Centro Estudios Ingleses C-65: Why it is important to conserve our natural world

Gretchen Daily on the economic value of conservation

She says that if we can see the economic value of conserving our natural world, we will integrate nature in economic decisions

If we can see the economic value of conserving our natural world, we will integrate nature in economic decisions. That’s according to Gretchen Daily, conservationist and director of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University.
Gretchen Daily: More and more conservation, as we think about it as conservation for the 21st century, is emerging as an effort that integrates human and natural well-being and seeks to harmonize those things.
She calls it “natural capital” – extending the idea of economic capital to the beneficial goods and services humans get from nature, such as bees that pollinate crops, freshwater for farm irrigation, and marshes that protect coasts from storms.
Gretchen Daily: We invest in physical capital, all of our physical infrastructure. Well, why not invest in our natural infrastructure?
She said that as the wealth of nature is disappearing from the planet due to human demand, more and more people are thinking about how it’s critical to preserve nature for humanity’s future prosperity. Daily said that in the past, conservation was seen to be in conflict with human development. She said that today, conservation is working to integrate human development with nature.
Gretchen Daily: It’s time to think very strategically about how to invest in natural capital to ensure that we maintain and help develop further really prosperous and sustainable ways of life across the world. The neat thing about what’s happening today is that people from all walks of life are recognizing the critical need to integrate understanding of how people depend on earth’s life support systems on our living natural capital; what kinds of conservation investments are needed if we think about environment as a type of capital that supplies us with a stream of benefits we depend all on for our economic prosperity.
In other words, the environment provides humans with tangible benefits for society. Daily mentioned, for example, the massive flooding that occurred in China in 1998 due to deforestation. She said deforestation elevated the flood risk in the Yanghtze River Basin. The flooding affected and killed thousands of people downstream from the deforested area. After the flooding, China began thinking differently about the value of forests in the landscape.
Gretchen Daily: There are massive investments being made now in China in shifting livelihoods from certain kinds of farming to more stable perennial crops and forests, to maintain that aspect of the natural capital of those upland river systems.
She added that conservationists themselves are getting smarter about how to get other people on board with conservation goals.
Gretchen Daily: We’re becoming more clever, and more sophisticated, about how to run with people, how to integrate people and human well-being into conservation activities and investments.

by Lindsay Patterson

Dear Gretchen Daily,

Thanks for all you are doing.

Can you point to another species in this wondrous world we are blessed to inhabit that both eats itself out of its own houses and ravages its earthly home as Homo sapiens is doing in our time?

If you can, does that species possess the level of consciousness, collective intelligence and other miraculous gifts (e.g., opposable thumbs) that make significant, rapid adaptation to the practical requirments of biophysical reality possible for the human species. To be in possession of such gifts as human beings have and then willfully choose not to deploy them as best we can because it is politically inconvenient and economically inexpedient; because human greed has been legitimized, institutionalized, legalized and regarded as virtuous, looks like a crime against humanity as well as the Earth for which human beings proclaim to be stewards, I suppose.

Sincerely,

Steve Salmony

o patricia grey says:

August 22, 2011 at 10:33 am

I fully endorse Steve Salmony s views. To those detractors that think that Conservation and Ecological issues are a lose-lose battle and that we are doomed, Gretchen s views on Natural Capital could be the answer. There is a point in trying to stop global warming, there is a point in trying to preserve what we have. The point is OURSELVES. We are a species that is dying out. How long will it be necessary for us to realize before it is too late ? Capitalism is perhaps to blame for our endless greed and insensibility to nature s needs. On the other hand, it is a powerful engine that creates capital and gives jobs. The trouble is, it needs a balance. As everything else with man. BALANCE. The opposite view would be to become aware of its evils . One of them is thinking that money is everything. that there is. And Gretchen is pitting the two forces together with her ideas. Great . A lot of thinking on our part must go into this idea. Patricia