On his book Endangered Economies: How the Neglect of Nature Threatens Our Prosperity
Cover Interview of May 03, 2017
A close-up
The natural world contributes in crucial ways to our
physical wellbeing. There are also spiritual and esthetic dimensions to what it
brings, and it is these that have traditionally motivated people to argue for
conservation. Nature’s economic contributions are not taken into account. I
look at how these can be measured and what the results are.
To give a sense of where this takes us, the world’s
populations of pollinating insects represent an asset that is worth at least
$14 trillion. Without them, up to a third of our food crops would be lost. And
the world’s forests are worth well over $10 trillion just for their
contribution to stabilizing the climate by photosynthesis, taking carbon
dioxide out of the air and replacing it with oxygen. I calculate these values
by estimating the value of the services the assets provide each year, and then
capitalizing this over their lifetimes – the standard way of valuing any
capital asset.
Biodiversity is another asset that is undoubtedly of great
value, but we understand so little of why it matters to us that we can only
value a few of the many aspects of its contributions to human societies. I
identify several contributions. One is the development of medicines through
bioprospecting. Another is the insurance role played by crop varieties that are
not currently used commercially and can be used to replace current commercial
varieties, if these fall to the assaults of pests. Yet another contribution is
that biodiversity has allowed the development of all of our important foods
crops and animals from their wild originals. And, of course, the popularity of
nature programs shows that we have an intrinsic attraction and attachment to
biodiversity.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
A close-up
The natural world contributes in crucial ways to our physical wellbeing. There are also spiritual and esthetic dimensions to what it brings, and it is these that have traditionally motivated people to argue for conservation. Nature’s economic contributions are not taken into account. I look at how these can be measured and what the results are.
To give a sense of where this takes us, the world’s populations of pollinating insects represent an asset that is worth at least $14 trillion. Without them, up to a third of our food crops would be lost. And the world’s forests are worth well over $10 trillion just for their contribution to stabilizing the climate by photosynthesis, taking carbon dioxide out of the air and replacing it with oxygen. I calculate these values by estimating the value of the services the assets provide each year, and then capitalizing this over their lifetimes – the standard way of valuing any capital asset.
Biodiversity is another asset that is undoubtedly of great value, but we understand so little of why it matters to us that we can only value a few of the many aspects of its contributions to human societies. I identify several contributions. One is the development of medicines through bioprospecting. Another is the insurance role played by crop varieties that are not currently used commercially and can be used to replace current commercial varieties, if these fall to the assaults of pests. Yet another contribution is that biodiversity has allowed the development of all of our important foods crops and animals from their wild originals. And, of course, the popularity of nature programs shows that we have an intrinsic attraction and attachment to biodiversity.