and Wildlife Service 2018). In the home, hobbyists assemble collections of butterflies and mollusk shells, as well as books, paintings, sculptures, and stamps with flora and fauna themes.
Diversity is the spice of life, and species diversity is a key element in the recreational value of organisms. Many gardeners, exotic pet fanciers, and shell and butterfly collectors want to own species that their friends do not have, and they will pay handsomely for the privilege. Similarly, birders, botanizers, hunters, and anglers covet experiences with species they have not encountered before.
Services
Most of the economic values described previously involve species that serve as goods – physical objects that people can use – but there are some exceptions. When wild relatives of domestic species provide genetic information for plant and animal breeders, or when wild species give enjoyment to outdoor recreationists, they are providing services rather than goods. Other examples include the pollination services rendered to farmers by bees, bats, gnats, and other species, the aeration of soils and decomposition of organic matter by earthworms and many other organisms, and the removal of pollutants from air and water by plants and other organisms (for example, bacteria play an important role in degrading crude oil after accidental spills). Many of these services are not routinely purchased and could be described as ecological values, which we will address in subsequent sections. On the other hand, the absence of these services often has direct, easily measured economic costs; for example, farmers often have to rent beehives because wild pollinators have been decimated by insecticides, and the global value of pollination services has been estimated at $153 billion (Gallai et al. 2009).
Spiritual Values
Who does not delight in the beauty of a calypso orchid? We are all inspired by the majesty of a golden eagle. We find spiritual comfort in the transformation of a caterpillar into a monarch butterfly. The sight of baby animals usually activates our own nurturing instincts. In other words, people love living things, a phenomenon called “biophilia” by E. O. Wilson (1984).
It is easy to find evidence of our aesthetic, spiritual, and emotional affinity for other species. This linkage is revealed in the symbols we choose for our governments, religions, businesses, and athletic teams; think of the sugar maple leaf emblem of Canada, the wild animal totems of Native American tribes, the Jaguar sports car, the banana slug mascot of the University of California at Santa Cruz. Indeed, most nations (142 of 196 by one count) have selected animal species as their national symbol, although this does not always translate into successful conservation (Hammerschlag and Gallagher 2017). We also show our affinity for certain species in the motifs we use to decorate our clothing, jewelry, and dwellings, and in the places we select to visit in our leisure time. Our language – busy as a bee, an eager beaver, happy as a clam – reveals the depth of this linkage (Sommer and Sommer 2011).
Sometimes, our feelings for other species are revealed in the ways we spend our money; sometimes, they are not. Imagine a woman who lives her whole life in landlocked Kazakhstan who will never see a living blue whale, but who derives pleasure from simply knowing that blue whales exist. Her love for whales is real and valuable, but costs her nothing. It is hard for society to account for feelings like hers when making policy decisions because economic issues are usually paramount, and her feelings are not easily expressed in monetary units. But this does not make her feelings unimportant. It also does not diminish the political impact of her feelings. For example, the decision to curtail exploiting Newfoundland’s baby harp seals for their fur was made not because it was unsustainable (harp seals are doing well) but because of the deep feelings of people who had no direct contact with harp seals and no economic stake in their fate. Economists are trying to devise methods for estimating the monetary value of blue whales and harp seals for people whose only relationship with them is knowing that they exist; we will discuss existence values further in Chapter 16, “Economics.”
Scientific and Educational Values
The world is a complex place, but our knowledge of it is increasing all the time, and some of the credit goes to our fellow inhabitants (Fig. 3.9). There are many examples. Birds offered both the inspiration to fly and a model from which to learn, and, similarly, the ability of bats to fly in the dark inspired the development of sonar and radar. Mendel’s famous peas opened the door to genetics, and the convenience of working with Drosophila fruit flies has greatly facilitated genetic research. Much of what we know about human developmental biology we learned from watching salamander eggs. Many anthropologists who seek insight into human social interactions study our nearest relatives: all the other members of the primate order. Engineers, biologists, and others continue the quest to develop technology inspired or informed by nature, an endeavor often called biomimicry (Harman 2014). Some of the latest examples are manifested at the atomic and molecular scale with the structure of viruses and bacteria furthering advances in nanotechnology (Pacheco‐Torgal and Jalali 2011) (Fig. 3.10).
Figure 3.9 Other organisms teach us about our world. Here biologists attach a radio‐transmitter to a giant armadillo in Emas National Park Brazil.
(Courtesy of Leandro Silveira)
Figure 3.10 (Left) This person climbed up and down almost 10 m of glass, at times carrying a 20 kg load. How is this possible? He used hand‐held paddles made from novel polymer microstructure technology inspired by the toes of geckos. (Right) Geckos can climb smooth surfaces because their toes have bundles of “hairs” that stick to the surface by essentially sharing electrons with it. This nano‐scale technological innovation has many potential applications, from simple jobs like replacing car windshields to capturing space junk or replacing ropes and ladders for rescue operations in urban environments.
(DARPA/Public domain [Left]; Mr.B‐king/Shutterstock [Right])
Of course, scientific inquiry is just an advanced form of the intellectual curiosity about the world that begins in infancy. Our education would suffer greatly without a diverse world to explore, without bean seeds to plant and follow to germination, without frog eggs to watch develop into tadpoles. Whether we want to learn about ourselves or the world we share with other species, we need models to observe.
Ecological Values
Every population of every species is part of an ecosystem of interacting components, and thus has an ecological role to play. There are producers, consumers, decomposers, competitors, dispersers, pollinators, and more. In this sense, every species has ecological value, that is, instrumental use to other species that share the same ecosystem, including people.
Although all species have ecological roles, not all have roles of equal importance. Some species are ecologically important simply because of their great abundance. Often these are called dominant species, a term that usually implies that they constitute a large portion of the biomass of an ecosystem. Examples are sugar maples in a sugar maple
