Human society can no longer treat the environment as a ‘free good’ to be exploited without consequences. As the limits to our consumption habits begin to materialize along the horizon, we must reconsider fundamentally how we think of ourselves in relation to the ecosystems we are destroying yet rely on so heavily for survival in order for our children to survive and thrive in a world worth living in. All of humanity will ultimately benefit from working to reshape our society’s functions to consider not only its efficiency but also its resilience in providing us with such security and comfort well into the future.

One of the major opportunities for positive change toward a more resilient society involves harnessing a better understanding of how the functions inherent in our local ecosystems can provide us with services that are often more beneficial than their man-made counterparts from an economic standpoint, which thus yields further incentive to restore and sustain the biodiversity that enables our ecosystems to provide us with these services, from the provisioning of food, water, timber and natural gas to the regulating of our air and water purity.

In order to harness such an understanding I’m proposing to create artifacts of a possible future of the global internet infrastructure that would, by design, close the perceived gap between the consumption habits of “end users” and the resulting impact on the environment. The landing stations for the submarine fiber-optic cables that carry our web traffic around the world would be reconfigured with new data transfer technology combined with extensive complexity and environmental research that would result in an web paradigm where essentially web connectivity speeds are directly based on the biodiversity of the landing station’s local ecology. Not only would this have all internet users thinking and caring about their local ecosystems, but also of those in countries the world over.

The artifacts would most likely consist of advertisements, from digital banner ads to subway posters, taking place in future cities all over the world.

The implementation of ecosystem services into our infrastructure can result in a kind of environmental manipulation that can have unforseen consequences. Through these objects I’ll attempt to expose possible social, economic, or ecological downsides, attempting to provoke questions about what it means to intervene in such complex systems. For example, in “Ecosystem Services: From Concept to Practice” Jetske A Bouma and Pieter JH van Beukering state that “the key characteristic of ecosystems is that they consist of public or “common-good” resources.” So what does it mean to privatize these resources? What does it mean for the poor, who are more likely to rely on these common-good resources rather than societal infrastructures (like grocery stores or purified tap water)?

Question:

Does the internet’s physical global infrastructure directly (or at least indirectly) benefit from any ecosystem services? Can it? How?

Inspiration:

1. Evan Roth, “Internet Landscapes“
2. Trevor Paglen, “Deep Web Dive“
3. Gustavo Romano’s “Madonna, Water Maps, & Botannical Gardens” essay (from Net Art Latino Database)
   • Building off the idea of “technological determinism” (the internet attention economy as the market which decides what content survives and what disappears forever)…
   • “The digital medium makes no allowance for marking the passage of time… either it’s here or it’s gone.” … Can these digital cultural assets be sustained by making sure the internet itself is built on a sustainable infrastructure?
4. Niklas Roy, “Pneumatic Computing – Flop or Future?“

Approaches:

1. Mapping
   • Map the major cables/hubs of internet infrastructure across the world
   • Map the ecosystems in these areas and the accompanying local services in use
   • Identify matching supplies and demands among these two global systems
   • Present maps/diagrams visualizing how the services would interact at a local level
     • For an audience of internet users most-likely oblivious to its physical infrastructure and to the concept and complexity of ecosystem services
2. Research
   • Learn what comprises the internet’s physical infrastructure
     • What natural resources does it demand?
       • How are these resources sustained through ecosystem services in other systems?
     • How does it connect to the power grid / other infrastructures?
     • How does one come up with / discover new ecosystem services that can be taken advantage of?
     • Present this research as raw documentation
       • For an audience of internet users most-likely oblivious to its physical infrastructure and to the concept and complexity of ecosystem services
3. “Design fiction”
   • Inspired by Niklas Roy’s project above, the proposed question can be: how can the internet infrastructure be restructured to incorporate existing ecosystem services?
   • Learn what comprises the internet’s physical infrastructure and identify alternatives involving existing ecosystem services
   • Presentation can be in the form of a video, a series of images (photoshopped, CG, illustrations)
     • For an audience of internet users most-likely oblivious to its physical infrastructure and to the concept and complexity of ecosystem services

 

 

Texts:

Ecosystem Services, Ronald E Hester & Roy M Harrison, 2010

• Preface
• Ch1: An Assessment of Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity in Europe

Ecosystem Services: From Concept to Practice, Jetske A. Bouma, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) , Pieter J. H. van Beukering, & Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 2015

• Ch1: Intro
• Ch4: Mapping ecosystem services

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Ecosystem Services — Preface

“Ecosystem services” born out of visible/attainable limits to natural resources. This first led to ‘technological solutions’ like

• ‘End-of-pipe’ sewage/waste clean-up
• Increases in agricultural production via
  • Plant breeding
  • Pesticides
  • Chemical fertilizers

Then came realization that these approaches are not sustainable, which led to more holistic thinking to environmental management (i.e, a life-cycle approach to manufacturing products for mass and energy flows at all points in the process).

