What's wrong with putting a price on nature? | Environment. Ecosystem services is not exactly a phrase to stir the human imagination. But over the past few years, it has managed to dazzle both diehard conservationists and bottom-line business types as the best answer to global environmental decline. For proponents, the logic is straightforward: Old-style protection of nature for its own sake has badly failed to stop the destruction of habitats and the dwindling of species. It has failed largely because philosophical and scientific arguments rarely trump profits and the promise of jobs. And conservationists can't usually put enough money on the table to meet commercial interests on their own terms. Pointing out the marketplace value of ecosystem services was initially just a way to remind people what was being lost in the process — benefits like flood control, water filtration, carbon sequestration, and species habitat.
But the rising tide of enthusiasm for PES (or payment for ecosystem services) is now also eliciting alarm and criticism. Happiness is a glass half empty | Oliver Burkeman. In an unremarkable business park outside the city of Ann Arbor, in Michigan, stands a poignant memorial to humanity's shattered dreams. It doesn't look like that from the outside, though. Even when you get inside – which members of the public rarely do – it takes a few moments for your eyes to adjust to what you're seeing. It appears to be a vast and haphazardly organised supermarket; along every aisle, grey metal shelves are crammed with thousands of packages of food and household products.
There is something unusually cacophonous about the displays, and soon enough you work out the reason: unlike in a real supermarket, there is only one of each item. And you won't find many of them in a real supermarket anyway: they are failures, products withdrawn from sale after a few weeks or months, because almost nobody wanted to buy them. This is consumer capitalism's graveyard – the shadow side to the relentlessly upbeat, success-focused culture of modern marketing.
Failure is everywhere.
Sustainability should be the true measure of US creditworthiness | Simon Zadek. Gas-guzzlers: cars crawl along an LA freeway. Photograph: Robert Landau/Corbis Standard & Poor's historic downgrading of the US's creditworthiness delivers a righteous judgment on the state of American politics. What many missed amid the fallout, however, is that the rating agency astonishingly failed to raise even an eyebrow over the terrible state of its bloated, unsustainable economy. The US Treasury has since been quick to point out an alleged $2 trillion maths error in S&P's calculations. Yet the failure of S&P, and indeed the other major rating agencies, to measure what really counts in shaping new economies for the 21st century passed unremarked.
After all, the fundamentals of the US economy remain mired in the practice of overconsumption, under-investment in public infrastructure and services, and an unsustainable environmental footprint. Rating agencies exist in order to provide a view of the future creditworthiness of borrowers. UK children stuck in 'materialistic trap' | Society. Unicef warns that children are being bought off with 'branded goods' because parents can't spend much time with them. Photograph: Paul Sakuma/AP British children are caught in a "materialistic trap" in which they are unable to spend enough time with their families and instead are bought off with "branded goods" by their parents, the United Nation's children's agency Unicef warns.
Three years ago, Unicef ranked the UK at the bottom of a league table for child wellbeing across 21 industrialised countries, by looking at poverty, family relationships, and health. It attempted to discover why children fared better in nations which were both more equal to the UK – Sweden – and more unequal, such as Spain. The results were startling. Children in all three countries told researchers that their happiness is dependent on having time with family and friends and having "plenty to do outdoors".
To help alleviate such pressures, Unicef calls for a series of measures. Without belief in moral truths, how can we care about climate change? | Mark Vernon. Peter Singer was in Oxford last week. The bestselling advocate of utilitarianism was the star contributor to a conference in which he talked with a group of Christian ethicists. Given Singer's inflammatory views on matters such as euthanasia and infanticide, the dialogue was striking for its agreements, particularly the common cause that can be made between Christians and utilitarians when tackling global poverty, animal exploitation and climate change. However, it was on the last issue that the conference demonstrated real philosophical interest too.
Singer admitted that his brand of utilitarianism – preference utilitarianism – struggles to get to grips with the vastness of the problem of climate change. Climate change is a challenge to utilitarianism on at least two accounts. Second, preference utilitarianism also runs into problems because climate change requires that we consider the preferences not only of existing human beings, but of those yet to come. Bolivia enshrines natural world's rights with equal status for Mother Earth | Environment. Bolivia is set to pass the world's first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country's rich mineral deposits as "blessings" and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry.
The country, which has been pilloried by the US and Britain in the UN climate talks for demanding steep carbon emission cuts, will establish 11 new rights for nature. They include: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered. "It makes world history. Earth is the mother of all", said Vice-President Alvaro García Linera. But the abstract new laws are not expected to stop industry in its tracks.