When Economics Isn’t Enough

Journalists ought to be open about their biases, so I need to come clean: I approached last week’s post with a bias the size of a Chinook salmon.

Sure, I was trying to do something useful: nobody’s ever quantified the economic value of nutrients carried by salmon from the ocean to inland ecosystems. It only seems reasonable that this be calculated when balancing benefits provided by salmon with the cost of keeping them alive in the wild.

Truth be told, however, I wanted the number to be big. Something that would snap the negotiating table in half when environmentalists plunked it down, spilling coffee in the laps of lawyers from hydroelectric companies and pesticide manufacturers and salmon farms and pollock fisheries and everyone else whose thoughtlessness is driving the salmon to extinction. But maybe the salmon just aren’t worth that much.

After all, it’s not like East Coast forests are barren and withered just because there aren’t any salmon to feed them. Maybe it’ll cost so much to save wild salmon that it makes economic sense to let the die. Drop Salmon Carcass Analogues in the streams where salmon used to spawn, write checks to everyone who used to make a living off them. Issue corporate apologies and move on. The cycle of life continues.

Is that acceptable? And if not, why not?

For me, the salmon have a value that transcends economics; in some unmeasurable way, the world is simply better for their existence, and this existence needs to be wild, not contained in the marine version of cattle pens. It fulfills me to know that salmon range for thousands of miles, following Earth’s geomagnetic field to their home rivers, giving their life’s last energy spawning. In my mind’s eye, when I picture North America from above, its northern coastal rivers and streams are pulsing silver threads. It gives me a tiny thrill to look at the Penobscot River that runs by my Maine hometown and know that there are salmon there, even if I can’t see them.

In short, this is a spiritual notion. It can’t be justified by anything but recourse to itself. It doesn’t fit with the sort of arguments that are usually made in formal debates about threatened species, which tend towards variations on the theme that they’re useful to us, or might be. It’s what environmental policy types call a “vaguely formulated concept not amenable to the sort of comparative expression needed for conservation decisionmaking.” I can’t argue with the fact of their statement; but on this issue I side with David Quammen, a nature writer who wrote that “the whole argument by utility may be one of the most dangerous, even ominous, strategic errors that the environmental movement has made.”

Quammen’s words are contained in an essay entitled “Jeremy Bentham, the Pieta, and a Precious Few Grayling.” It’s one of the more beautiful pieces of nature writing in existence, and I’m taking the liberty of reproducing a long passage here:

A hydroelectric dam, which can be built in a mere ten years for a mere $119 million, will have utility on its side of the balance against I snail darter genes, if not now then at some future time, when the cost of electricity has risen above the cost of recreating the snail darter through genetic engineering. A snail darter arrived at the hard way, the Darwinian way, across millions of years of randomness, reaching its culmination as a small ugly perch roughly resembling an undernourished tadpole, is something far more precious than a net asset in potential utility. What then, exactly? That isn’t easy to say, without gibbering in transcendental tones. But something more than a floppy disc storing coded genetic lingo for a rainy day.

Another example: On a Sunday in May, 1972, an addled Hungarian named Laszlo Toth jumped a railing in St. Peter’s Basilica and took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pieta, knocking the nose off the figure of Mary, and part of her lowered eyelid, and her right arm at the elbow. [...] Deoclecio Redig de Campos, from the Vatican art-restoration laboratories, said at the time that restoring the sculpture, with glue and stucco and substitute bits of marble, would be “an awesome task that might take three years,” but later he cheered up some and amended that to “a matter of months.” You and I know better. The Michelangelo Pieta is gone. The Michelangelo/de Campos Pieta is the one now back on display. There is a large difference. What, exactly, is the difference? Again hard to say, but it has much to do with the snail darter.

Sage editorialists wrote that Toth’s vandalism was viewed by some as an act of leftist political symbolism: “Esthetics must bow to social change, even if in the process the beautiful must be destroyed, as in Paris during les evenments, when students scrawled across paintings ‘No More Masterpieces.’ So long as human beings do not eat, we must break up ecclesiastical plate and buy bread.” The balance of utility had tipped. The only directly useful form of art, after all, is that which we call pornography.

So what does all this mean, practically and immediately? I’m not sure. I have trouble articulating it to myself. But somehow I can’t escape a feeling of deep unease with the economic frameworks that ultimately guide our society’s handling of endangered salmon, and every other species in danger of disappearing. When every animal has a price, it’s only a matter of time before humans do, too.

Posted by Brandon Keim