Pricing the deck chairs/lyrical doomsdays

Reading Nature's bit on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment's report this week, I'm amused that the first paragraph, in the time-honoured traditions of that august journal, dutifully reports the intended principal thrust of the assessment's research and conclusions on the value of pricing damage to the productivity of the environment into economic modelling...

As opposed to the leads in the popular press, which, in my ever so humble opinion, actually cut much closer to what you'd think would be one of the more arresting aspects of the findings.

To wit: 'we're fucked'.

Okay. No, no single paper has yet quite used that lead. Or at least not verbatim. But The Guardian's Tim Radford was typical in selecting his focus, here, which comes close enough:

The human race is living beyond its means. A report backed by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries—some of them world leaders in their fields—today warns that the almost two-thirds of the natural machinery that supports life on Earth is being degraded by human pressure.

— Two-thirds of world's resources 'used up', The Guardian

Mind you, to Nature's credit, they do get to the 'we're fucked' part by the second paragraph.

Yeah, I'm still on the doomsday thing. Honestly didn't mean to be, but I bought a Globe and Mail yesterday because I wound up eating lunch alone, and the report on the millennium assessment was spread across much of page three.

As I said, I'm a bit amused by Nature's focus given the results, even if, yes, this focus is what the researchers themselves recommend as a solution—pricing the environment in.

But then, they've got nothing on me. Listening to Ronald Wright's masterful lecture yesterday—the third in the Massey series I mentioned in the last post—specifically to his description of the deforestation of Easter island—a story with obvious and previously noted ramifications for our own civilization—I'm struck, as much as anything, by the sheer lyrical beauty of his delivery:

We might think that in such a limited place, where, from the height of Terevaka, islanders could survey their whole world at a glance, steps would have been taken to halt the cutting, to protect the saplings, to replant. We might think that as trees became scarce, the erection of statues would have been curtailed, and timber reserved for essential purposes, such as boat-building and roofing. But that is not what happened. The people who felled the last tree could see it was the last. Could know with complete certainty that there would never be another. But they felled it anyway.

All shade vanished from the land, except the hard-edged shadows cast by the petrified ancestors, whom the people loved all the more, because they made them feel less alone.

For a generation or so, there was enough old lumber to haul the great stones and still keep a few canoes seaworthy for deep water. But the day came when the last good boat was gone. The people then knew there would be little seafood, and, worse, no way of escape. The word for wood, rakau, became the dearest in their language. Wars broke out over ancient planks and worm-eaten bits of jetsam. They ate all their dogs, and nearly all the nesting birds, and the unbearable stillness of the place deepened with animal silences.

— Ronald Wright, from the third lecture in 'A short history of progress'

Yep, that's just me: give me so dark and frightening a tale, with overhanging, ominous portents for my own future and that of my children, and my first response is: 'Wow... you said that so beautifully'.

In my defense, it seems to me that if your civilization is gonna go the way of the Dodo, at least you deserve to have the story of its passing so beautifully written.