Values at sea, value of the sea: Mapping issues and divides

Abstract

In the framework of the Ecost project (www.ecostproject.org), this article seeks to lay the foundations of an interdisciplinary and integrative perspective on the true value of marine nature, which is exposed to a global alteration process that is qualitatively new. The article critically sets up the inherent limits and dead-ends of the dominant utilitarian neoclassic economic paradigm in the understanding of the human-marine entities nexus. Mapping the conceptual oppositions, the paradigm divides and scans the lines of possible convergences (biology, philosophy, anthropology) and propounds a re-elaboration of the concept of intrinsic value. The latter is based on a Spinozist-Jonassian approach enlarged by the concepts of non-linearity, uncertainty, irreversibility and trophic dynamics, which ground the growing ecosystemic approach to the res halieutica.1 Based on a broad anthropological-ethical vision of the historical forms of appropriation of marine entities, which include symbolic and spiritual dimensions, the article questions the construction processes used in constructing timeframe horizons (dispositions, valuing schemes) since, within the diversity of institutional forms of access, these timeframe horizons in the last analysis govern the extraction of these wild entities cast as resources. In contrast to the regressive destructive enterprise of the highly integrated feudalities of industrial fisheries based on a high discount rate of fishing resources, the author once again underscores the urgent need to dismantle not only criminal forms of plundering, but those that are organized and legitimized, too. This would be possible through the rehabilitation of strong democratic public policies that gave priority to the wellbeing of inshore coastal fishing communities and the society, which are sustained in their social reproduction by that of nested ecosystems, where volens nolens they continue to be embedded. © 2007 Sage Publications.