There is no master metric for biodiversity (with Ville Lähde)

Philosopher and environmental researcher Ville Lähde (with the Finnish BIOS Research Unit) argues that we need to understand biodiversity differently at a fundamental level in order to preserve it. Biodiversity loss is much more than the list of extinct and endangered species. In our conversation, we talk about the myriad food systems and their different relationships with biodiversity, what are the hidden costs of simplifying biodiversity, and why Ville feels closest to biodiversity when working with his compost pile.

Read the Life Matters Everywhere essay

For more info, transcript and resources, visit: https://tabledebates.org/podcast/episode68

Guests

• Ville Lähde, Philosopher and environmental researcher at BIOS

Episode edited and produced by Matthew Kessler and Ylva Carlqvist Warnborg. Music by Blue dot sessions.

Transcript

Matthew 

Welcome back to the nature season of Feed – a food systems podcast presented by TABLE. I’m Matthew Kessler.

Ville Lähde
Many listeners may have heard this metaphor of the biodiversity crisis as an aeroplane that is losing nuts and bolts in mid flight. We are just hanging in the air, waiting for the one critical bolt to fall away and then the whole aeroplane falls out of the sky. But the problem with that metaphor is that nature is not one aeroplane.

Matthew

In our next two episodes, we look at two different ways that  we value nature in our economies, and we ask if food systems and biodiversity would be impacted if we put a price tag on nature. 

We’re joined by Ville Lähde from the BIOS Research Unit.

Ville  

I am Ville Lähde. I'm a philosopher and an environmental researcher from Finland

Matthew. 

In this episode we dig deep into why the concept of biodiversity loss can’t be reduced to one challenge with one solution. 

Ville
I live in a small town called Lampala, in the mid-southern part of Finland. I kind of shuttle to and from my home and Helsinki.  I work a lot on food issues, but because the BIOS is a sort of a multidisciplinary collective of researchers, we work on a lot of different issues.

Matthew

Last summer, Ville Lähde’s essay Life matters everywhere was passed around, read and admired by the TABLE staff. The essay was commenting on the 2021 Dasgupta Review: The Economics of Biodiversity. This report was commissioned by the government of the United Kingdom and with an enormous team of support, economist Partha Dasgupta unpacked the economics of biodiversity for the concerned citizen. Ville opens his essays with these sentences. 

“The Dasgupta Review (2021) was both lauded and criticised upon its publication. Criticisms tended to focus on economizing Nature, ”laying a price tag on Nature”. However, such criticisms miss the mark in two key respects. First, the notion of biodiversity in the report is surprisingly nuanced, and secondly, Dasgupta is adamant that determining the “price” of Nature is crucially a matter of politics.”

I share one more quote to help set the scene for this conversation.

“For the wider public, and quite likely for the majority of decision-makers, economists and journalists, the most familiar manifestations of the biodiversity crisis are lists of endangered and extinct species. Accordingly, biodiversity is seen as an issue of less vs. more: the more species there are, the better. Nature is the Library of life, full of unique editions handed down by history, and preserving as many as we can is the metric of success. However, species richness and extinction rates is only one dimension of biodiversity, and it does not really work as a proxy metric for the whole issue. In this, biodiversity differs essentially from climate change.”
Matthew

Your different endeavours make you a fantastic guest for today. You’re a writer, philosopher, a researcher. How do you think about biodiversity?.

Ville  

Well, personally, for me, my main connection with biodiversity is in our garden. I garden a lot. I actually come from a family of two teachers, Finnish language teachers. And they had long summer holidays, two and a half months. So we would work at our garden;sort of a summer cottage, but really a farm that we used to work. And they had four sons, so they had a lot of voluntary or involuntary child labor. We used to produce a lot of our own food, like mainly all of the vegetables and root vegetables that we would eat throughout the year. And actually, we donated a lot of that to our wider family. And I sort of returned to those roots when my wife, who is a daughter of two farmers sort of encouraged me again, and infected me with the gardening bug. And especially when I work with my compost heaps, I find my connection with biodiversity. And when we work with the soil of our garden, because it started as a fairly compacted clay soil that hadn't been husbanded for many, many years, and now it's full of life. And that helped me to understand why biodiversity is an important matter everywhere. Like I wrote in an essay, it's not only about nature out there, but it's also about nature in our midst.

