Engineering ecosystems for services

From Nature:

[Peter] Kareiva is a great fan of the ecosystem-services argument for preserving nature. But he admits that the problem of what to do when novel ecosystems provide better services than the native ones is "a question we don't talk about that much".

And Kent H. Redford and William M. Adams write in Conservation Biology:

[E]cosystem services need not be provided by native species. Many introduced species will do the job as well, or perhaps better. Zebra mussels are highly effective in filtering particulates from water, although their impact on ecosystems is in other ways strongly negative. Ecosystems managed so as to deliver services may do their job perfectly well if existing species are replaced with exotics; they may even do it better. Environmental policy based on the optimization of ecosystem-service values will not necessarily lead to the conservation of biodiversity. [...]

A logical extension of the alteration of natural systems to increase flows of ecosystem services is to replace naturally occurring parts with novel, artificial alternatives.

Of course, this is the kind of thing humans have been doing for millennia in order to get food, clothing, refuge and entertainment.

A biologist offers investment advice

Here.

Evolution of the social discount rate

Peter D. Sozou argues in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (Individual and social discounting in a viscous population) that caring about the long-term welfare of one's local community may make evolutionary sense because it benefits one's kin. But,

What of a social discount rate for decisions that impact on the whole population, rather than a locality or specific group? This question arises, for example, in the problem of global climate change. In the absence of competition between planets, there is no basis for behaviours that benefit the planet as a whole to be directly adaptive, and therefore no evolutionary basis for directly determining a social discount rate for global welfare. This seems to lead to a puzzle: why do people care at all about the long-term welfare of humanity as a whole? People may have evolved preferences for positive valuation of long-term general social welfare in ancestral environments in which such preferences would have mainly or always influenced actions with only local effects, and that therefore would have helped kin. But in the modern, global environment, such preferences may cause people to care about global problems such as climate change.

A more plausible explanation is that, as expected by an evolutionary analysis and as shown by people's actual behaviors, people do not really care about the future of humanity but do try to appear as if they care. Appearing to care may be adaptive because it may help to attract partners and friends.

Global inequality

Rohit Bhargava reports that 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity. This calls for government redistribution.

Positive rights, negative rights and the UN

William Easterly writes in his blog:

So here’s the scorecard on UN human rights. On something like “the right to water,” where it is impossible to identify who is violating such “rights,” the UN talks big. On human rights violations like killings and torture, where the UN knows precisely who is the violator, the UN sometimes shows up on the violator's side.