“The forest cleans water.”--David Powell, a forester with Virginia's Department of Forestry. He says when you look at a forest, just sitting there, it's actually doing stuff. For you. “Forests are very good at filtering out and preventing erosion and sedimentation; it also helps clean out the air.”
Sabri Ben-Achour: This is what's called an ecosystem service -- when nature does stuff for people. The trouble is, even though people benefit from nature just doing its thing, nobody gets paid for letting nature do its thing. Actually, they get paid to do the opposite: forests get cleared, roots dug up -- benefits gone. That's just the markety world we live in. So Virginia's forestry department wants to pay for the benefit and maybe get consumers to do so too later down the road…Using models, they'll quantify the benefit of a forest to a water source, wrap it up and put a price tag on it and make it a product. But who pays how much and for what?
Sabri Ben-Achour: This is what's called an ecosystem service -- when nature does stuff for people. The trouble is, even though people benefit from nature just doing its thing, nobody gets paid for letting nature do its thing. Actually, they get paid to do the opposite: forests get cleared, roots dug up -- benefits gone. That's just the markety world we live in. So Virginia's forestry department wants to pay for the benefit and maybe get consumers to do so too later down the road…Using models, they'll quantify the benefit of a forest to a water source, wrap it up and put a price tag on it and make it a product. But who pays how much and for what?
Hanson: For decades, we've been talking about saving nature for nature's sake and that's worked to some degree -- we have a lot of protected areas around the planet, etc. -- but there are limits. For a lot of governments, a lot of people, a lot of companies, that's not a convincing argument.
The person who comes up with the scheme that commoditizes the forests’ processes and can sell it to the public will surely be the next billionaire. At first, I couldn’t help but laugh at this broadcast, imagining these people scuttling about to find ways to make a profit from this natural process. But later, when Craig Hanson spoke about the lack of progress in convincing people to care for the environment for nature’s sake and for our own survival, I felt sad. The question, “what does it take?” keeps entering my mind. How bad must things become for people to implement the change that is required for us to thrive?
A friend of mine, referencing back to stages of development, pointed out that it usually takes either some kind of personal catastrophe or a giant helping hand that saves a person from catastrophe to create the conditions that allow someone to see beyond a narrow frame of reference. For example, a person rooted in “red” who thinks the State should stay out of their business could experience a shift in perspective if they have a life-threatening illness in which outside support is the only means for survival. Not only will they be shaken by the severity of the unanticipated disease, but they may feel gratitude for the support provided, which allowed them to survive. From this experience, they may be transformed to acknowledge that society functions better when we work together instead of constantly trying to grab power from each other.
Even though it isn’t fun and cheerful to hear about impending economic and environmental collapse, this message needs to be repeated in as many ways as possible to alert us all to the dangers we are facing so that we can try to prevent the horrific consequences on the horizon. We need to share these messages in personal ways too. The damage is real and is heartfelt, here and now, not in some forecasted future. The gripe about gasoline prices is something we all share in the Western world, and perhaps that is a starting point for some to explore our system-wide inefficiencies. Unemployment is another. It seems that very few are untouched by these factors. If we act sooner rather than later, we will all gain, and, I hope, have a chance to thrive.
Exactly. The key is not just to repeat the message, but to do so in different ways and make sure people really understand how these things affect them personally.
ReplyDeleteThe other important point is to also show actions that people can take right now to make a difference. There are many people who would prefer organic food, electric vehicles, and clean energy but simply can't afford it. For those people, showing how they can save money, re-use things, repair things they have, and so on will help.