Extracting ecosystem services

• In Event: Technology, Invention, and Infrastructure: From Millstones to Outer Space and Back Again

Abstract

Climate action plans often call for Nature-based Solutions to climate change; these solutions include planting trees, protecting wetlands and making agriculture regenerative. These ‘solutions’ are often promoted as ecosystem services that attempt to quantify the way nature provides humans with the essentials of life— clean air, clean water, adequate food and shelter. Ecosystem services have become central to discussions of humans’ relationship to nature and are frequently invoked to justify ecological projects. The contemporary framing of nature's value as a set of services and solutions has roots in ecological scholarship.

Before the dominance of ecosystem services, how did planners and communities discuss ecological planning projects, such as planting trees and designing parks? Using examples from Chicago from in the early 20th to the early 21st century, this paper will explore how planners, decision-makers and communities have invoked and described the services that nature-- and especially trees-- could provide in the city.

Early 20th century advocates of tree-planting discussed the benefits of trees, although they did not talk about 'ecosystem services'. However, benefits are discussed more often in recent plans. The services emphasized have changed over time, such as cultural services, which have shifted from providing a sense of cosmopolitanism in the emerging metropolis to a sense of equity and care in disenfranchised areas of contemporary Chicago.

By examining planning documents, landscape design and sites, this paper will explore how the concepts of benefits from nature have changed over time and changed the landscape of Chicago. This history provides context for considering how the concept of ecosystem services influences planning and climate action today. The increasing emphasis on the monetary value of ecosystem services suggests the potential for Nature-based Solutions to be another manifestation of ongoing global extractivism and speculation amid carbon markets that will shape the future landscape and climate.

Author

• Susan Ask, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign