We live in a world today where very little if no value is placed on the natural world in its natural state. In fact, much of the past few centuries, in particular in the United States, has focused attention on conquering the wilderness, taming the rivers, making the deserts bloom, increasing the productivity of land, and other such noble causes. People at large, the scientific community, and government decision-makers have created a mindset that everything in nature must be improved to better mankind. These sorts of improvements have fallen into a system of accounting suitable to market/capitalistic economics where cost and benefits are equitably weighed and a decision, at the individual or federal level, is made in favor of the highest benefit.
This system of accounting is supposed to guide our decision-making with respect to natural resources to use them in ways that will increase quality of life. But is this aim being met? The system should be rather simple. One has to wonder if this system will see the value in a region such as the marine terraces of Mendocino where for hundreds of thousands of years waves and tectonic uplift have carved steps in the greywacke sandstone of the Franciscan Formation, leading to a diverse array of ecosystems at each step.
In the modern society everything is about “things”. The more “things” you have, the better. Even in our attempts to protect to the natural environment, our efforts are largely focus on cute, fury animals, rather than the bacteria which we derive many medicines. A quandary develops in natural landscapes where the pygmy forests of Mendocino and the mima mounds along the Merced River will always receive second billing to the Yosemite and other grander landscapes.
Along the Mendocino coast one can find about 5 or more distinct terrace formations that have been forming for several hundred-thousand years. The uplift is continuously creating new terraces from the ocean’s greywacke sandstone bottom and therefore you will find the youngest terraces at the ocean’s edge. The abrupt change in flora from the younger first terrace to the older third, forth, and fifth terraces baffled botanists and geologists alike for many years. The younger terraces largely support grasslands and mixed conifer forests. Soils you might find there include Humic Dystrustepts and Typic Plinthohumults. Oxiaquic Haplorthods can be found on the fourth and fifth terraces, where the pygmy forests are found. Pygmy forests are dominated by small cypresses and dwarfed closed-cone pines, plants that have been able to adapt to the acid and hardpan horizons of the underlying podsols.
A question we might all ask is, Does an ecosystem such as this deserve protection? "Deserve" in the neo-classical economic sense is largely inferred to mean, Will we make more money off of it in its natural state or if we build a new university campus on it? Borrowing from Erlich and Wilson, we might remember three important reasons for preserving landscapes in their natural state:
Landscapes provide much aesthetical value to people and we might even argue that we are compelled by ethics to protect these regions;
We have derived innumerous benefits in the form of medicines from microbiotic communities endemic to rare soil/plant ecosystems and might forgo future benefits by destroying these places; and lastly
These systems are closely integrated as the Jenny article points out and we are foolish to assume that we can preserve those parts of the ecosystem which are cute and fury while letting the others go to waste without compromising the stability and integrity of the system as a whole.