1. ECO-HEALTH-O-METER

2. HOW-MUCH-IS-TOO-MUCH-O-METER

3. FAKE-NEWS-O-METER

4. SPIRITUALITY-O-METER

1. ECO-HEALTH-O-METER

Our court systems are beginning to recognise ecosystems as non-human persons, deserving of some basic rights.  Do all persons, human or not, deserve access to quality health care? What would this look like for an ecosystem? Does the accurate, sophisticated, and widely legible array of metrics and care we use to measure a human person’s physical health exist for measuring ecosystems? What is their equivalent to blood tests, physio workups, cardiograms and MRIs?  

Ecologists do work on this problem, and have made some progress. But we need better access to their concepts and information. The concepts need to be expanded, synthesized and assimilated into public and project work.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a simple, consistent, but sophisticated set of measures we could use to compare ecosystem health across time and against variables?

FURTHERMORE… It’s hard for most people to quantify or articulate, the difference between a rich, mature, connected healthy piece of nature, and a degraded, invaded, or over-sanitized scrap. 

On the standard map, we have one category, which is “open space”. The commonly used NDVI data layer offers a vegetation index in different shades of green, which is literally just an optical measurement of how green it is in satellite imagery. 

What if natural areas, every suburban backyard or urban community garden had an easily accessible eco-health score, or set of scores, that humans could use to set goals for care and improvement, to easily understand with a set of numbers -  what it is now, compared with what the land wants to be, what it could be, what it once was?

Note that measuring ecosystem health is a completely different goal from measuring an ecosystem’s economic value.  It can be useful to try to put a number to ecosystem value - but most efforts so far, in natural capital accounting, seem crude and clumsy, heavily weight the ways an ecosystem benefits humans only, ignores values to other species, and ignores what gorgeous and intricate, perpetually reacting and evolving system it could become if left alone, if obstacles to better health are removed.

How can we non-ecologists (including landowners, activists and politicians), easily get a handle on a place, some named shades of green, to understand the true potential of our parks and ponds, to understand where we have been and  what we should be working towards? Can these numbers be indexed and added to every pale green blob on google maps? 

Inputs to the index could include:

1. Number of species (biodiversity, how many species are present)
2. Species composition (mapping relative abundance of different populations)
3. Number of specialized species
4. Number of relationships!
5. Disturbance-recovery patterns - is the historic (pre-industrial) disturbance regime in place? 
6. Pollution
7. Productivity - number of babies each year produced, and surviving
8. Soil bacteria richness/composition and mycorrhizae abundance - cf to reference system
9. Potential and reference ecosystems, for all these things
10. Connection and adjacencies - for resilience and part-time resources - isolation or reduction in area predicts species loss
11. Patterns over time - are species declining or not? (Set the baseline to pre-industrial, if possible).
12. Time needed to reach reference ecosystems level:
https://appliedecologistsblog.com/2019/09/27/green-infrastructure-urban-biodiversity/?fbclid=IwAR2ORHAj04RAkIzLRgEOz-Jw9xxGz4Vx475WlrDn5fuVAftdliLrqRH1s-0 (”Species composition and soil conditions provide information of generally higher relevance for evaluation of ecosystem recovery processes than the most commonly used metric to assess restoration success, species richness.”)

Besides aiding in setting restoration goals, and a way to evaluate results, we could also use these individual metrics as warning signs: Many different symptoms of imbalance, or out-of-range levels, as in a human body, can be used to detect danger before the overall system reaches a critical condition. Ecologists, lend us your metrics, and let humans use the ECO-HEALTH-O-METER to become the data-driven stewards of ecosystems, monitoring and adjusting populations or nutrient flows in a wetland, coral reef, or forest system the way we now monitor and adjust pH in our swimming pools, before tipping points are reached?
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2664.13526?fbclid=IwAR0Zf4a4fqKLshbd5XwcSZcl2w5-kq6-xO4AHjP8hPuQ_H2Y8NHofZ9uOh0

2. HOW-MUCH-IS-TOO-MUCH-O-METER

Many consumers wish to help save the planet but have no clear understanding of “how much is too much” when it comes to consumption. Many items that could be bought for aesthetics or convenience, need not be. To help with decision-making, there could be a recommended consumption budget (RCB) for each member of the human population for luxury goods - not for money spent, but for quantity of energy and material (QEM) points consumed. 

QEM points

In my dream economy, each product would be stamped with a score representing the quantity of energy and material resources (QEM) that has gone into producing it, including ecological costs of resource extraction, transport, manufacturing, packaging, disposal. No product could be sold without this score. 

A consumer could stop wondering, crimping and scrimping with vague eco-guilt, and use this score to self-monitor her levels of consumption, and stay within the current QEM RCB, conscience clear and energy freed up to focus on better things. 

Support groups could be formed to help each other stay within limits, or to trade unused points. It would be a personal cap and trade system. Those consuming in excess of the RCB would have to pay either in cash or service for their excess.

With my QEM RCB fantasy in place, the ominous rumble of inequality, and the constant whine of eco-anxiety, would transform into a simple, measurable, black and white numbers on a linear scale. 

3. FAKE-NEWS-O-METER

Journalistic fact-checking. Each news article can receive a “factfulness” score from an outside agency which measures how many times its veracity has been fact-checked, how deep did the research go, and who else was involved. We need a publicly accessible measure of journalistic standards.

4. SPIRITUALITY-O-METER

Some traditions recommend to spend time with those who are “more spiritually advanced” or “a guru”  if one wishes to spiritually progress. I guess most of us have sensed a version of this superiority in at least one other person we have met. This suggests there is some kind of linear scale of spiritual development–notwithstanding that most spiritual teachings call for equality of compassion and respect between all beings. But is there an uncomfortable truth being glossed over here? Are some people simply better, spiritually speaking? And can it be measured? 

1. Calm, Patience and Even-Temperedness in a Wide Range of Situations (score: 6)

2. Joy (score: 10)

3. Selflessness, Yet Also Healthy Boundaries and Understanding of Limits (score: 2)

4. Love and Compassion (score: 5)

5. Communion with the Plants and Animals (score: 8)

6. Humor (score: 5.5)

??

More Metrics for Better Living