All the busy bees at work collecting pollen and nectar (and pollinating flowers as they go about their business) should drive home the point mentioned in Friday's post:
Not a single bee has ever sent you an invoice. And that is part of the problem, because most of what comes to us from nature is free, because it is not invoiced, because it is not priced, because it is not traded in markets, we tend to ignore it.- Pavan Sukhdev
The work done by nature that benefits us--known as ecosystem services--is beyond description. Obviously we benefit when bees pollinate the plants we eat. But we don't pay the bees for their work. Rather the opposite: we spread insecticides and destroy quality habitat in our pursuit of highly productive monoculture crops.
What would it cost us to pay a private company to develop, deploy, and maintain billions of tiny robot-bees to do the same? And would we want to be beholden to companies with a profit motive to ensure our well-being?*
Wetlands are another example of an ecosystem service, and in this case we often find ourselves unwillingly paying nature's invoice. In a functioning ecosystem, wetlands filter water and absorb massive inflows from storm events, which helps prevent flooding. As we've drained wetlands to install (you guessed it) more monoculture crops...as we've paved over prairie, healthy forests, and other habitats with impermeable parking lots and subdivisions...as we've confined rivers to predetermined channels that don't allow them to expand and contract as needed...we find ourselves faced with more frequent and more severe flooding events, which are devastating to communities and costly to clean up. Would the cost of giving back those marginal acres to nature balance out the cost of the floods and related damages?
Combine the difficulty of conveying the complexity of ecosystem services with the similarly complex conundrum of externalized costs and our cultural notion of private property superseding public good and you have a recipe for trouble. We as a community can't charge a landowner for plowing under a prairie or planting row crops right up to the edge of a stream, yet those changes can have a profound negative effect and impose a cost on the rest of us in terms of harming our water health (which requires costly treatment systems to make potable, impacts our ability to safely boat or swim in those waterways, and even has a negative effect on other industries downstream, such as those who make a living fishing in the Gulf losing business due to the Dead Zone caused by nutrient runoff from Iowa and other states).
Similarly we don't impose costs on developers who strip off and sell the rich topsoil from the land before building, leaving hard-packed clay beneath shallow-rooted turfgrass. This, again, can increase runoff and contribute to more flooding events as well as carrying chemicals and other detritus into our waterways. It may be less profitable for these developers to leave that topsoil, or to install raingardens and bioswales to balance the loss of that topsoil...but these current practices strip away those ecosystem services that benefit everyone. Wouldn't it be nice to see even imaginary invoices for those costs, so we can all understand and acknowledge what is being lost and the costs that will need to be borne?
Green infrastructure like the Sycamore Greenway and wetlands can be more costly to install than traditional stormwater management systems. Those rain gardens and bioswales cost more than cheap turfgrass on clay. Leaving buffer strips along waterways and preventing agricultural planting in floodplains certainly are more costly to the producer than planting every possible scrap of an acre.
But these are only more costly because we disregard the cost of all the services that are provided by these practices. Because we don't value the services when they are performed quietly, freely, by nature. Maybe it's far past time to change that.
* One estimate puts the cost of ecosystem services at a whopping $44 trillion!
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