Ecosystem Services- Should 'essential variables' serve special interest groups first?

Essential variables as standard candles for measuring ecosystem content need be independent and free of tailoring to special interest groups. The paradigm of satisfying stakeholders as special interest groups could generate ecospherically counterfactual data in regard to the best interests of humanity in its ecosphere. Humans probably should learn new building and living economic methods rather than perpetuate the system that is processing the ecosphere toward oblivion. Present necessary ecosystem services should be viewed as temporary measure utilized until the new paradigm of living synergistically with the ecosphere is actualized.

Yet not of it (poem)

 

Wandering the streets of time
cluttered with canisters
of mythic electrons
mud brick homes
aging dust of the world
sights sounds, mysteries
known and unknown
with troubles of inefficiencies
ecosystem servicing
allocations of everything
packaged, priced, calculated proplits
transversal rules for deposits-
the lines compile nothingness softly
with bar-coded rainbows
layered and striated
Meisner-infused sandwiched
talus slopes tumbling
dimensions falling apart
with nightfall within sagebrush
until shadows return
to silence.

Spy Balloon Vector Threats version 2

 The 'spy balloon' meandering at 60,000 feet over the U.S. is said by the Pentagon to be from China. It is a threat only insofar as it demonstrates a good position to release biological war vectors into the United States from above. Maybe a new variant of Covid 19 is being released in tiny caplets that survive descent and release on the ground, or some sort of weaponized pneumonic-plague-ebola hybrid. The Pentagon says it's not a threat.

China said that the sort of balloon observed couldn't survive the trip from China. Several China experts have denied that China released the balloon and that it probably was released by a commercial boat for weather observation. Apparently the balloon was under observation for several days traveling along the Aleutians and over Canada until reported hovering menacingly above Montana. The Pentagon said it is too dangerous to civilians to take down the balloon over populated areas; if that is the case why didn't they take it down several days ago over the ocean or the wilderness regions of the north? If it is releasing weaponized viruses or other advanced technology such as nano-gremlins to float on the currents to the ground the President feels it does not warrant capturing the balloon to see what's inside. They refuse to unbox the balloon and let the public know what's inside.

Those of the opinion the balloon isn't Chinese imply the balloon is a false flag stunt or propaganda tool of the Biden administration to intimidate Americans with a real Chinese threat invading hillbilly regions of the U.S. President Biden may need help for Americans to be made to believe that he is in good form on U.S. national security.

Chinese Spy Balloon a False Flag or Covid 19 Dispersal Device?

 The 'spy balloon' meandering at 60,000 feet over the U.S. is said by the Pentagon to be from China. It is a threat only insofar as it demonstrates a good position to release biological war vectors into the United States from above. Maybe a new variant of Covid 19 is being release in tiny caplets that survive decent and release on the ground, or some sort of weaponized pneumonic-plague-ebola hybrid. The Pentagon says it's not a threat.

China said that the sort of balloon observed couldn't survive the trip from China. Several China experts have denied that China released the balloon and that it probably was released by a commercial boat for weather observation. Apparently the ballon was under observation for several days traveling along the Aleutians and over Canada until reported hovering menacingly above Montana. If it is releasing weaponized viruses or other advanced technology such as nano-gremlins to float on the currents to the ground the President feels it does not warrant capturing the balloon to see what's inside. They refuse to unbox the balloon and let the public know what's inside.

Those of the opinion the balloon isn't Chinese imply the balloon is a false flag stunt or propaganda tool of the Biden administration to intimidate Americans with a real Chinese threat invading hillbilly regions of the U.S. President Biden may need help for Americans to be made to believe that he is in good form on U.S. national security.

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202302/1284774.shtml

That Paragraph on Ecosystem Services

 An ecosystems services approach for governance of the ecosphere does seem somewhat reductionist missing out on conservation of wilderness values. Erosion of wilderness brings irrecoverable damage to the ecosphere. It should be possible anyway to have better and more accurate data on species living on Earth quantifiably speaking with drones and cell samples mapping all living species in an area. Drones and remote sensing with computational tabulating should be much better than simply measuring water and land biota quantitatively- The latter is rather crude although better than ignorance of course. Satellites are great surveillance devices and provide wonderful data in a variety of spectrums however they should be complimented with drones. Every living thing on Earth should be quantified as well as Noah knew the number of animals on his boat. There should be real time numbers for every living species to monitor there status. One might have the suspicion that ecosystem services could otherwise end up being a tool for capitalists to learn how to extract the most value from ecosystem services even as it declines overall.

Stocking Shelves (the poem)

Stocking shelves of poems with thought
salads of furies
with metaphors bought
wrangled misty cereal aisles
one crunch miffs another one’s style

Ice cream sailing ship root beer floats
inflated bread of yeasty jokes
scribbled lists cover stockers woke

Stanza’s reigned to low pressure cisterns
Ali Babas fed with magic beans
skyfalls drop to mulch units earned
more heavily flopped coordinated tat skeens

Paragraphs draw new air to the sea
surfaces shine as if meant to be.

