Is Air Valuable?

Hearing "One World" on Radio World Service I was a little annoyed by the UN head of conservation's attitude to conservation efforts. Everything he said was within a consumptive economic paradigm: species may provide benefits to man; they should be preserved for future generations; they are so intricately involved in the web of life that we can't afford to lose them. How 1 dimensional. Such mechanical talk makes me think I should be dead.

Air is not valuable. It is easily available, free to transport (via the wind and diffusion) and is recycled free of charge. It is not economically valuable unlike its sibling land. What lies above us is free and worthless, what lies fixed beneath our feet is the most precious resource with more blood spilt over it, literally as well as metaphorically, than anything else. This distinction is purely mechanical like the difference between plains Indians following buffalo and Canadian Indians who were agricultural and owned land. An surprising irony I now see that vegetarians are better fighters than meat eaters because vegetarians form more fixed territories to grow their food on!

But what economics explains also rips economics apart. Air has no economic value because it has no exchange value, an it has no exchange value because no-one can deprive anyone else of it and so be in the situation of selling it to them. If air was available in bottles for even 1p we would just walk outside and breathe for free. Yet at the same time as it being worthless, it is the most important resource. We can survive without food for many weeks, we can survive without water for many days, we can survive without warmth for many hours, but we can't survive without air for more than a few minutes.

What is least valuable is also most valuable. If there ever needed to be a demonstration of economic value being just a type of mechanical measurement here it is.

There is then a type of valuation which doesn't show up in measurement until the resource is scarce. It is the same with a friend who dies and only then do we realise how much they meant to us, or a time of great happiness that we only appreciate when we are sad. The problem with economics is that things only show up in £ when it is too late. We "value" that we have already lost (as I often quote Bono as having said so well in The Fly).

This is where economic conservation is logically flawed. There is only money is saving that which is rare. It means that which is abundant we don't care about and that is the whole problem with mankind at the moment; we can't appreciate what is everyday, normal, free and easy. We have to aspire and struggle for what is hard to attain to get any value in life. Yet after a 1000mile journey to find gold we feel great value as we take it out of the hand of a man who lives in a place where it is so common they make spoons from it. Same material thing but one man travelled 1000miles for it. He should have stayed at home and appreciated his stainless steel spoon that the man from the land of gold has never seen, or even the wooden spoon that he crafted one cold winter from a branch. What is the difference except in how we look at it?

So sadly the UN head of Conservation is a very good conserver of the World because he only sees the value of what is already beaten up and virtually destroyed; that which has economic value.