{"id":2244,"date":"2016-12-20T11:15:33","date_gmt":"2016-12-20T15:15:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/?p=2244"},"modified":"2016-12-20T15:39:17","modified_gmt":"2016-12-20T19:39:17","slug":"why-you-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/?p=2244","title":{"rendered":"Why you read"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I try and read something every night.  Not always successful.  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/2016\/12\/22\/whats-happening-to-the-bees-and-butterflies\/\">Really liked this review<\/a> but liked being able to give this paragraph to a student trying to make an argument about climate change: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>More recent\u2014and possibly more powerful\u2014is the \u201cecosystems services model,\u201d which is an attempt to cost out all the various services that nature provides, as if nature were a giant utility in charge of cleaning the water and freshening the air and sheltering coastlines from damaging storms but incapable of presenting us with a bill we can understand. The point of commodifying nature in this way is to give us a means of putting our actions\u2014destroying mangroves, for instance\u2014in perspective, showing us the hidden costs of what would otherwise look like rational economic behavior. The flaw here is that we can only value the ecosystems services that bear some resemblance to the things we\u2019re used to assessing. Or as McCarthy puts it, \u201cWorth is attributed only to services whose usefulness to us can be directly measured.\u201d But what value, he asks, \u201cdo we give to butterflies which, when I was seven, captured my soul? What value do we give, for that matter, to birdsong?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I try and read something every night. Not always successful. Really liked this review but liked being able to give this paragraph to a student trying to make an argument about climate change: More recent\u2014and possibly more powerful\u2014is the \u201cecosystems services model,\u201d which is an attempt to cost out all the various services that nature &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/?p=2244\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Why you read<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles-of-note"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8rNFZ-Ac","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2244"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2246,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2244\/revisions\/2246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}