a woman can say that she loves conservation, but if she doesn't donate to any conservation efforts, then we wouldn't believe that she truly loves conservation.If a woman told us that she loved flowers, and we saw that she forgot to water them, we would not believe in her “love” for flowers. Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love. — Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
conservation is a public good. everyone can benefit from a public good even if they don't help pay for it. if you asked someone how much they value conservation, and they know that their answer will determine their contribution...
if you think about it carefully, samuelson's rule is based on the premise that the true demand for conservation should determine the supply of it....it is in the selfish interest of each person to give false signals, to pretend to have less interest in a given collective consumption activity than he really has, etc. — Paul Samuelson, The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure
anyone who does truly value conservation probably thinks that demand for it is incorrect. society as a whole undervalues it. maybe this is the case. and so most people don't mind letting elected officials and professionals determine the supply of conservation. but more money for conservation inherently means less money for cancer research. even if the supply of money was somehow unlimited, the supply of genius people is not. how can there possibly be some sort of objectively correct division of geniuses between these two public goods, and all the other public goods?
for a while i kept trying to persuade my orchid friend toby to put orchids on his trees. one time when i saw him at an orchid show he said something like, "i finally put some orchids on my tree and they were growing really good! but then the hoa cut the tree down. it cut all the trees down in order to save money."
democracy doesn't scale well. the bigger the group of voters, the dumber the results. this is why the most popular content on youtube is garbage. the lowest common denominator is really really really low.
back in april here on this forum @OWgave shared a youtube documentary of dudleya poaching. i watched the entire video and commented...
yesterday the creator of the video, siblingrivalry772, replied...sure, the phalaenopsis on your table wasn't poached, but its ancestors certainly were. the figs you enjoy? poached from the wild more than 10,000 years ago. loquat? kiwi? poached from china perhaps more than 100 years ago. the achacha you still haven't enjoyed? poached from bolivia maybe a couple decades ago. not to mention all the veggies that have been poached, like potatoes. thank goodness for humanity that it's only just recently that our society has become so stupid, as a result of lowest common denominator places like youtube, that laws against poaching have been enacted and enforced with taxpayer dollars that could have been spent on things that are actually useful, like public food forests.
my reply...Thank you for your comment. You're right that many of the plants we enjoy today were originally taken from the wild for food and decorative purposes. However, there's a right way and a wrong way to reproduce things from the wild. This story highlights the wrong way: taking thousands of plants to sell for profit without regard for the environment. Instead, responsible cultivation involves seed collection and growing plants in a way that doesn't destroy native habitats. There's a sustainable method to cultivate and sell plants that ensures we protect and preserve our natural ecosystems.
you can't see my comment on the video because siblingrivalry772 deleted it.if taking thousands of dudleyas from the wild counts as "destroying" native habitat, then what word do you use for what happens to the environment with slash and burning, mining or development? bulldozers "annihilated" native habitat for your home to be built? in the world of real and actual habitat destruction you're don quixote. the "giant" you tilted against didn't destroy anything at all. these individuals simply made the effort to move thousands of dudleyas into the capable hands of collectors in asia, many of who would have done the expert work of pollinating and reproducing from seed. the result would have been a world with an even greater abundance of dudleyas. but all this incredibly beneficial ex-situ conservation didn't happen because of the true giant... the government and all the ignorance it's built on. stop being don quixote. start studying james buchanan. no, not the president, the nobel economist who clarified that supply and demand is just as necessary for public goods (ie conservation) as for private goods. after your head is filled with this incredibly important information, do a documentary about the problem with not knowing the actual demand for conservation. then, and only then, will you be tilting at giants instead of windmills.
here on agaveville we don't have the opportunity to use donations to say, "please bark up the conservation topic tree". just like my friend toby doesn't have the opportunity to use his hoa dues to say, "please leave trees for me to attach orchids to!" just like we don't have the opportunity to use our own tax dollars to say, "conservation is more valuable than cancer research!"
since 99% of all possible credible signals of value and worth are missing from our society, the result is inevitable.... countless people barking up the wrong trees. an unfathomable amount of resources and talent is wasted on less important things.