded as honest and the remainder dubious. Maybe Hispanics don't expect American police to be more honest and are satisfied if they are not persecuted tor harassed. Maybe Hispanics have lower expectations of police based on cultural experience to the south- I just don't know. 

So how to reform police for black Americans and Hispanics too even if they don't expect much of the Federal government except to let more Hispanics enter the U.S.A. That is the federal question. Without a good answer it would be dangerous to willy nilly throw some experimental fixes on the nation and see if they work. If too many crimes occur after the new era of policing it is likely a harsh counter-reaction would follow if history is much of a guide.

Religious Oppression at Social Media by Atheist-Woke Crowd

 This is something of a placeholder for more on the topic later. The subject was occasioned by my online encounter with a wikipedia article on the relation between science and religion. The article is heavily biased toward the atheist point of view and editing of the article showing errors are deleted overnight by the woke crowd that rises after dusk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_religion_and_science

One of the claims made is that there was no concept of religion prior to two or three centuries ago. The truth is that people knew about comparative religions millennia ago. One example is the choice of Assyrian conquerors of Judah in the late 8th and early seventh centuries B.C.E. to destroy the temple at Jerusalem and enslave the leaders and priests. religion probably arises from the word liege meaning Lord that is from old English, Old French and Old German. In the Pentateuch God is named 'Lord' numerous times (e.g. in Deutronomy, 2nd Kings and Jeremiah). The koine Greek kyrios means 'Lord'. A religion was the practice of loyalty to God, the Lord in recurring worship. Reality as a word has a similar morpheme 're' and all probably is referent to everything. The use is similar to that of re before liege or lige. The word Lord appears more than 6000 times in the Old and New Testaments.

People have had a concept of religion for millennia. Comparative religions or comparing religions occurred early in history as evidenced by religious wars and heresies. People were aware of the differences between one religion or allegiance and another. That is one of the reasons why political Lords sometimes suppressed allegiances to foreign or unknown dieties- even specious ones; because they were aware that foreign religions were a potential danger to their own authority.

It wasn't simply that some like Nero believed themselves to be God or that various rulers made themselves head of the state religion; some religions were recognized and tolerated as in Athens and Rome for a time. The Apostle Paul tried to explain the nature of the One True God to people in Athens at the agora mentioning and comparing the others. People were persecuted to having different religious beliefs probably before the historical era in the Iron Age.  Nothing is mentioned of the topic in the wiki article; my contribution was deleted and scientist reading the thing are left to believe that religion was born yesterday.       

I mentioned my own book 'Christianity, Evolution and Digital Universes' and that was too deleted. How convenient that nothing of modern expository writing on the problem of Wittgenstein/Kripke/WVO Quines paradigm of the indeterminacy of translation and how that can effect interpretation of scriptural paradigms is permitted to be read. The atheists would like people to learn their own version of things omitting inconvenient  counter-factual truths.

Reform Capitalism and Political Economy Toward Sustainable Ecosystem Services

 Capitalism needs to be reformed with the global ecosphere becoming an element. Ecosystem services that find a value for environmental services have the problem of being too local and lacking in cognizance of the networked or essential unity of all system and the greater cost of deleting parts of it. Numerous studies including some mentioned in the marine environment have shown that species recovery and productivity of surrounding regions to a highly protected area rise too and may fall with its loss of protection. What is the value of life on Earth in which mankind arises and is sustained? Can it be sold off or traded within the values of the values of unreformed capital market economics? Are the goals of market economics and the values given to ecosystem elements commensurate with the ideal of conserving and recovering ecospheric health or for supporting the most efficient profit and trade relationships for all regardless the state of the environment. Is it a necessary that protecting the ecosystem is of more economic value than exploiting and degrading it within supply and demand political economies.

I think the reform of capitalism would include taxation and regulation as well as in some cases ecosystem service evaluation. Taxation would make it costlier to harm the environment than to conserve it. Real estate developers for instance, would pay fewer taxes on building homes that have no net loss of biota than builders that clear off biota and have a net loss of biota. Taxing properties than harm the environment or displace it would result in higher taxes than green properties, and that could stimulate a new era of sod roofs if not advanced design flora covered hollow artificial 'mountains' for people to live within.

Regulations should be made to stimulate inventors and business start ups to create enterprises that are not harmful to the environment and have the least entropic effects on the ecosphere. Maybe the IQ. level of business execs need be higher with better education. Capitalism given tax incentives that are consistent surely may find some entrepreneurs that can satisfy social ecosphere conservation and restoration efforts and benefit so many people on Earth. Even creating new ecosphere on the Moon, Mars and elsewhere off-world should receive substantial tax discounts. Capital of course need be taxed sufficiently to prevent the concentration of wealth to the degree that plutocrats arise to make a toy and puppet show of democracy as well as to support a basic social income so people can afford not to be employed in dirty business yet be able to survive until clean jobs employ them. For some time changing the quantity and proportion of dirty jobs to clean jobs will create some social displacement effects. The smarter and more honest politicians become (it must be a joke yet I hope that is possible) the less displacing the changes could be.

