The strange case of cultural services: Limits of the ecosystem services paradigm

Abstract

As interest in the concept of ecosystem services (ES) has grown, so has its scope. This paper considers some limitations of the ES paradigm by examining one category of ES: cultural services, including the environmental basis for esthetic, spiritual, and recreational experiences, cultural heritage, sense of place, and ways of life. It examines whether cultural ES can be assessed in terms of purely individual benefits or if social/collective considerations must be included; and whether the concept of ‘services’ even provides an appropriate framework for understanding such values. To pursue these questions I consider the recent literature on the assessment and valuation of ‘cultural services’ and assess the adequacy of this perspective against several examples from American Indian communities of the Pacific Northwest. Three characteristics of these situations from Indian Country are problematic for an ES framework: the social construction of environmental experience, the symbolic character of environmental knowledge, and the multidimensionality of environmental value. On the basis of this analysis, I propose a model of culturally reflexive stewardship as potentially a more productive and theoretically consistent framework for characterizing such socially constructed environmental values and practices.