Ecosystem Services
It’s so tempting as a landowner surveying your property to focus on things: a native-plant community; birds visiting a feeder; a fenced kitchen garden; deer browsing nearby (thus the garden-fencing). But the intangibles may be the greatest asset your property provides to you, and the whole Island for that matter. A group of these unseen value-givers are called ecological or ecosystem services.
Ecosystem services operate in any healthy environment and include things like natural water-management (filtration, retention), air-temperature moderation, and habitat provision for beneficial animals and insects—to name only a few. These services help keep relative humidity in the narrow range human beings can tolerate. They serve as baseline for food production. They moderate the threat of severe disease.
If you find this way of thinking selfishly anthropocentric, you’re right. The world’s biomes don’t exist merely to serve homo sapiens, which is, after all, just one species on the landscape. And rest assured these same ecosystem services also support other organisms, whose rights to them equal ours.
But seeing your property’s services as vital to human well-being does give your new eyes. For one thing, it makes you see that property values don’t stop at property lines or sum up nicely in a figure from the assessor’s office. The spring greens you just picked up at an Island farmstand will nourish you from soils supported not just by a farmer but also by organisms ranging miles from the farm. In August, your un-air-conditioned house will benefit from the cooling services provided by your neighbor’s trees or a nearby creek that chilled the breeze blowing through your window.
Why not start thinking of your property as participating in this system of services? Would you take better care of what crosses over and through it if you did? Would you do something to link it ecologically to its surroundings? Organize the neighbors to protect or improve some ecological feature owned in common?
And what if society began to calculate these so-called intangibles as real assets, which they are? (The emerging field of ecological economics tries to do just that.) Would people pay attention to ecosystem services if a dollar figure could be attached to them, summed up as the Gross Domestic Eco-services (GDE)? They might, and maybe one day will.
