Economic progress depends on paying nature fair wage

By Gary Raham
Nature Writer and Illustrator

Spring rains and snowfall were good this year. I could see the grass growing and almost feel the water table rising. Winds blew crud out of the air, even if a few people lost hats and hairpieces. All good, and all free. Well, not really.

When I was a young bachelor teacher, my landlady required that I hire someone to clean up for me. She shamelessly discriminated against all male tenants that way. It did work well. I left my dishes in the sink and they showed up clean in the cupboard the next day. Even the partially dissected roadkill in the freezer (intended to improve my biology teaching skills) magically disappeared while I wrote checks for her labors (and indulgences).

Nature provides similar services – clean water, fresh air, stuff to eat and exciting places to go – and it all just seems to be there, without charge.

A British economist with an ecology background, Partha Dasgupta, contends that's a problem. He believes the value of nature should enter into the equations that measure economic prosperity. That way, humans can properly fund and preserve her beneficence.

I ran across this information while reading an article that marked 2010 as the United Nations' International Year of Biodiversity. And biodiversity – the wealth of living things on the planet – "is the key to the maintenance of the world," according to entomologist E. O. Wilson, who essentially defined the term in his 1992 book, "The Diversity of Life."

Wilson inspired worldwide activity on behalf of a healthy planet. Also in 1992, 193 nations signed a pledge in Rio de Janeiro to find a way to improve the natural health of the world and still enjoy economic growth. While there have been some successes since then, the world's diversity of species has continued to plummet, largely because of human population growth and economic development.

Since World War II, the term GDP, or gross domestic product, has been used to conceptualize economic progress. It's defined as the total market value of all final goods and services produced within a country in a given period of time. Note that "nature" does not enter into the calculation, although nature produces a host of services – both practical and esthetic – that materially contribute to human health and happiness.

Dasgupta proposes a new measure called "inclusive wealth," which attempts to assign a monetary value to nature, human welfare and human knowledge. It treats ecosystems as capital assets that, like roads and buildings and computers, depreciate when misused or overused.

To successfully use nature without abusing her, everyone needs to understand the importance of biodiversity. A number of scientific studies point to the importance of rich and diverse ecosystems. Quite often these studies result from examining the results of calamities like drought – something familiar in the West.

David Tilman and colleagues at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul made some discoveries while monitoring grassland plots at the University's Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve. One way to measure the productivity of an ecosystem is to determine how much biomass it can sustain – essentially the weight of all the living things on site. Tilman had such information about his prairie plots, and then a drought hit. Looking at his wounded and wilted ecosystem with scientific calipers, he found that drought-stricken plots with 20 or more species had about half the biomass recorded in normal years. But plots with only one or two species produced one-tenth the normal biomass.

Biodiversity provides resilience in times of stress.

Tilman became curious and set up additional experiments to determine the effect of number of species on total biomass production – even during optimal conditions. His experiment, using 168 plots with one to 16 species, has run for 16 years. Plots with more species routinely produce more biomass than those with fewer species.

Biodiversity creates more productive ecosystems.

Similar studies in a variety of habitats have corroborated these results, although scientists debate the causes. But we don't have to understand the mechanisms in detail to act. All we need to do is consider the "intelligent tinkerer" argument: "When fiddling with something complicated and not entirely understood, it's not smart to throw away parts – especially when those systems keep humanity alive on the planet." Anyone who's found bolts and thingamabobs lying around after rebuilding a car engine can appreciate the sense of foreboding that stray parts engender.

Dasgupta has attempted to compare and contrast the GDP of six countries with an "inclusive wealth per capita" figure. Based on GDP alone, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and China all showed positive GDPs over the period 1970-2000. Sub-Saharan Africa showed a slight decline. After factoring in values for nature's services, however, all showed a decline in inclusive wealth except China. China's GDP gain of 7.8 turned into a more modest inclusive wealth gain of 4.5.

Dasgupta sees the biggest problem of assigning monetary values to be the fact that many of nature's services remain hard to define and measure. But people are working on it. At the University of Wyoming, for example, Edward Barbier has been giving dollar values to mangrove ecosystems cut down to make shrimp farms in southeast Asia. The shrimp farms look far less profitable when factoring in the protective value of mangrove trees to human life and property during violent storms.

Wilson used a storm metaphor to good effect when talking about biodiversity. "This (biodiversity) is the assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve," Wilson wrote. "It has eaten the storms – folded them into its genes – and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady."

Part of that steadiness derives from the boundless diversity of microbes that recycle the finite swirl of atoms of which our world is composed. Like the maid service I took for granted, they make roadkill disappear – one of many services that can't afford to remain priceless.