wise use of mires and peatlands - Peatland Ecology Research Group

116 VALUES AND CONFLICTS: WHERE DIFFERENT VALUES MEETof justice are those that would be agreed to byfree and rational persons, placed in the “originalposition” behind a veil of ignorance: not knowingtheir place in society; their class, race, or sex;their abilities, intelligence, or strengths; or eventheir conception of good. In contrast to theUniversal Declaration on Human Rights, that islargely founded on a western metaphysicalconcept of rights, Rawls’ principles follow theKantian approach of rationality anduniversalisation (the “categorical imperative”):Act only on a rule that you wish to see generallyfollowed by everyone. Accordingly, he derivestwo principles of justice to regulate thedistribution of liberties, and of social and economicgoods.47Basic liberties include: political liberty (the rightto vote and to be eligible for public office) togetherwith freedom of speech and assembly; liberty ofconscience and freedom of thought; freedom ofthe person along with the right to hold (personal)property; and freedom from arbitrary arrest andseizure as defined by the concept of the rule oflaw (Rawls 1971).48To deal with intergenerational relations, Rawlsintroduced the concept of “just savings”, implyingwhat is reasonable for members of succeedinggenerations to expect from one another bybalancing how much they would be willing to savefor their immediate descendants against what theywould feel entitled to claim of their immediatepredecessors.49This section draws substantially on the ideas ofHampicke (2000).50World Commission on Environment andDevelopment 1987.51Howarth 2000.52Some technological optimists, for example,expect that the science of ecology will eventuallyprovide sufficient understanding of ecologicalprocesses and relationships to enable an effectivecontrol of ecosystems and natural resources. Thisbelief disregards the fundamental scientificlimitations to ecological knowledge: theenormous complexity of ecosystems, theunpredictability of their dynamics due to chaosand contingency, their uniqueness which precludesfar-reaching generalisations, and the limitedpossibilities of quantifying their qualities (Gorke1999).53Hampicke 2000.54Cf. Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1968): “Happinessis a mirage – as for the so-called “happiness offuture generations” it is even more of a mirage.Who knows anything about it? Who has spokenwith these future generations? Who knows whichidols they will worship? Ideas of what happinessis have changed too much through the ages. Noone should have the effrontery to try and plan itin advance.”55Barry 1977.56I.e. the material life support functions.57Dasgupta, 1995.58“Almost every article, paper or book onsustainability bemoans the fact that the conceptis broad and lacks a broad consensus; this is usuallyfollowed by the authors’ own preferred definitionswhich in turn add to the lack of consensus!” (Bell& Morse 1999).59Neumayer 1999.60The distinction between weak and strongsustainability is similar to that of the distinctionbetween the “sustainability of the means to anend” and the “sustainability of the end” (Bell &Morse 1999). E.g. “sustainable peatland forestry”generally refers to the sustainability of forestryon that spot, not to the sustainability of peatland,as the peat may eventually disappear as a resultof drainage (cf. Päiväinen 1997, 2000).61See also §5.6.5 (2) below.62I.e. the maximisation of the well-being of allpresent and future humankind.63This is also expressed in the Ramsar definition ofsustainable utilisation: “the greatest continuousbenefit to present generations while maintainingits potential to meet the needs and aspirations offuture generations”.64Cf. Dasgupta 1995.65See §5.6.5 (2) below. If, for example, society in100 years will need a specific sum of money tomitigate the consequences of climatic change, amuch lower sum can be invested today and thissum will increase to its final size 100 years fromnow, according to the laws of compound interest.66Pigou 1978.67Hampicke 2000.68Hampicke 2000.69This does not exclude the possibility that advancestowards solving these problems or substitutingthe concrete services and resources might be madeat some time in the future.70Ott 2000.71Rehmann-Sutter 1998.72Sober 1985.73Those who consider their loss acceptable shouldindicate how they are substitutable. There canalso be discussion regarding whether a particularfunction is essential or substitutable.74In considering which part of biodiversity is vital,it can be asked from the anthropocentric pointof view on which this document is based, whetherwe have to preserve all mires, all mire speciesand all peat? To what extent is their maintenancenecessary for maximising human happiness (orminimising human suffering)? To what extent istheir abundance redundant and useless?The probability of an unknown property of aspecies being directly useful for humankind infuture is low, because it is the product of two lowprobabilities: (i) that the species indeed is useful,and (ii) that its use will be discovered (Norton1987). In a world with tens of millions of species,the loss of a currently useless species maytherefore be of negligible importance. It is,furthermore, irrational to defer some real andknown benefit in favour of a theoreticallypossible but still unknown use of certain species(“a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”).Contrary to what ecologists thought in the 1970s,species diversity is no longer regarded as a