Matthew  

I think a garden is a fantastic metaphor, because as humans, we can think of biodiversity to hold functional use, cultural use, religious or even spiritual use. And perhaps your garden is playing a little bit on each of these dimensions for you personally?

Ville  

Well, basically, biodiversity is - it's an inherent feature of life. In order to understand ecology, and evolution, it's crucial to note that life doesn't just arrive in an environment. Life is a phenomenon that actually creates and maintains its own environment. 

Matthew

Ville points out that all living beings - humans, animals and plants – develop and evolve not only through the pressures of their environment, but they also affect those pressures. 

Ville
So it's always a sort of a loop relationship to other beings and other nonliving things and so on in ecology, that there's a concept that is called niche construction, which basically is the idea that ecological niches are not just some eternal spaces that are out there in the order of nature, they're always in a dynamic flow. Life is creating and recreating and maintaining them. And actually, in a wider scale, life is a planetary phenomenon, we wouldn't have the atmosphere, we wouldn't have the soil, nor would we have the cycles of carbon, that are crucial for maintaining life on Earth and maintaining the planet in a sort of dynamic equilibrium. 

Matthew
In my high school biology class I was taught that while cooperation exists, life is also a constant struggle over scarce resources. But Ville points out that it’s not only about getting into conflict with other beings, but also about avoiding conflict and finding new niches.

Ville
So that is why life tends to create biodiversity over a longer time timescales, because different species and different populations and being sort of find new niches and cracks, to thrive, in order to find new kinds of food, new kinds of energy, and also to avoid conflicts and find for example, new mutual relations and so on. One being’s poison is food for another, and so on.

And that kind of makes it possible for life as a general phenomenon to have not only resilience in a sense that it can withstand changes. But what some researchers call Transformative Resilience, that after a severe disaster, for example, life can bounce back, and bounce forward into new forms. If we think about like that major mass extinctions in the history of the world, the ability for life to bloom and emerge in various new directions, is the explanation why this planet has the life after like 90% of life has been destroyed, at least one time in deep history.

Matthew  

So biodiversity represents the microorganisms in your compost pile in your garden, all the way to the atmosphere. And perhaps all the different relationships happening in between those. Scientists agree that we're experiencing a big biodiversity crisis at the moment, some call it the sixth mass extinction. I think we can acknowledge that there is a crisis at hand, an enormous loss of life, species and habitat. Why does that matter more broadly?

Ville   

Well, we all are aware of course, that we are a species are becoming extinct. We have the Red Book of species and so on. X number of species every year are going extinct at a faster frequency then would be the baseline. Now we seem to be in a era of his era of history, that huge human action, especially species are going extinct, far faster. And that might be called, like absolute extinction when a species ceases to exist all over the globe. But then you also have local extinctions, that species like disappear from Finland, or from Europe, or from Tasmania, or from Siberia, but they still might thrive in Africa, for example. So that local extinction, of course, will change the constellation of the ecosystems in that area. And some of those species, small or big, sometimes predators, sometimes primary producers may be so to speak keystone species, that their disappearance from one ecosystem can sort of cascade through various ecosystems, like create a domino effect. 

Matthew
But beyond these population and individual species changes, there’s ecosystem fragmentation; like corridors, or connections between forests or waterways that may be fragmented, which then alters migration patterns. And even beyond that: there's overall changes in conditions that can change the workings of various kinds of ecosystems; I’m thinking here about ocean acidification, or ocean warming, or climate change. 

Ville
My old teacher, professor Oria Hyla, who was my great friend at work and is still my great friend and mentor. He has sort of put it in this way that historically, humans arrived at a ready-made table. We arrived at an historically opportune moment. 

Matthew
That moment - or period, is known as the Holocene, which began roughly 12,000 years ago. This is the geologic era of earth when humanity spread across the globe and thrived. So what made this period different? Well, the climate was fairly stable, the world wasn’t mostly covered in ice. This meant that there were greater stretches of land were habitable, with fertile soils and abundant water resources.

