November 21, 2009
UTNE READER

Hiring Mother Earth To Do Her Thing

(Page 3 of 3)

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Gretchen Daily, a Stanford University ecologist, is working on that last piece. In 2006 Stanford’s Woods Institute, where Daily is a senior fellow, joined forces with the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund to create the Natural Capital Project, which is developing tools for measuring the services specific ecosystems provide, determining what they’re worth, and identifying who’s benefiting from them.

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Daily does not initially seem like a typical capitalist. She’s a soft-spoken biological sciences professor who caught the environmentalism bug during her teenage years while she was watching massive demonstrations against acid rain in Germany, where her father was stationed with the military. All things considered, Daily would rather be tramping around some bug-infested tropical forest than navigating the canyons of Wall Street. But as a young scientist doing research in Costa Rica, Daily realized that large-scale solutions to environmental destruction must be embedded in a system of economic incentives. “In many parts of the world, there’s no way to feed one’s family and conserve nature. People just don’t have that choice,” she says. “If they’re not making money, it’s not going to happen.”

 

E. B. Boyd is a San Francisco writer. Excerpted from Whole Life Times(April 2008), the Los Angeles edition of a family of regional conscientious living magazines published by Conscious Enlightenment; www.cemagazines.com.

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