The environmentalist's paradox, introduced by Raudsepp-Hearne and colleagues (2010), has so far generated Viewpoints (Duraiappah 2011, Nelson 2011), a Counterpoint (Raudsepp-Hearne et al. 2011), and an additional article (Ang and Van Passel 2012). Indeed, given the complexity of the relationships between human well-being (HWB) and ecosystem services (ES), alternative narratives can be expected. We agree that (a) the relationship between HWB and ES is scale dependent (Duraiappah 2011), (b) data scarcity is a key issue (Nelson 2011), and (c) the subject is probably more complex than previously anticipated (Ang and Van Passel 2012). In this Viewpoint, we propose that when focused on historical ecosystems (sensu Hoobs et al. 2013), there is no paradox.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment synthesis report (MA 2005) distinguished four types of ES: provisioning, regulating, cultural, and supporting. However, only the first three types relate directly to HWB. We obtained similar results when analyzing ES and HWB in rural areas of southern Chile (Delgado et al. 2013, Delgado and Marín 2016). Still, some provisioning and cultural services are also provided by other systems other than ecosystems, and as a result, trends in their delivery may partially relate to historical ecosystem degradation. In this context, we propose that Raudsepp-Hearne and colleagues (2010) made an erroneous choice when discussing “food production” as a provisioning ecosystem service (i.e., their hypothesis 2). From our perspective, agriculture, meat from farm animals, and fish from aquaculture do not correspond to provisioning ecosystem services, because historical ecosystems did not provide them; indeed, their production is normally supplemented by exotic fertilizers and food items (e.g., pellets). Although the previous discussion may seem semantic, it does in fact affect the whole paradox issue. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) report clearly states that it dealt with a full range of ecosystems, including agricultural land and urban areas. However, for environmentalists, forests are considered threatened by agriculture. Therefore, we strongly doubt that when environmentalists warn us about ecological degradation, the basis for the “environmentalist's expectation,” they are thinking in terms of agriculture, livestock, and fish aquaculture. Rather, they are concerned about the future of “natural” ecosystems and their species (e.g., Diamond 2005). A few examples may serve to emphasize our perspective.

In rural, semipristine areas such as the Aysén watershed in southern Chile (Delgado et al. 2013), 100 percent of the rural population uses wood from local native forests for home heating, and 14 percent lives from selling wood. Furthermore, 56 percent extract water free, directly from the watershed, and only 12 percent pay a water company. When described in economic terms, these two provisioning services contribute an average reduction of household living costs of $148 per month. In more degraded ecosystems, such as the Río Cruces watershed (Delgado and Marín 2016), where those services have decreased, rural families have to spend $68 monthly, on average, for wood and water. Therefore, when analyzed from the perspective of historical ecosystems and their components, the paradox vanishes, and in fact, a positive relationship appears between the use of ecosystem services and the income of local societies (i.e., the “environmentalist's expectation”). However, well-being is more than money.

Delgado and Marín (2016) propose that presently, the HWB concept is multidimensional and that it incorporates the idea of people developing their potential in relation to available opportunities. From this perspective, the availability of ecosystem services can be considered as one of those opportunities. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) was based on five HWB constituents: basic material for a good life, health, security, good social relations, and freedom of choice and action. The work by Raudsepp-Hearne and colleagues (2010) starts by citing its synthesis report in relation to the decline of ES and the gains in HWB at a global scale. However, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report also shows (figure B in MA 2005) that direct and indirect drivers of change, other than ES, affect HWB. Next is the problem of the human development index (HDI) that Raudsepp-Hearne and colleagues (2010) use in their analysis of well-being. This is a composite index of four variables: life expectancy at birth, expected years of schooling, mean years of schooling, and gross per capita national income (GNI). However, according to the United Nations Development Report (http://hdr.undp.org/es/composite/HDI), “the HDI was created to emphasize that people and their capabilities should be the ultimate criteria for assessing the development of a country, not economic growth alone.” Therefore, can the dimensions of the index be related to ES alone? We propose that the answer is no. First, both variables related to education could hardly relate to ES. Indeed, our results for rural areas in Chile (Delgado and Marín 2016) show that the education level is the same for people living in semipristine and degraded ecosystems. In addition, the per capita gross national income involves many systems aside from ecosystems. Last is the complex issue of life expectancy at birth. Several authors have proposed that ecosystems contribute positively to human health through their “green infrastructure” (Coutts and Hahn 2015). Indeed, our results (Delgado and Marín 2016) show that people living in close contact with nature refer to it as a “tranquil way of living.” However, when comparing semipristine and more degraded (urbanized) ecosystems, low access to healthcare services and problems of connectivity tend to decrease the quality of life associated with living in contact with nature. Therefore, we propose that the HWB components of the HDI are hardly appropriate to analyze in terms of ecosystem services. Still, this does not mean that the HDI is erroneous or that it is measuring the wrong components (hypothesis 1 from Raudsepp-Hearne et al. 2010). It means only that it was designed for a very different purpose and that its use in relation to ecosystem services is erroneous.

The analysis and synthesis of the relationships between HWB and ES urgently require interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary collaboration to avoid wrong conclusions. HWB, in its widest sense, is a function of several systems—not only historical ecosystems. Some HWB components, such as health and education, will depend mostly on other providers (e.g., private and public health systems or government education systems). Other components, such as income and jobs, may depend on both historical ecosystems (e.g., wood providers in rural areas using native forests) and other systems (e.g., subsistence agriculture using artificial fertilizers and cattle fed external feed). Therefore, there may be disconnections between HWB and ES. However, if we consider only those services that could be, theoretically, provided by historical ecosystems, then ecological degradation and simplification seem to be followed by a decline in the provision of those services, leading to a decline in HWB—in other words, the environmentalist's expectation hypothesis (Raudsepp-Hearne et al. 2010). Accordingly, their paradox is the result of using a wide ecosystem definition (i.e., from urban areas to tropical forests), incorporating HWB components (those from the HDI) that do not depend on historical ecosystem health, and accepting as provisioning services those that do not depend on those ecosystems. In summary, we propose that it is neither the lack of data nor the scale of the analysis that is stopping science from reaching a synthesis about HWB and ES relationships. Rather, this is a post-normal problem, with a multiplicity of legitimate perspectives in which context (e.g., types of systems and HWB components) is the most important element.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by CONICYT-Chile (grant no. FONDECYT 1120005).

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