Ville
So like, nature was actually kind of hospitable for humans. Whereas often we hear like that idea that primordial humans had to struggle against nature only, of course, they did have to do that they actually have to do that in a fairly historically hospitable conditions. In a sense this situation endures that natural systems do all kinds of  unknown or unrecognized work for us, or not for us, but we can benefit from that work. And they, in effect, make our whole societies possible. We couldn't produce food, we couldn't really stay healthy, and so on without that work of myriad invisible hands around.

Matthew

Describing this landscape and the relationship humans had with nature, still resonates with some communities today, it’s pretty far removed from modern Western society’s relationship with nature. One of the major catalysts that brought us to the situation we are in today is the industrial revolution. We’ve created technologies that have enabled us to exploit natural resources much faster, and in doing so, we’ve also produced a lot more waste.

Ville

 And we have sort of become accustomed to the illusionary idea of independence from nature, because we have those couple of hundreds of years where we could push the boundaries of nature around us by using a lot of cheap, abundant energy. And actually, we could rely on functional ecological sinks. Basically, that we could dump wastes and side products of our activity to the atmosphere, to the rivers, to the seas, and so on. And the ecosystems could deal with that up to a point.

Matthew
As humanity throughout decades and centuries has continued to quote “thrive”, we’ve dumped our waste to the atmosphere, the soil, the rivers and the sea, and biodiversity is paying a hefty price. And now we turn our attention to the relationship between food systems and biodiversity?

Ville  

Well, the major food systems in the world or the dominant food systems in the world act on so to speak, a productivist paradigm where the main thing is to produce as much as you can and economically as efficiently as you can. And that idea of efficiency, and that idea of scale, is built on the largely on the idea of independence from nature. As I mentioned, that we have ample energetic inputs and chemical inputs, and functioning, ecological sinks. And that kind of efficiency is only possible in that context. And that has created the idea that we can produce food more efficiently if we detach ourselves from nature, but actually, we have become more and more dependent on nature, because we are using natural resources to sort of artificially maintain that distance. 

Matthew

And regardless of the way we think about food systems and food production, outside of food cultivated indoors which of course relies still on energy and material costs - we depend on pollinators, the soil microbiome, the cycles of water purification, nutrient retention and so on. 

Ville
So this is again, like biodiversity matters everywhere. It matters, not only out there in the forests, for example, but it matters in our habitation environments and in our production environments. And as the world is becoming more unpredictable, to do various forms of environmental change, and as we have to sort of distance ourselves from the ample use of fossil fuels and so on, then this dependence from natural systems becomes more and more crucial. We sort of have to recognize them much more than we used to, because we cannot distance ourselves so much from that those like invisible hands that are acting all the time around us.

Matthew  

So we've covered now that biodiversity is crucial for humans for all of life, for functioning, for fulfillment. And I want to turn to this idea of how do we value biodiversity. So there's a management consultant that once said, “you can't manage what you can't measure.” There was a paper that came out in the late 90s, led by Costanza sort of now famous paper that put the ecosystem services on Earth, accounting for all the sort of US dollar output of that would be $33 trillion. There's an economic cost for not valuing nature and not caring about these ecosystems that might not be obvious or present to people who don't perhaps, live close to nature, or have work that really depends on natural resources. I know, you've thought about this deeply about this notion of how do we value and measure biodiversity? Can you give us a sense of how mainstream economists and much of society understands how we value nature today?

Ville  22:24

I think I'll start with the management quote, The problem there, I think is that most often, it assumes that there has to be one master metric that you can measure. You cannot manage, if you have sort of too much information, you need clear numbers. So unquestioned numbers that you can refer to anyone, and everybody can agree with them. And then you can sort of manage things, then you can have policy. But biodiversity, it's a mosaic phenomenon. It's not a unified phenomenon, like climate. With climate, we have a global system. With biodiversity, we have a mosaic, life finding those niches within each other and in between each other and so on. And so instead of one master metric, you'll need a sort of contextually changing toolkit like a constant awareness of changes around you. But the tension here is that politics tends to demand these clear numbers. So this mosaic phenomenon tends to be simplified. 

Politicians can say that, okay, we have to conserve nature. But how many species do we need? Or how many square kilometers do we need? So they really look at biodiversity and nature as a more versus less issue, and not as an issue of functioning ecosystems around them. But if you only look at species and want to conserve X number of species, then you get the risk of sort of perverse outcomes. For example, conserve a species by the very tiny population of it. Or you are happy with the fact that that species remains in one corner of the world, and you can legitimize its disappearance from wide areas. Like, for example, people can say that there are hundreds and 1000s of bears in Russia, why should we worry about bears disappearing from Finnish forests, and so on. 

