I've been thinking about this recently.
I still have trouble with the concepts of use and exchange value so this might be a silly question, but humour me (someone had to ask, right?)
Edit: I wrote a follow up to this here
An ecological preserve doesn't have "Value" in the Marxist sense, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have value. When Marx talks about value he's talking about commodity production under capitalism, not about whether something has intrinsic "value", if that makes sense.
It has use-value - access to green spaces is extremely beneficial to human health
They good and nice to look at, plus "ecological services" 🙄 ie "you need it to survive you fucking psycopath"
this. sometimes also referred to as "ecosystem services", which many land use types can have. like a managed forest or a farm would have "provisioning" services, because it provides for materials, textiles, food, medicinal resources, energy to meet needs of human activity.
other service categories are "regulating" (air/water purification, carbon sequestration/climate regulation, waste decomposition/detoxification, pollination, biodiversity/habitat, disturbance regulation [flood/extreme weather protection aka "green infrastructure" like wetlands], and "cultural" (depending on the nature reserve's biome composition, it could be a motif in art/human expression, spiritual/historical, recreational, science/education, therapeutic like social forestry/ecotherapy, animal assisted therapy)
without knowing anything about the specific nature reserve, i would imagine it has a use values in the regulation category and likely some in the cultural category.
It's pretty. Being outside is nice. It's a good place to relax. You can let kids run around there.
Not everything is a commodity.
carbon sink, ecological reserve to repopulate surroundings, research.
now, if a 'reserve' or 'park' a correct way to conceptualise preservation & custodianship of natural lands is a good question
You might find my follow up post interesting! I've linked it in this post.
I don’t really have an answer but I was on one on cape cod a few months ago and the access point had us walking through a private gated neighborhood of million dollar homes and I took the smallest amount of joy knowing that the people living there must totally hate that normal people get to walk through their safe space for a few minutes
It doesn't make sense to attribute use value to things that are not commodities.
Certainly, it could be transformed into a commodity, if the reserve were gated off, and then tickets were sold for people to enter it.
At which point its use value would be the answer to the question, "Why are people buying tickets to enter this wildlife reserve?"
Not by default, no. Not until a logging company or some land developer or something starts to transform it into a commodity.
Somewhere for me to run hog wild during the full moon, by golly.
Interesting! You might be interested in my follow up post, as it's tangentially related to this. I've linked it in this post's text
Use value is intangible good, you can use it. View out of window has use value. bugatti doesn’t have use value for me cause i can’t drive for example, only exchange value. Pizzas costing the same might have different use values. Use value of water in desert approaches infinity :shrug-outta-hecks:
Even knowing there is a park nearby brings some small use value, cause you know you can go there
You know, that’s something my uncle vern on the east coast spent his whole life trying to discover.
If you have discord, our book club is starting the German ideology next week, and any questions about Marxist economics or otherwise generally get answered by very well read Marxists. You started a good discussion you should check it out https://discord.gg/B8FC44YA
