Since in an ecosystem everything is connected to everything else, to assign importance to a specific list of ecosystem features is problematic. All organic processes, whether directly useful to humans or not, are products of the ecosystem within which they occur – the result, but not the end resulof millions of years of competition, natural selection, adapct, it is tempting to assume that the emissions are an externality because the factory is imposing them upon the residents. However, that conclusion depends upon both the extent of the rights held by the residents and the nature of the emissions created by the factory. If the residents have no right to be free from air emissions, theut into space and die; indeed, life on Earth would never have arisen at all, planets would not exist to orbit a sun, and so on. Gravity is essential to life, tation and evolution within systems of interacting organisms and non-organic resources. Without the dynamics of the systems in which they are found, the phenomena wouldavity, a feature of nature upon which life depends, is zero. However, if Joyce has a right not to be defamed and Bob's words have the effect of lowering Joyce's character in the estimation of her peers, then Bob's speech violates Joyce's right. The conclusion depends on the existence and definition of the rights held by each party. It is impossible to know which party imposes upon the other without contemplating the rights in issue. The same is true for air emissions. Where a factory produces air emissions to which residents objeand therefore its value is infinite and incalculable. On the other hand, no one is in a position to remove or to eliminate gravity, and nobody is able to exclude others from its effects. It factory is not causing an externality. If the residents have a right to be free from emissions that present a danger to human health, then the factory is producing an externality if not exist. Therefore, protecting ES requires that the systems in which they exist operate and evolve in the way that they do. Ecosystems are unplanned, dynamic, changing, uncertain, and uncontrolled. Those are the conditions that produced ES. Aiming to specifically protect ES to the exclusion of the rest of the system does not sustain the conditions that produced them. Protecting ES is a specific, instrumentalist objective that flies in the face of the logic of ecosystems. The fate of ES depends on the fate of the systems within which they emerge. Consider the economic value of a resource that is essential but not scarce: gravity. On one hand, without gravity
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