Measuring the unmeasurable

Do we need to quantify our impacts?

Recently, a friend challenged me to develop a method to assess how behavioral changes would impact carbon fluxes. This is right in the wheelhouse of both my scientific toolbox and my activist calling. However, it’s the kind of project that takes 10 minutes to formulate and 10 years to complete. Nonetheless, it got me thinking about the tyranny of carbon, once again. Two weeks ago I wrote an article “Stop Talking about the Climate”, highlighting the fact that environmental conversations seem to always converge on climate issues obscuring the other environmental crises we’re facing. And so my friend’s suggestion made me wonder how I would develop an environmental impact measure accounting for biodiversity loss, water pollution, dirty air, loss of soils, wilderness depletions, a myriad of oceanic threats, toxic pollutants, and climate instability.

The most common approach for assessing multiple impacts is to develop an “integrated index”. This is a metric that adds up all the impacts of a given product from its production, through its use to its disposal using a common currency. Such as money. So the dollar cost to damaged ecosystems from harvesting the component parts, the pollution from manufacturing, the packaging, the transportation, and the eco-friendly disposal of any given product is calculated. A total lifecycle price. Money has the advantages that it is nearly universally known and it has a vast infrastructure. But it is problematic to place a price on a swamp or a wildflower field, let alone the extinction of a frog or a housefly. Methodologies do exist for pricing life, including 1. asking people what they would pay in order to save a frog or a habitat and 2. estimating the monetary value of the services provided by a habit, such as water filtration or flood control. One of the pitfalls of monetizing nature is the temptation to think it is equitable to replace an ancient ecosystem with a newly built one. This happens in the construction industry and is meant to offset ecological damage.

These are horrifying methodologies to me. Who are we to place a price tag on a specie’s existence? And there is no way that a built wetland has a fraction of the diversity or robustness of an ancient swamp. Pricing everything also leads us to the fallacy of the bottom line - cheaper is better. Nuances, such as the well being of subsistence farmers or workers’ rights can be easily overlooked. Yet even though I balk at this commodification of nature, I have to acknowledge the wisdom in the observation that we already make economic calculations in our development strategies. Perhaps it would be better to make this explicit and transparent. Humph. I still don’t like it.

One alternative to the monetary summation estimation is to look instead at the total carbon emitted over the lifetime of a product. We could then label products with their carbon costs, implement a carbon tax or develop other carbon reduction incentives based on the product’s carbon footprint. I like this index because carbon measures lie at the intersection of the living world, which is about 1/2 carbon, and industry, which is fueled by carbon. And I relish the lifetime of the product approach, but once again we’re back in the carbon tyranny and potentially ignoring other crises.

A third integrative approach is the eco-footprint. This is a very clever idea that estimates how much land it takes to support our lifestyle. Included in the eco-footprint estimate is the land to grow our food and the products we buy, land to absorb and filter our wastes, and land to absorb the carbon we emit. Now we are getting somewhere. Various impacts are considered for the eco-footprint, like waste treatment and the extent of farmland. And even more satisfying to the idealist in me, that which is being measured, land, is a physical resource. Indeed, as I’ll discuss later, wildlands are the keystone resource for a vibrant “everything”. The eco-footprint is useful for comparing lifestyle choices and how sustainable they are. However, and this is a fatal flaw for me, the eco-footprint is dominated by how much land is required to absorb one’s carbon emissions. For instance, if everyone lived like the average American, we’d need 5 Earths to keep us going. But a whopping 3.6 of those 5 Earths is down to carbon absorption. That’s a bit of a misdirection, in my opinion.

In A Drop of Grace, I listed the natural resources upon which human life relies. In order of increasing timescales, our eight essential natural resources are fresh air, fresh water, healthy soils, a stable climate, biodiversity, robust oceans, a toxicant free environment, and a healthy wilderness. That’s a lot to have to consider. But we can reframe that by considering our impacts on a healthy wilderness. A healthy wilderness assures the other seven resources are robust. What’s more, a healthy wilderness is the goal of environmentalism. Wilderness has inherent value, it provides life support services to humans and other beings, and it holds future options for foods and medicines. The difference between a healthy wilderness index and an eco-footprint may appear trivial to some readers, but many eco-footprint users conclude that carbon is their main negative impact. And as you know, I don’t think that is the case.

But perhaps the carbon, food, and land metrics are all an attempt to measure something which is immeasurable? Life, after all, is not one dimensional. Perhaps we are taking our need to categorize and quantify too far. And to further muddy the waters, these methodologies miss many important ethical considerations like racial and inter-generational injustices, wealth inequality, and the rights of indigenous people to name a few. Should we abandon this attempt to measure the immeasurable altogether? Definitely not.

In the meantime, we can turn to organizations that have done the legwork for us and produced consumer guides for the UK and the US or this other US one. Or we can quite elegantly live by the golden rule “Live simply, that others may simply live”. We know when we’re being indulgent or extravagant. We can commit to reducing our consumption. We can decline trips that require long haul flights or at least slash their frequency. And perhaps, most effectively, we can reduce our meat and dairy consumption. Another way to put it is to live like a peasant.

We might not have a quantitative measure of total eco-impacts, but we certainly know enough to have the measure of consuming conscientiously.