Ecosystem valuation: Combining economics, philosophy, and ecology

Discussions regarding ecological crises often begin by casually identifying anthropocentric traits as responsible for the crises and by briefly explaining the need for holistic or macroscopic model-ing. Yet, when modeling begins, policy scientists, philosophers, and social scientists usually are not included, and the models often are not ecological, but are rather narrowly biological or physical. The main purpose of this paper is to emphasize the need for broader and richer modeling and the need to recognize that en-vironmental protection and enhancement is anthropocentric policymaking. The question is not whether it will be anthro-pocentric, but which anthropocentric values, beliefs, and phi-losophies will guide the policymaking paradigms and analytical techniques. The Need for Context and Criteria Deliveries and consequences between what we call a natural organism and a social organism are the means for each other so that neither can be understood nor valued separately from the other. To think about the qualities of a thing "is to look at a thing in its relations with other things, and such judgment ofte