Is knowledge Comparable to a Redwood Tree Rooted in a Local Ecosystem or a Seagull Travellng the World?

 The question" Is local knowledge determined by nature" is as clear as mud; what is local knowledge, what is nature and so forth. One might as well ask the Cartesian question and reply cogito ergo sum and decide that experience is an existential affair. Knowledge is knowledge and people know what they know so far as they can be certain of the veracity of their own knowledge. If they travel some distance more than they can walk they have knowledge about that distant region.

I often lived in a forest more than 30 years and know it fairly well, yet I travel too and know the desert etc. I flew over Iceland a couple of times and looked at it from 30,000 feet. It seemed like a nice place with a lot of clouds around. Yet people in cities or even a few miles away have a completely different experience of life, and nature, because they live indoors in a heated and cooled thermostatically determined world. One should not underestimate the power of artificial heating and cooling, running water, baths and electricity on the way people think and how they tend to lack common sense about 'nature' and its relationship to mankind. People can be content with parks instead of the wild and its health and destroy it without thought since they don't live in it carefully.

One might wonder if knowledge is comparable to a Redwood tree rooted in a local forest or like that of a seagull flying hundreds or thousands of miles. Bar-tailed godwits fly 7500 miles each year between Alaska and New Zealand. One shouldn't overlook special relativity in considering the meaning of locality and knowledge. The philosopher C.D. Broad actually wrote a book a long time ago titled 'The Mind and Its Place in Nature'. People have wondered about knowledge and mind quite a long time.

The planetary ecosphere is a continuum with humanity existing within the ecospheric bubble they clumsily try to break like bulls in a China shop economically speaking in regard to methods and practices. 'Primitive' people live existentially too and have serialized praxis concerning behavior. The difference between primitives and advanced societies are in externalities and manufactures. Each has an ensemble or tool kit that is more complex actually in nature than in the simplified artificial world of stick frame homes, steel girder structure or whatever produces indoor comfort and security for dwellings. People naturally separate themselves from nature in order to make life less painful for-themselves. Apes may groom other apes and pick off fleas and bugs of various kinds as part of nature; humans like to do a little better than that even going so far as to be unhappy when contracting various illnesses that cause pain and death;therefore humans manufactured or evolved surgical and pharmacopoeia remedies over time, so far as they could. Even primitives happily become moderns where they can afford to.

Knowledge is a result of the grace of God, reasoning and occurs within nature. Nature includes Universal thermodynamics and the intake of energy and mass to sustain personal healthy mass and thought. Thermodynamics is the correction to original sin perpetrated by beings beyond the four dimensions of space-time. Willful disobedience to God is the inherited problem for the human race. Only though the saving grace of Jesus Christ can a soul be saved and liberated from eternal separation from God. Letting nature be healthful would require intelligent humanity and it is corrupted by original sin and systems that reinforce worldly, corrupt values, hedonism and consumerism. It is worth trying to change. Yet in my opinion it is possible that putting a price on nature and natural services will not solve or fix the primary environmental question of sustaining its existence in a healthy way. Human values Adam Smith's capitalism wouldn't generate an invisible hand that would guide the market of ecosystem services to the best possible condition as if the market was intelligent and benevolent. Even the atmosphere would be considered an externality to most people and air would have no value perhaps in some ecosystem service systems. Who needs to breathe is more than an existential question in my opinion.

Alligators Could Save the Lives of Cattle and Frump Atmospheric Gas CO2

 Because cattle are so harmful to global warming reduction areas and require large amounts of grassland to feed (or even grains) phasing them out and keeping just a few for pets and free ranging in the wild in some locations could be a natural evolution. What could replace them on the American menu? You may have guessed; alligators.

Farming alligators to large size might be used to help recover wetlands lost to development. Hundreds of thousands of very well fed, large gators might be raised in restored and artificial wetlands and commercially exploited, transformed into alligator-burger patties. Alligators fart underwater usually and may be less damaging to air quality. Millions of frumps may be safer and greener than farting in the air.

If Crocodiles replaced alligators for food then saltwater could be used to raise them in vast artificial ponds. Saltwater could be pumped and siphoned in pipelines, evaporated and collected under condensation roofs to make fresh water for the American Southwest deserts. Maybe gators and crocs would let a million points of light bloom, or not while fresh water for drinking was made in New Mexico from Pacific Ocean saltwater.

