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Anytime we make a fair choice, we subconsciously value one outcome over another– even choosing to do nothing means picking over whatever alternative reality there would have been. Although it may not necessarily mean that the choice we make is what we really wanted, but it was a choice we ultimately made. And by ‘fair choice’ I mean when we choose what song to vibe to, how and who to spend our life with and whether we want to join a social justice cause. 

This new project I’m working on, in an oversimplified matter, tries to make sense of the values we place on ecosystem services. The idea behind it is, if we can evaluate nature in ways that matters to us, we might be able to make better decisions on what we do with nature. For example, we could assess two plots of areas with coconut trees and assuming that everything else in the two plots is the same, one could reasonably argue that the plot with more coconut trees is more valuable to them, and vice versa.

The issue though is who gets to decide on what gets decided on and how do you standardize those values? And you can see how complicated this idea of evaluating ecosystem services to make fair choices could be. 

Yet ‘we’ do this already– ‘we’ have paved roads to connect us from Yigo to Malesso’ because we valued the accessibility to drive from A to B, ‘we’ decided to build up Tumon because we valued the tourism industry as an economic input and we have had choices made when the military desecrates burial grounds because of US imperialism. 

Modern choices for development have always been made despite outcomes that fairly considered environmental degradation, indigenous access, culture, sustainability, etc.

And so, even for something as priceless to me as the environment, trying to enumerate the idea of values–to hopefully make for more informed decisions– is enough for me to try and may be the better way for me to communicate why the environment should be more protected.

This was recorded on the lands of the CHamoru people.

p.s. happy 2022!