And there are people who are saying, for example, we shouldn't conserve nature in Finland that much, because the coral reefs and the rainforests are much more important. But we need then policy to be able to stomach these kind of more cumbersome toolkits. And not to look for just that one value, which can be priced.

Matthew  

I want to share another quote from the Life matters everywhere: ”Biodiversity as a mosaic phenomenon does not aggregate in a fruitful way, but environmental policy especially at a global level tends to require aggregate metrics. This is a truly wicked problem for biodiversity policy. Species numbers and the extent of protected areas tend to be the fallback positions, even though the scientific problems relating to that exclusive focus are well known”…

In your essay, you talk about it as a wicked problem, that nature is mobile, silent and invisible. It is silent as in cannot speak for itself. It is invisible. Referring to the numerous microscopic species that aren’t present to our visible eye. 

Ville  

And mobile nature means of course, that natural ecosystems do not respect national borders and other human borders. Nature doesn't divide neatly into boxes where you have the borders of the ecosystems are clear and straight because they inter lap in multiple ways. They work in different temporal and spatial scales. So one tree might include myriad different ecosystems*, for example, and even at different altitudes, like ecosystems can work on Horizontal and Vertical Scales at the same time.

Matthew  

There's a fantastic book called The wild trees by Richard Preston, which talked about the ecosystems that were, I don't want to use the word discovered, that were observed in the redwood forest, the trees in the Redwood Forest that were found at 80 meters 200 feet above the ground, because humans had not previously been up in those trees to observe it. And then they found not only unique species, but unique ecosystems in that setting. 

We’re talking to Ville Lähde about how biodiversity as a mosaic phenomenon can’t be summed up and simplified into one problem – one solution. In Ville’s essay: Life Matters Everywhere, he mentions a common metaphor for the biodiversity crisis that he finds “deeply problematic”?

Ville  

Yeah, so many listeners may have heard this metaphor of the biodiversity crisis as an aeroplane that is losing nuts and bolts in mid flight. We are just hanging in the air, waiting for the one critical bolt to fall away and then the whole aeroplane falls out of the sky. But the problem with the metaphor is that nature is not one aeroplane, is not one clockwork, it's not one machine. It's a legion of systems. Considering biodiversity there is not one critical boundary, we can say that one and a half degrees is a critical boundary visa vie climate change. But with nature, we cannot find that. We can have many big and small crashes at the same time all around us. And we necessarily don't even notice them.

Matthew

So an example, in much of the US midwest, which has largely been converted into fields of production for soy and corn, the native ecosystem was a tall grass prairie. Over hundreds of years of agriculture, and the last 50 years of more intensive tillage and the increased use of synthetic farm inputs, the 2 or more meters of fertile top soil has degraded and it’s led to a lot of nutrient leaching. The soil’s microbiome diminished. Waters get polluted and the lives of pollinators are disrupted by agricultural chemicals. This has been an ongoing process. Everything does not crash at once. Not with a bang, but a whimper goes the biodiversity crisis. 

Returning to where we started – how do we actually go about measuring or valuing biodiversity given that it’s mobile, silent and invisible. And that it’s a mosaic operating across spatial and temporal scales. How should we be valuing biodiversity differently?

Ville  

Well, I think the key prerequisite for valuing biodiversity differently is for us to understand it differently. Our public discussion on biodiversity is dominated by the idea that biodiversity is a more versus less question. And as long as you have somewhere a lot of biodiversity, everything's fine. But biodiversity is crucial everywhere, even in ecosystems, where there's a smaller number of species, for example.

Then our concerns are not about nature as separate from us, then they should be about our practical relationships with ecosystems around us. So the valuing of ecosystems shouldn't be reduced to a monetary metric, or even any kind of one measurable metric that as long as that metric is fine, we are fine. It should be inherent in the very practices where we produce food or manage our forests and so on. So it's not primarily I think, a matter of giving value. It's a matter of design. 