Some Americans might be relieved that harmless cattle no longer were decattleized as units of meat on the hoof raised and sold as abstract entities for profit and barbecue. Prime alligator rib and barbecued alligator could be more appealing to diners than Herefords sliced and broiled and Guernseys converted when milked dry into dog food pellets.

Ask Mexico to Join the United States to Secure Southern Border

 The Democrat Party has created and maintained a perennial border crisis allowing more than a half million foreigners to illegally cross in to the U.S.A. every month. For years and even decades that party has sabotaged U.S. internal security and swollen the ranks of illegal workers that have several adverse effects on the American economy. About a quarter of a million illegal entrants are captured and released monthly while about 300,000 get away without making any kind of contact with federal officers at all. Some of those could be Russian, North Korean or Chinese specialists bringing in suitcase nuclear bombs to bury in desert regions for later possible use by sleeper agents demolishing U.S. cities. There should be some sort of interim solution to the problem of the creeping conquest of America by illegals.

Illegal workers as a vast left-wing class undermine the fundamental principles of equality. Plainly there should be no illegal underclass of citizens in the U.S.A. that creates a bifurcated economic divide between those on the legal clock and those not as is the case in California. Some way the U.S.A. and its values are permanently corrupted by the presence of a vast illegal underclass of physical workers not collecting fat paychecks at a desk. The remedy is to seal the southern border to illegal entrants as President Trump tried to do while being sabotaged in the effort by Democrats. After a couple of years of sealing the borders against illegal entry aliens that have worked in the U.S.A. for two years or more should be offered legal residence after being screened against international criminal and terrorists registers.

The alternative would be to ask Mexico to consider becoming part of the U.S.A. so the United States of America would include Mexico and its states as they are with one government and citizenship for all. Mexico has a smaller southern border that the U.S. government might be able to afford to defend although Democrats probably would find a way to make it grossly insecure too.

Public Goods in the Market and Scarcity

 I don’t believe that capital is a concept created by the Judaeo-Christian culture. Capital I.m.o. is a fundamental quantification of anything and giving it a value as a thing-in-itself. Value in turn is a function of scarcity. Abundant water in rainfall for example is less valued than rare water in a desert to users. A primitive tribe might regard itself as part of nature and not be wrong about that, and if it had abundant resources no particular value system might arise to a level at all resembling anything structured, yet if any disturbance to the force of nature occurs that makes living a challenge, the response of a tribe would be a function of the increase in value of the resource disturbed or reduced in quantity. Scarcity is the cause for the origin of capital even if it is manufactured as a novel product that becomes desired-with implicit scarcity before mass production.

Why can’t public goods be traded in the market? In the United States some public goods are owned by the government (i.e. land, water, oil, minerals etc.) and can easily be given a price and sold in the market. Maybe in some nations they cannot be traded.

If ecosystem service are worth more than 150 trillion dollars annually and setting aside ecosystems because the value particular ecosystems have are annually worth more than 100 times what it costs to buy them in dollars, and the loss of income to particular users of ecosystems not conserved is about 1/100th what the loss would be to public users of the ecosystems if they aren’t conserved, why can’t either major U.S. political party move to set aside and restore more ecosystems at a progressive pace of perhaps a trillion worth of acquisitions each year (maybe through taxes on the rich and a decrease in the military budget)?

Ecohomo Economics vs Ecopluralism

   What is presently named biodiversity to portray an abundance of species flora and fauna is being reduced toward the disaster of ecohomo monism over time. If the sole existing life form on Earth is mankind that species may be doomed. Classical economics exploits the wealth of ecopluralism and prioritizes to the exclusion of everything else ecohomo lines. Ecohomo psychology has even reached out to try to kill off the idea that God exists.

An ecosystem service approach if using a standard axiology would lock in that value system socially, and economic valuation metrics are hard to change. Society does chase after money- the root cause for slavery and wars, and so adapting ES to a free market is necessary yet challenging. Ecopluralism rather than an Ecohomo monist reduction to just mankind on Earth is the right way to proceed.

An ecohomo economic world order is evolving or devolving the ecosphere obviously. Maybe experimenting theoretically with constructing lunar ecohabitats of as large a scale with selections of Earth species that could adapt would help humanity learn of the value of keeping a verdant ecopluralism on Earth.

There is no mistake that ecohomo economics is driven by greed and the attraction of money. Slavery in the United States would never have occurred without the profit motive. It was the economic value of slave labor rather than sadistic sociopathy and racism that motivated the growth of the slave business. Wars occur for economic reasons and have for millennia even when security appears to be the primary cause.