Historically, society has treated the environment as a “free good” to be exploited without consequences. Thinking in terms of ecosystem services allowed full impact to be recognized.

Ecosystem service = nature doing a ‘service’ for human society (i.e., small villages dumping liquid waste into local water courses, rendering the water not harmful via self purification processes).

“Our most basic needs for food, water, and air are supplied through ecosystem services which society interferes with at its peril.”

“All ecosystems deliver a broad range of services, and managing an ecosystem primarily to deliver one service will reduce its ability to provide others.”

Ecosystem Services — Ch1: An Assessment of Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity in Europe

The ecosystem is the level at which “key processes such as carbon, water and nutrient cycling and productivity are determined” and measured. These processes determine how the world functions and are how services are identified.

Ecosystem Services: From Concept to Practice — Ch1: Intro

“…policy-makers and practitioners are struggling to implement the concept in practice. An important reason for this science–policy divide is the lack of an interdisciplinary framework” (p3)

“the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem services is complex and non-linear. Although biodiversity forms the basis for all ecosystem services, biodiverse ecosystems do not necessarily provide more ecosys- tem services than ecosystems that are less diverse.” (p6)

Less biodiversity = less resilient ecosystem (threatens availability of ecosystem service in long run)

Ex: “drive towards monoculture food production. By increasing the productivity of food production, soil formation processes are diminished and disease regulation is reduced.” (p6)

“it is clear that the risk of ecosystem collapse is real”(p8)

“…the costs of replacing ecosystem services by man-made capital are often substantial and replacing natural capital by man-made capital usually greatly increases energy use as well.” (p8)

“Perhaps the question should not be to what extent improving the health of ecosystems improves human well-being. Instead we need to ask ourselves how the provisioning of ecosystem services can be safeguarded for generations to come.” (p8)

“protecting biodiversity may have implications for the poor. For example, Cernea and Schmidt-Soltau (2006) indicate that protected area establishment has increased poverty in parts of Africa as local communities were displaced.”(p9)

“…it is difficult to protect the ecosystem and alleviate poverty at the same time.”(p10)

“The key characteristic of ecosystems is that they consist of public or “common-good” resources.”(p11)

“an ecosystem delivers ecosystem services at a local, regional, and sometimes global scale. For example, a forest provides landscape and fuel benefits at a local level, yet the benefits of water purification and retention are regional and the benefits of the habitat function and carbon sequestration are global.”(p13)

“the concept of ecosystem services implies a shift from resource-focused policies (e.g. water, energy) to ecosystem-focused approaches (e.g. forests, wetlands) taking into account service delivery at multiple scales.”(p14)

Ecosystem service criticism exists over:

• The focus solely on benefits
  • “Clearly, ecosystems have more functions than the delivery of benefits for humankind only, and focusing only on benefits carries the threat of ignoring the other important roles that ecosystems fulfill.”(p14)
  • “debate about the ‘commodification’ of ecosystem services”(p14)
    • “economic valuation of ecosystem services and introduction of market mechanisms is making ecosystem services tradable similar to other commodities”(p14) like timber and soy.
• Lack of attention for distributional issues
  • “…effective governance of ecosystems requires attention for social justice and the distribution of ecosystem benefits.” (p15)
• Simplicity of the stock-flow relation underlying the concept
  • “…the concept is too simplistic to be used for policy-making as it hides great uncertainties about ecosys- tems and the delivery of ecosystem services that need to be better understood.”(p15)
  • proposal of alternative concept: “ecosystem resilience”: “instead of valuing the current societal benefits of ecosystems, the focus should be on ensuring the long-run resilience of ecosystems, with the implicit suggestion that this will benefit society in the long run.” (p15)

Ecosystem Services — Ch4: Mapping Ecosystem Services

“…the supply of ecosystem services is not homogeneously distributed across space” via “variability in plant functional traits + other environmental conditions” (p65)

“demand of ecosystem services dependent upon location as well” via “spatial variation in socioeconomic conditions” (p65)

Mapping is used to “understand the role of this spatial variation”. (p65)

Regulating service = most commonly mapped (esp climate regulation)
Provisioning = second most commonly mapped (esp food production)

Why do ecosystem services get mapped?

• To make inventory of current supply
• To determine priorities
• To perform a trade-off assessment
  • “different stakeholders have different needs, and structuring the landscape to meet one of the objectives will have impacts on other ecosystem services”
• To determine changes in service supply/demand over time

What exactly gets mapped?

