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, publically 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 respectxs it is the modern equivelent 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 particulary blacks. Federal reforms tend to be universal fixes that break a lot of eggs to make minority omlets. 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 worled 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 underexucated 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 countires 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 remaiinder dubious. Maybe Hispanics don't expect American police to be more honest and are satisfied if they are not persuted to 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 Travelling 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 quiote 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.