February 11, 2007 How to Get Wall Street to Hug a Tree By David Wolman
Environmentalists and investment bankers are working together to put a price tag on nature. The new ‘greens’ think that human beings are ready to start paying for Mother Nature’s services—and that calculating their financial worth will save the planet.

This is the future of the environmental movement. Increasingly, economic measures are being used to assess ecosystems by way of the universally comprehensible currency of money. The calculations can be quite explicit:

A recent study by the World Wildlife Fund reckoned that the bees that pollinate a Costa Rican coffee farmer’s crop, and by extension the nearby forest where the bees live, are worth as much as $60,000 annually to the farmer.

Last year, two entomologists, one from Cornell University and the other from the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, figured that a $60-billion-a-year chunk of the U.S. economy is supported by wild bugs such as dung beetles and bees that pollinate plants, hasten the decomposition of manure, feed on crop pests and end up as dinner for birds, small mammals and fish.

To read the article in full………..

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