Ecopluralism has been shown in the newish field of Ecosystem services to be of real economic value. In other words the value of a rich and vibrant ecosphere with ecopluralism entailing millions of species. Today the estimated number of species is close to nine million though just more than one million have been cataloged. That number is large yet is in steady decline with numerous important species already extinct and/or critically endangered.

Because ecopluralism is like a cloth that adapts to various challenges, eliminating various species threads from it can lead to its disintegration and the disaster of a necrotic ecohomo environment. An economy subsists through interacting and harvesting ecosystem services and a portion of various species rather than eliminating any. With ecoreductionist methods ecological economics are adversely impacted, for example, if all of the fish were harvested there would be no fish to catch, or in the abstract, if species 1, 3 and 5 were needed to support the life of species 9 that is harvested economically, then species 1, 3 and 5 need be protected too in order to allow species 9 to live to be harvested. If species 1, 3 and 5 depend on several other species and flora to exist, eliminating those species with displacement of harvest to extinction will ultimately result in the loss of the species that support the life of species 9.

Ecosystem services are part of the toolkit needed to keep ecopluralism alive and healthy. Humans benefit and are alive because of ecopluralism and the grace of God.

Mass as a Secondary Quality Embedded in the Higgs Field with Relativistic Characteristics

I had a dream or something like that this morning that brought me to consider relativity in the Higgs field as if I was going to explain it to a class of non-mathematicians like myself. I looked at Google search about the field equations for general relativity and got a couple of useful, succinct paragraphs…

“The Einstein Field Equations are ten equations, contained in the tensor equation shown above, which describe gravity as a result of spacetime being curved by mass and energy., which specifies the spacetime geometry.”

and

“Einstein made two heuristic and physically insightful steps. The first was to obtain the field equations in vacuum in a rather geometric fashion. The second step was obtaining the field equations in the presence of matter from the field equations in vacuum.“

Mass is an emergent characteristic of energy slowed down passing into the Higgs field. Relativity; the special and general theories, explain the relationship of space-time relationships of mass-energy particles have traveling in the Higgs field. Mass attracts other mass at the speed of light- the speed limit of any mass in motion, and of course loses times as it acquires speed for space and time are one unified field in the Higgs field.

Probably space is really an empty dimension and the Higgs field fills it and gives it the qualities of being a unified space-time for mass embedded within it. Quantum particles travel at the speed of light, or nearly, and are massless. In the Higgs field some massless particles pick up the characteristics of mass as they are slowed and their energy is converted or transformed into mass that seems to be an inert phase of energy; an appearance of being mass and solid.

Quantum particles and the characteristics of quantum particles with small amounts of mass; quantum orbital spacing and distance, charges etc are functions of theoretical units of mass in the relativistic apparent aspects of the Higgs field acting on mass. Quantum uncertainty is necessary for quantum particles because mass is an apparent rather than an actual phenomenon at all times subject to the characteristics of being mass in a Higgs Field. Because there isn’t actually mass; just some kind of grand appearance of massless, highly energetic field particles entangled at the quantum level, and because space-time is unified though space itself hasn’t real dimensions either-simply apparent dimensions defined by the Higgs fields governance for some reason unknown to me (as is the grand reality of energy in massless particles that download or flux into the Higgs field space-time) it is reasonable that quantum entanglement can exchange information faster-than-light because the information may be more real and equivalent to the level of the Higgs Field’s ‘altitude’ than mass.

There is a point made in physics, if I recall correctly, that quanta may have mass in one dimension yet not in another. Spin of quanta may alternate from massless to mass in various dimensions, and there are four dimensions of space-time. On a mathematical line there is no spacing between points- it is a continuum. Quanta on the line may have mass on that line yet non in dimensions intersecting it. I suppose quanta in the Higgs entangle dimension characteristics in their positions of being.

I would like to think of the relationship of the Higgs field in the context of Neo-Platonism. In Plotinus the expositor of Plato several centuries later- about six-hundred years in the second century C.E., Plotinus in 54 tracts named The Enneads wrote of the realm of forms operated by the Intelligence/Spirit who downloads copies into a Universe where they seem real objects. Quantum information would be in the realm of forms and the quanta themselves in the world of real objects. Relativity; special and general, govern the relationships of energy quanta embedded in the Higgs Field of real objects.

I would like to think of the relationship of the Higgs field in the context of Neo-Platonism. In Plotinus the expositor of Plato several centuries later- about six-hundred years in the second century C.E., Plotinus in 54 tracts named The Enneads wrote of the realm of forms operated by the Spirit who downloaded copies into a Universe where they seemed real objects. Quantum information would be in the realm of forms and the quanta themselves in the world of real objects. Relativity; special and general, govern the relationships of energy quanta embedded in the Higgs Field of real objects.