Mariculture Increases with Fish Prices

 My course on ecosystem services leads to some interesting urls , for instance, integrated farming of livestock and fish.

https://www.fao.org/3/AC155E/AC155E04.htm

https://thefishsite.com/articles/shrimp-and-salmon-farmers-are-set-for-a-year-of-profits-and-plenty

https://www.worldwildlife.org/industries/farmed-shrimp

a comparison of India and Equador's farmed shrimp resource use

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/aff2.23

https://www.globalseafood.org/advocate/ecuador-sets-legal-framework-for-offshore-fish-farm-development/ legal framwork in Ecuador set for offshore fish farming

https://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?184801/Sustainability-standards-completed-for-tilapia-farming

Is the U.S. Losing the Race with Russia for Total Ecosystem Services Mapping?

 Why be primitive or last place in trying to map the ecosystem services of the state or nation one lives in? Alaska could probably have the entire state's ecosystem services mapped with some sort of federally financed, state operated program. Germany has done it...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318252191_Germany's_Ecosystem_Services_-_State_of_the_Indicator_Development_for_a_Nationwide_Assessment_and_Monitoring

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/mapping-ecosystem-services

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304571223_National_ecosystem_services_mapping_at_multiple_scales_-_The_German_exemplar

It is possible that the EU https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/mapping-europes-ecosystems-1 is ahead of Alaska too. As in the arms race, the ecosystem services race may have economic, political and financial consequences for the players. Alaska should not be a loser in the ecosystem services mapping race.

It doesn't appear to me that the U.S. government has got an ecosystem service map and survey with comprehensive data for Alaska done. The Russkies may have more data on their big board about Alaska ecosystem services than the Alaska State Government or even the U.S. Government. I wonder if the White House situation room has a Big Board with full display of the state of U.S. and Russian ecosystem services in real time providing updates whenever launches of defoliation or loss of biological species happen.

Maybe I should have invented a way to make potato chips at home from whole potatoes or soy beans and got a patent and manufactured the chip makers in China so I could live on Golden Pond. Instead I need to wonder about ecosystem services and water conservation and if wastewater could be reduced by using solar charged electrical toilets without water; maybe microwave toilets in major cities, instead of water-using ones. A properly designed microwave toilet ought to be fairly cheap. It would be interesting to see the design. I suppose even a poor manufacturer could make Beatles wigs with good hidden audio headfones and mp3 players for workers not allowed to listen to music at work. Maybe the wigs could have built in motion sensors so one would get a beep if their boss is sneaking up from behind. Perhaps Shanghai would be the place to make those. Even the Chinese could listen to my blog if the wig had a speech translator so they could find blogs talking about ecosystem services.

Ecosystem Serices and Post-Modernist Epistemology

 Plainly monetizing and commodifying ecosystem services with neo-liberal market criteria should be used as an advisory evaluation for government planners rather than as fungible things-for-themselves. In a way money itself- e.g. cryptocurrency, is commodified and relative with volatile values for what people are willing to pay in addition to its utility for avoiding taxation. Ecosystem services could be used for properties privately held I suppose, and bought or sold to governments or NGOs because they show the immediate worth to politicians and company economists of ecosystem services of a particular commodity within their general profit-loss paradigm concerning their present goals (politicians live in the present and act in the present rather than the future, while alternatively nature evolves within a continuum, unlike politicians as humans although party politics could be said to evolve, though quite unlike natural evolution).

Evaluations of environmental objects, or things as processes deemed to be objects may always underestimate object-values because they need necessarily be incomplete appraisals of object functions within the ecosphere. W.V.O. Quine’s ‘Word and Object’; a philosophical work of epistemology and naming, and Kripke’s ‘Naming and Necessity’ show some of the issues and structures concerning the developing of words and ideas in relation to objects, sometimes called perhaps inaccurately ‘external objects. It is interesting to me to find that environmental objects like wetlands are also subject to linguistic philosophy paradigms about naming. Quine’s ‘Ontological Relativity’ provides a formalism for the logical constructions of naming to a certain extent and is somewhat less of an epistemological treatise than ‘Word and Object’ or P.F. Strawson’s ‘’Individuals’. Quine notably demolished the philosophical foundations of empiricism in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ and demonstrated the subject nature of knowledge cannot be overcome too well. Yet I believe the entire idea of dead reckoning judgments of a pragmatic nature and working nature while remaining informed of the subjective and relativity of language and categorization of words and objects is an adequate replacement for naive realism. Relativity and uncertainty are transcendent ideas that allow space-time and matter to flow withing the Higgs Field’s entangled massless particles. Even so humanity still needs to keep its ecosphere working properly and ecosystem services including those of bats are a part of that. Bats evolved in caves comparable to the way human knowledge evolved in Plato’s cave. The prisoners chained to the cave floor saw things they didn’t understand and made explanations for them and over time they found the conditional truth at the surface. Then of course they could face new problems concerning environment and cosmology like those of contemporary humanity.

I wonder if this interesting module of socio-historical analysis of ecosystem services is very useful in regard to the purpose of learning how to evaluate and set pricing paradigms for ecosystem services at the introductory level. Life offers only so much time to humans and while philosophical reflection is useful, some intellectual journeys can be superfluous to practical applications of knowledge.

The reference to Paul Erlich was interesting because he wrote 'The Population Bomb' in the 1970s- an early and sensational recognition of human overpopulation of the limited, finite world ecosystem. For those concerned with adapting human life on Earth to the available resources and conserving the remaining health of the ecosphere perhaps ecosystem services is a tool that can be used for bringing an appreciation of the value of the ecosphere to the masses and to political leaders analytically by showing clear and present costs and even dangers of harming or displacing/destroying environmental elements.

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.