wollaston.org Blog

Book Review – “The New Economy of Nature – The Quest to Make Conservation Profitable”

September 18th, 2006

by Gretchen C. Daily and Katherine Ellison

This is a must read for those who wish to understand the status of the environment in our current capitalist system and the almost disregard capitalism has in quantifying and valuing environmental benefits.  If you think capitalism has evolved to its most advanced state, books such as this will help clarify that many elements of our society are not correctly valued by the simple supply/demand equation of current economics.  Countries like Costa Rica are beginning to recognize true environmental benefits from the policies they have enacted to protect their natural resources.  Our environment and our ecosytems are not limitless, though human kind has been living under that premise of ‘limitless nature’ since our dawn.  In the near future, new business opportunities will emerge in the valuing and trading of environmental benefits.  We already see this process starting with the carbon trading system and the New York watershed protection.  Environmentalism may finally develop a name for itself as a capitalistic enterprise…and none too soon. 

“As the saying goes, a woman’s work is never done-nor fairly compensated-and this is nowhere truer than in the case of Mother Nature.  Much of Nature’s labor has enormous and obvious value, which has failed to win respect in the marketplace until recently…

Historically, all these labors of Nature have been thought of as free. And with the exception of the production of a few specific goods, such as farm crops and timber, the use of Nature’s services is actually quite startlingly unregulated.  Despite our assiduous watch over forms of capital-physical (homes, cars, factories), financial (cash, savings accounts, corporate stocks), and human (skills and knowledge)-we haven’t even taken measures of the ecosystem capital stocks that produce these most vital of labors.  We lack a formal system of appraising or monitoring the value of natural assets, and we have few means of insuring them against damage or loss…

Even more striking is how rarely investment in ecosystem capital are rewarded economically.  Typically, property owners are not compensated for the services the natural assets on their land provide to society.  With rare exception, owners of coastal wetlands are not paid for the abundance of seafood the wetlands nurture, nor are owners of tropical forests compensated for that ecosystem’s contribution to the pharmaceutical industry and climate stability….

As Stanford University biologist Peter Vitousek has said, ‘we’re the first generation with tools to understand changes in the earth’s system caused by human activity, and the last with the opportunity to influence the course of many of the changes now rapidly under way [as human society and the environment reach critical thresholds].’ ”

See more at Amazon.com – The New Economy of Nature

Entry Filed under: Book Review, The Environment