Currently the discussion on valuing nature is mostly about punishing for wrongdoing or concept compensating for damage already done in somewhere else or pricing, the damage is so high that people choose less damaging alternatives. So it becomes an issue of avoiding damage. It's very hard to tie that to the idea of maintaining biodiversity around you. I think it's more about like, investing on and legislating for and incentivizing transformations in our provisioning systems. It's not only politics of nature, or politics of biodiversity, it should be ingrained in our economic policies and economic practices. 

Matthew  

For the last 30 years or so, we have really dialed up the economic instruments to try to protect and conserve nature. That may be part of a solution - but it’s not enough. 

Ville  

We have hard times in front of us. Even in the best of possible worlds, there will be hard changes. You still will need also the old style of conservation, you need conservation areas, marine preserves and all that. And biodiversity has an inherent potential for nature to find new ways. Preparing for the worst, we need that potential, but concerning biodiversity in our midst. In Finland, for example, with the current war and Europe in general, the dependence on imported fertilizer and nutrient inputs in agriculture is becoming more and more crucial. 

Matthew

In the opening stages of Russia’s war against Ukraine, in Europe we all heard the discussions and concerns around natural gas; both for energy production and consumption, and also for fertilizer production. Now, a lot of researchers and politicians are talking about the importance of nutrient self sufficiency.

Ville
With self sufficiency of nutrients, that will inevitably create less dependence, less vulnerability to price spikes, and less political vulnerability. And then incentivizing nutrient self sufficiency in farming practices could in effect, help alleviate the biodiversity crisis, because it would reward using various kinds of secondary flows from the cities and so on to retain nutrients and cycle them back to the agriculture and for example, in Finland, which is highly concentrated on animal production for various historical reasons, going back to the Second World War and beyond, vegetable and animal production have been sort of separated from each other. And then we have huge waste flows from the animal production. And like 70-80% of our agricultural land is devoted for animal production. So re-integrating those production forms, and sort of lessening the proportion of animals would open up the way for reforestation in some areas, or reintroducing like old meadow systems for grazing and so on. And then would also help keep up those nutrient flow. So the policy would not be first and foremost about biodiversity. But it would end up protecting biodiversity in our midst, and not in some faraway place, which is called nature.

 Matthew  

We've converted half of the habitable land on the planet for food production. We now have more people who live in cities than in rural areas. And that's only growing and also the population is continuing to grow to an estimate around 10 billion. Clearly the current food system is presenting a lot of challenges, not just for biodiversity loss, but also for climate change. Also on equitable distribution, right, we're still in a place where many people do not access the food and nutrition that they need on a daily basis. Thinking about this relationship between biodiversity and food systems, do you think that percent of how much land we use for food production should be shifted at all? Should we be using more land? Less land? 

Ville  

Well, there would be the potential there to feed all the population with a lesser amount of agricultural land that is being used now for the simple reason that animal agriculture takes up like 80% of the current land in use, either directly as grazing or indirectly as fodder production, and actually even of the fishing catch in world's oceans, a substantial percentage is being fed to other animals. 

Matthew

Simply by reducing the dominant position of animal production, substantial resources can be freed for biodiversity conservation.

Ville
And some of the land could be even left out of the production - geophysical, biological potential is there. And as for the population, we always have to remember that population is shrinking at some parts of the globe, it stabilized at some parts of the globe, and is growing at some parts. It is shrinking for example, in China currently, it seems. Population is growing mostly in places when there is wide scale hunger, poverty, insecurity, lack of education, bad medical systems, and sanitation systems, and women's rights are not in a good condition. Changing those conditions for the better, could fairly rapidly stabilize even the world population. So that is why the prediction projections of when and at what level the population peak will happen. they diverge even by close to 3 billion. So the future of the population issue is really, really uncertain, because it is tied to the question of how much global solidarity do we have? Do we wish to look for a more equitable world? Or do we continue on the current trajectory? 

We don't need x percent more production. Because the world doesn't have one big rice ball where everybody's going with their own spoon. The world is divided into myriad different food systems. In our recent article, the crisis inherent in the global food system, we sort of conceptualize this as a network of national food systems that are in inequitable situation, and the need for growing food production is in certain areas of the world, it's not a global need.   

Matthew

Questions about; how much land? How much population? How much food?... Well, according to Ville Lähde, they’re much too often approached as an aggregate, generalized global issue, when instead they’re inherently global and regional, political issues. Instead, we should be asking: what agency do communities have, do individuals have who are now in marginalized positions to be able to discuss and decide over their own future?

