This course, taught by my advisor, Patrick Mooney, is going to be challenging. I am not speaking of the work load, but specifically to the challenge for me to overcome my preconceptions about the concept of ecosystem services. To help frame the importance of ecosystems for human well-being within the current economic paradigm, the United Nations pulled together 1,360 scientists from around the world in 2001 and published the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment in 2010. Ecosystem services–the benefits that humans receive from ecosystems–grew from this assessment.
If the goal of this course, the UBC Landscape Architecture program, and ultimately the entire profession is to improve upon the status quo and elevate the profession to a new paradigm in which “doing the least bad” to the environment with design becomes “improving the environment” to a status healthier and more biodiverse than currently realized, taking must be replaced by giving. The very word “services” in the context of ecosystems and the natural world implies an absolute anthropocentrism. It infers taking from the land, rather than giving back to it.
I understand that this reframing is wholly intentional and means to give greater clout to nature in the eyes of those who consciously despoil it for profit, but I fear our time requires a more drastic action. Our time pleads for a shift away from the measure of the natural world in terms of quantifiable resources towards an embrace of biocentrism. We know that we have surpassed Earth’s carrying capacity. Our race’s population boom, thanks exclusively to the resource of cheap and abundant stores of ancient sunlight, has surpassed a sustainable threshold of resource consumption. Those concerned with the unsustainability of this, and with developing a voice for nature, have not yet found a way to slow this runaway train and have now decided to meet the opponent on the same playing field.
I will give this course my undivided, but I do so with a dose of skepticism about trying, yet again, to work within our fatally flawed consumerist paradigm. Perhaps ecosystem services might help begin building a bridge to a better world. I aim to at least hear its argument as I know it will teach me something. Hopefully that something is galvanized hope.
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