Partially Diminished Fraction of Ecosystems

Do you know the PDF of your shampoo? A PDF refers to a “partially diminished fraction” of an ecosystem, and if your shampoo contains palm oil cultivated on clear-cut jungle in Borneo, say, that value will be high. How about your shampoo’s DALY? This measure comes from public health: “disability-adjusted life years,” or the amount of one’s life that will be lost to a disabling disease because of, say, a lifetime’s cumulative exposure to a given industrial chemical. So if your favorite shampoo contains two common ingredients, the carcinogen 1,4-Dioxane, or BHA, an endocrine disrupter, its DALY will be higher.

PDFs and DALYs are among myriad metrics for anthropocene thinking, which views how human systems affect the global systems that sustain life. This way of perceiving interactions between the built and the natural worlds comes from the geological sciences. If adopted more widely, this lens might usefully inform how we find solutions to the singular peril our species faces: the extinction of our ecological niche.

John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter (2012-02-14)

• entropy
• environmentalism