Ville
And biodiversity is like connected here, of course, that when food production has to be ramped up in some areas, those areas need aid from others to develop methods that are more sustainable, and other areas where we are overproducing. Then the question is justly transitioning to a more sustainable food system where you can perhaps produce less, but produce for better quality and more diverse quality, and not sort of systematically waste your resources, like in animal production, for example. And of course, that whole issue of wastage is crucial here. 

I was looking at a report of the World Resource Institute a while back and the percentage of food wastage. And this is like the direct food wastage, not the systematic waste that happens with animal production. The direct wastage percentage is similar in Sub Saharan Africa, for example, than in North America. 

Matthew

Let’s break apart what Ville is referring to here. The global statistic most referred to is that 33% or 1/3 food is wasted. But when you break it apart, that looks very different across the world. So in North America, food waste occurs primarily at the consumer end – in peoples’ homes, at a retail level and with the food service sector. While across Sub-Saharan Africa, food loss is more concentrated on the production side. Loss here can due to pests, to insufficient storage or a lack of infrastructure. 

Ville

In those wealthy food system, it really doesn't signal anything for the production chain. So that problem has to be handled at like level of policy, where as in vulnerable food systems, the aid has to come to the root level, there are very different problems there. 

For me, it's crucial to understand that we have not one crisis but a legion of problems. You cannot trace all of these problems to one route. And you can not solve all of these problems by turning the same key or with one strike of the sword as Alexander did with the Knot of Gordian. And if you look at the graphs how climate change for example of climate change, emissions, progress, or how mineral extraction progress is and how biodiversity decline progresses and so on, you can have in one society say Finland, you can have diminishing climate emissions. So the graph goes down. But for example, biodiversity decline can still go up. Mineral consumption or natural resource consumption can go up. So there's no logical connection between them.

Matthew  

So wrapping up, we came across your work, first with “Life matters everywhere” essay that you published in BIOS… I want to ask you more personally; through that writing process, if your relationship with biodiversity changed at all, if  through writing, you've thought about it differently?

Ville

Oh, well I learned a lot because I read like 100 different articles. I learned more about the perverse outcomes that I talked about that if you focus only on species number, what kind of problems you can have. But what I learned even more about was how, for example, economists tend to understand the issue and sort of the roots where their misunderstandings are. 

As long as we conceptualize environmental problems as externalities, and as long as we price the externalities, right, there is no problem. Of course, some of those externalities or problems are so bad that we cannot price them, they are priceless. But even beyond that, we should understand that those problems do not stay external, because nature is not external to us. They all the time radiate back into the socio ecological metabolism of our own societies. So even if you're like compensate for damages, you have still perhaps damaged some ecosystems that we used to rely on even without knowing it. Because nature is silent and invisible and mobile, because we really didn't understand our connections deeply enough. So even if you're like reforest somewhere else, or if you mess up a waterway and clean up a waterway somewhere else - down the line, you may notice that actually, you have degraded the very foundations of your well being and also your economy.

Matthew  

I think it's a good place to end. Thank you so much for joining us.

Ville  

And thank you for contacting me. I usually write in my own home in a little town in Finland, and I sort of translated my Dasgupta text as an afterthought. I was so happy that somebody found it from the jungle of the internet.

Matthew

A huge thanks to Ville Lahde. If it isn’t already clear, we highly recommend checking out Ville’s essay, Life Matters Everywhere, which we’ll link to in the show notes and on the episode webpage. You can also find more of his writing in English on the Bios website and on the publisher Aeon.co.

And thanks to you for listening. As always, please take a few seconds to rate and review us wherever you’re listening to podcasts, and you can always share your thoughts and suggestions for guests by sending an email to podcast@tabledebates.org.

This episode was edited by Ylva Carlqvist Warborg and myself, Matthew Kessler, with help from TABLE intern Tatiana Dickins, as well as my colleagues Camilo Ardila Galvis and Tara Garnett. TABLE is a collaboration of the University of Oxford, Wageningen University in the Netherlands, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, University of the Andes in Colombia, National Autonomous of Mexico and Cornell University. Stay tuned for more episodes from the nature season in the coming weeks.