Nature's Service. You Don't Get Somethin for Nothin

Many of the things we get for free are the things we value least--which leads us to take them for granted. Because we tend to perceive nature's services as "free," we take them for granted by undervaluing and misusing them despite the fact that they "form the foundation that supports our societies and economies," writes Janet N. Abramovitz in "Valuing Nature's Services," in the Worldwatch Institute's State of the World 1997.

The free nature services Abramovitz refers to include "pollination, water supply and regulation, soil building and maintenance, habitat and refuge, nutrient cycling, and production of raw materials such as food, fish, genetic resources, medicines and other non-timber forest products." When we take these services for granted, believe them unlimited, and don't factor their values into our economies, we are effectively providing price supports for those parts of our economies on which we do place monetary value. In other words, it costs more to produce goods and services than we are willing to admit because we ignore the so-called free services of nature (We do, however, place economic value on more tangible resources, such as timber, minerals, building materials, oil and natural gas and the like.)

Proposing that nature's services have value isn't an alien concept. We've begun to use a similar argument for wastes. If you produce waste (pollution) and don't bear the cost of preventing it or cleaning it up, letting somebody else (public tax money) pay for cleanup, then the full economic cost of your product is undervalued. This would be like determining the worth of an industry only on its products, without factoring in the value of its land, equipment and so on. Today, in fact, a few industries have even begun to recognize the value of the intellectual knowledge held by the employees. So, for nature, we must value services in order to apply sound management principles that ensure abundance, quality, continuity and sustainability.

Take nature's development and production of raw materials as an example of natural services we should place value on. Medicines from natural products, according to Abramovitz, are worth about $40 billion a year worldwide. The value of lost pharmaceuticals in the United States alone because of plant extinctions, she writes, is estimated to be $12 billion. Quite a loss. One that is far greater worldwide.

Another example of nature's service: pollinators--bees and others--between 120,000 and 200,000 species of insects, birds and animals. Pollination is so important to agriculture that farmers and orchardists hire traveling bee-keepers to truck in beehives to ensure pollination. This is fine for certain crops and those who can afford to hire traveling bees. But 80 percent of the world's 1,330 cultivated crop species. . .are pollinated by wild and semiwild populations, according to Abramovitz. "Honeybee pollination services are 60-100 times more valuable than the honey they produce," she says. Yet, in the United States, more than half of the honeybee colonies have been lost in the last 50 years--a quarter of that in the last 5 years.