On his book Endangered Economies: How the Neglect of Nature Threatens Our Prosperity
Cover Interview of May 02, 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.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
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.