Whether the current calculations of the environment, of ecosystem services, are quite right and accurate is one thing. But the idea that we cannot or even should not do so is false:
Some environmentalists wince at the financial characterisation of the natural world, disputing an anthropocentric understanding of ecosystems and organisms as capital that derive value from how well they “serve” humanity. Guardian writer George Monbiot calls the approach “morally wrong, intellectually vacuous, emotionally alienating and self-defeating”. Others dislike the seductive logic of including the environmental damage of eating a beef burger or driving a petrol car in their “true” costs, deforestation and melting glaciers included.
We’re the only valuers around to apply a value to anything. Further, the valuations that are calculated are the valuations to human beings.
Of course, to claim that there is some pure and just value, independent of that applied by humans, is to make the same error that Aristotle and Aquinas did. This is not then to go on and say that all values are captured by market prices. We’d argue that a lot of them are but never that extreme that all are. It is though to insist that, among humans the value of something is the value humans ascribe to it.
To give an example, the cost benefit analysis for the varied alternatives to the Swansea Barrage, the Severn tidal dam and so on. In there is an amount for the value of mud flats for wading birds. Given the birds’ lack of money, so too the clams, the mud itself and so on, it’s obviously not a straight market calculation of how much they’d pay to keep that environment rather than having a lagoon generating electricity.
What that mudflats value actually is is that some people like the idea that there are mudflats for wading birds. That’s humans applying a value to some part and or form of the world. Working out exactly what that value is is a bit of an art (how much do people show, by their actions, that they value this at?) but the logical concept is sound. It’s exactly the same logical method we use to work out the statistical value of a life - how much, by their actions, do people show they value a representative life?
It’s also true that not only can we do this but we should. The aim of this economic game is to maximise the utility of us folks in aggregate. Therefore we need to know the calculations being applied to the varied things that are valued and produce that utility.
Gawping at mudflats, even knowing they exist, produces utility for some human beings. Thus it’s a part of the maximisation of utility. As are, of course, the alternative uses of that same chunk of the environment which is why we want to know the values in varied uses.
It’s common enough to declare that certain values are not commensurable. That value of the curlew getting its dinner as against the electricity with which a human can cook theirs. But all commensurable means is capable of comparison and given that both are the values ascribed by humans to those things then of course we can compare them. For they are the same thing - values ascribed by humans.