• Potential supply
  • “the capacity of the ecosystem to provide ecosystem services without considering the demand for an ecosystem service.”(p68)
• Actual Supply
  • “amount of the ecosystem service that is used by humans, i.e. the flow of an ecosystem service.” (p68)
• Demand for service
  • “requirement for an ecosystem service by humans”(p68)

Maps can be based on:

• Occurance
• Quantities
• Values (sociocultural or monetary)

How are ecosystem services typically mapped?

5 methods:

1. Look-up tables
2. Expert knowledge
3. Casual relationships
4. Extrapolation of primary data
5. Regression models

1. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA)
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Ecosystem_Assessment
– Major assessment carried out in early 00’s regarding human impact on the environment
– Popularized “ecosystem services”
2. Nutrient cycle
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrient_cycle
– the movement and exchange of organic and inorganic matter back into the production of living matter (decomposing the matter into mineral nutrients)
3. Organic compound
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_compound
– virtually any chemical compound that contains carbon; all known life is based on organic compounds
4. Biomass
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(ecology)
– the mass of living biological organisms (microorganisms, plants or animals) in a given area or ecosystem at a given time. Biomass can refer to species biomass, which is the mass of one or more species, or to community biomass, which is the mass of all species in the community
5. Ecosystem
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem
– interconnected systems where matter and energy flows and is exchanged as organisms feed, digest, and migrate about.
6. Biodiversity
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity
– the variety and variability of life
– “genetic variation, ecosystem variation, or species variation (number of species) within an area, biome, or planet”
7. Natural Capital
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_capital
– “world’s stock of natural resources, which includes geology, soils, air, water and all living organisms”

8. Common goods
–  “…goods from which it is difficult to exclude others. For example, the owner of a forest can exclude others from harvesting timber but it is difficult to exclude others from the benefits of carbon storage, birdlife and the landscape function, which the forest also fulfills.” (Ecosystem Services: From Concept to Practice, Ch1 p12-13)

9. Tragedy of the commons

– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

– individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting that resource through their collective action

Basic info:

“…there is money to be made in projects that embrace environmental goals.”[1]

Ecosystem services are essentially the ways in which humankind benefits from the natural ecosystems within which we reside. The term is meant to frame these benefits as economic instruments which make use of environmental assets (forests, bodies of water, organisms, etc) in both financially and environmentally favorable ways. This concept was popularized in the early 2000s after the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment reported how alarmingly close humankind is getting to reaching the limits of the various natural resources needed for survival at the current rate. This urgency for more sustainable human infrastructure helped incentivize environmental thinking within the prevailing capitalist system, as harnessing the systems already inherent in our natural ecosystems both saves money and makes sure the ecosystem is maintained, thus giving “the invisible hand of free market economics a green thumb”[1].

There are 4 types of ecosystem services:

• Provisioning: supplying for human use (i.e, food, water)
• Regulating: control of human/environmental welfare (i.e, air and water purification)
• Supporting: sustaining/maintaining ecosystems (i.e, crop pollination, nutrient cycling, soil formation)
• Cultural: spiritual and recreational benefits (i.e, sports, ecotourism, use of nature in artistic expression)

Response:

“Many important watersheds are threatened by development: not only that of New York, but also the watersheds of Rio de Janeiro, the basin of the river Paraibo do Sul in the Mata Atlantica coastal forest in Brazil (a biotically unique region whose conservation would convey benefits far in excess of the value of the water provided), and the watershed for parts of Buenos Aires. Arrangements of the type discussed here could be applied to the watersheds of some of the world’s largest cities. In the United States, more than 140 cities are considering watershed conservation as an alternative to water purification. Not only could this be cost-effective, it could also stimulate conservation and a coming together of market forces with the environment.”[1]

The article, Economic Returns form the Biosphere, mainly discusses New York City’s restoration of the ecosystem regulating services provided by the Catskill watershed in ~1996. The authors describe how the city’s water dropped below levels deemed acceptable by the EPA due to illegal dumping/pesticides being introduced into the water from the soil of the city’s main water source, the Catskill watershed. The city managed to save billions of dollars by working to revive the watershed’s natural water filtration capabilities instead of building new water treatment facilities.

I want to better understand how all the components in this system surrounding this environmental service interact. Here, I mapped out the interactions in a flowchart illustrating the movement of the provisioning service (supplying water to NYC residents) and the accompanying cost of the service ($1-1.5b natural capital).

This is an oversimplification though. For example, this diagram doesn’t show how the watershed restoration also benefited its biodiversity support and carbon sequestration (as watersheds are typically forests) services/capabilities, thus also affecting other environmental service cycles.

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[1] Economic Returns from the Biosphere, Graciela Chichilnisky1 & Geoffrey Hea1, 1998