Value(s) [antikvár]

preface Value(s) into Action: The Tenacity of Hope In March this year, I had the honour of giving the Annual Science Lecture at the Natural History Museum in London. The event had to be virtual due to Covid restrictions, but I felt the same rush of excitement as when I first visited the museum a few decades earlier. Then, a giant dinosaur. Dippy the Diplodocus, dominated the main entry hall. Visitors, like myself, were overawed by Dippy's size, but we were also reminded of the fragility of his species, for 66 million years ago, the Diplodocus, along with the rest of the dinosaurs, perished in a climate catastrophe. Today Dippy has been replaced by Hope. The museum acquired the skeleton of this 25-metre blue whale for L250 after she beached herself in 1891. Hope's species, abundant a century ago, has since been hunted to a tenth of its population, part of a mass extinction that is running at over a hundred times the average rate since Dippy's era. A natural catastrophe being driven this time by acts of humanity not of God. In my lecture, I asked whether the value of a blue whale is simply what her carcass fetches in the marketplace. How could we possibly calculate what whales provide for our planet - from enhancing fisheries to acting as carbon sinks? Can we even begin to price the awe they inspire or to assess our obligation to preserve them for those who will come after? Too often in our age, whales, our climate, our health, our communities are undervalued because market value is taken to represent total value. If a good or activity is not priced, it is not