Perspectives practice questions.

A government responds to falling fish stocks by setting catch quotas, licensing boats and funding a monitoring agency, arguing that use of the stock must be regulated so that people keep benefiting from it. This position sits where on the environmental value system spectrum?

• Ecocentric: deep ecologist
• Technocentric: cornucopian
• Anthropocentric: environmental manager
• Ecocentric: self-reliance soft ecologist

Answer: Anthropocentric: environmental manager

Regulation is the signature of the environmental manager, an anthropocentric position: the stock is managed because people depend on it. Regulation is often misread as technocentric, but the technocentric answer would be to engineer a substitute supply rather than to restrain use.

Which statement is closest to the Gaia hypothesis as James Lovelock set it out?

• Living organisms and their surroundings act as one self-regulating system
• The climate of the Earth is regulated entirely by physical processes
• Human technology will always be able to correct a planetary imbalance
• Every ecosystem returns to exactly its former state after any disturbance it suffers

Answer: Living organisms and their surroundings act as one self-regulating system

Gaia treats the biosphere and the abiotic environment as a single self-regulating system, comparable to an organism, held near habitable conditions by negative feedback, so life is part of the regulating mechanism rather than a passenger on it. It does not claim that recovery after every disturbance is guaranteed or that technology will restore balance.

The Limits to Growth report commissioned by the Club of Rome in 1972 modelled population, food, industrial output, resources and pollution together. What was its central claim?

• Rising prices and new technology would remove any resource scarcity
• Population would stabilise once average incomes passed a certain level
• Pollution rather than resource depletion would set the earliest firm limit
• Continued growth in a finite system would end in overshoot and decline

Answer: Continued growth in a finite system would end in overshoot and decline

The report's argument was structural rather than about any single resource: exponential growth inside a finite system overshoots the level it can sustain, and the correction is a decline rather than a smooth levelling off. The view that rising prices and new technology would remove scarcity is the cornucopian reply to the report, not its claim.

Two groups are shown the same survey data on a declining whale population. One argues for an immediate ban on all hunting whatever the cost to coastal communities; the other argues for a quota that keeps the whaling industry working. The disagreement is best explained by a difference in

• the reliability of the survey data each group was given
• the environmental value systems the two groups hold
• the statistical model used to estimate the population
• the number of whales each group counted at sea

Answer: the environmental value systems the two groups hold

Both groups accept the same facts; what differs is the worth they assign to the whales and to human livelihoods, which is exactly what an environmental value system determines. Shared data producing opposite policies is the standard evidence that the dispute is about values, not measurement.

A national agency proposes to flood a forested valley to generate low-carbon hydroelectricity for a growing city. The proposal is LEAST compatible with which environmental value system?

• Ecocentric - nature is held to have worth independently of its use to people
• Anthropocentric - the environment should be managed by regulation so that people keep benefiting from it
• Technocentric - engineered solutions are expected to meet rising demand
• Cornucopian - resource limits are expected to be pushed back by innovation

Answer: Ecocentric - nature is held to have worth independently of its use to people

An ecocentric position gives the valley ecosystem worth in its own right, so its loss cannot be traded against energy supply at all. The other three positions all accept conversion of the valley if the benefit to people is large enough.

A national reforestation scheme is backed both by an ecocentric conservation group and by an anthropocentric government department. Which pair of reasons best matches the two positions?

• Ecocentric: the scheme will show that engineered planting machinery can restore land faster than natural regrowth; anthropocentric: the woodland has worth in its own right
• Ecocentric: the woodland has worth in its own right; anthropocentric: the woodland protects the water supply and timber income of nearby communities
• Both hold the same position, because supporting the same scheme means placing the same value on the woodland
• Ecocentric: planting will raise the sale value of the land; anthropocentric: planting removes the need for regulation

Answer: Ecocentric: the woodland has worth in its own right; anthropocentric: the woodland protects the water supply and timber income of nearby communities

Two value systems can converge on the same action for different reasons: the ecocentric case rests on the woodland's own worth, the anthropocentric case on the services it supplies to people. Agreement about a policy is not agreement about values.