When you pick up this book, anticipating many hours in the company of Sir Partha Dasgupta, a distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Cambridge, you are immediately met by three prestigious sign spinners, which he has earned through his esteemed career. The New York Times calls him “the most important person you’ve never heard of.” Sir David Attenborough writes, “Partha Dasgupta provides the compass we urgently need… By bringing economics and ecology together, we can help save the natural world at what may be the last minute — and in doing so, save ourselves.” While the late Paul R. Ehrlich goes so far as to describe this as “the best book in economics for the general reader since Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.”
The book was born out of a report on the economics of biodiversity, commissioned by the UK government in 2019 and published by Partha in 2021 — the report was 610 pages. On Natural Capital is just 200, but he avoids the pitfalls of someone attempting to achieve such esteemed commendations using relatively little.
This is not a polemic reliant on reductionism and grandiosity. At every stage requiring nuance, Partha either delves into it or stresses that it is there. At every stage that feels prerequisite to purple prose, he avoids grand unifying sentences, instead jabbing the reader with a precise combination of relevant facts. On Natural Capital reads like an academic paper: one devoid of jargon, dead set on clarity, with a refreshing faith in the reader’s ability to consider his thesis at the level Partha delivers it — objectively.
And yet, despite his stressing complexity, the central thesis is, admissibly, simple: we cannot continue to take from the natural world at the rate we currently do. It’s immoral in the first instance and impossible in the second.
We have always known, haven’t we? The uncomfortable truth. That, despite a 15-fold increase in global GDP since the war and an increase in life expectancy from 46 to 73, nature is not boundless; our consumption cannot increase forever. And this paradox has led to kicking the can: let’s just get richer, or at least less poor. Except this can has just hit a wall, and Partha forces us to look up at the shadow now looming over us.
In 50 years, wildlife populations have declined by 73%. The size of low-oxygen areas in the ocean (because of algal growth, because of our actions) has increased by the size of the European Union and the number of zero-oxygen areas has quadrupled. The extinction rate is currently 100 to 1000 times the previous average. Owing to asteroids the size of cities or incomprehensibly severe volcanism, there have been five mass extinction events in Earth’s history. There have been five — but we are currently living through the sixth.
Since the publication of this hardback in January, the UK government has released a report concerning global ecosystems. The report was not about natural heritage or food standards, but about the biodiversity crisis as an urgent matter of national security (if the supply chain and food security collapse, geopolitical instability will ensue).
Much of the nature we exploit is an “open access resource”: we don’t pay for its exploitation, and implicit in our economic models — such as GDP — is an assumption that these resources will last forever. Acting in self-interest, we are collectively plunged into a “tragedy of the commons”, where it is always incumbent to overuse and deplete an open-access resource (because if you don’t, the person next to you will).
Natural capital, however, takes time to regenerate. If we do not allow it enough time before taking again, stocks will invariably decrease. And we are not giving the natural world enough time. Partha cites estimates that, at our current rate of consumption, we would need 1.7 Earths to sustainably provide us with resources (and, interestingly, that we only crossed the threshold of needing one Earth in the early 1970s).
The side effects of our exploitation, which economists call “externalities”, are also not incorporated into mainstream economics (and therefore pricing). When we buy shrimp from a shrimp farm, we pay for the cost of production; we do not pay for the costs incurred by the local community for the loss of their biodiversity.
Natural capital does not exist in a vacuum, however. The nature we use relies on complex ecosystems, which provide “maintenance and regulation services” to facilitate overall persistence (natural stocks require seed dispersal, pollinators, and waste decomposition, for example, all of which are processes that themselves require processes, and so it goes on).
This cross-reliance that powers an ecosystem is complicated — so complicated that we do not fully understand it (and much of it is invisible, occurring in the soil beneath our feet, or in deep oceans). When we desecrate an area, we can inadvertently set in motion a chain of events that leads to ecosystem collapse.
All this culminates in a fundamental truth of our existence — we are embedded within nature, not separate from it. And Partha grounds his vision in a utilitarianism which extends into the future. We cannot plunder indefinitely because we will run out of resources, and externalities are influential, as they damage how reliable and resilient natural capital is.
We must therefore pay for what we use. Either directly, such as rent on the open seas, or indirectly, such as rent paid to countries not to exploit their own natural capital. Rainforests, for example, are a public good — we use their oxygen to breathe, their carbon sequestration to offset our emissions and their biodiversity for our own wellbeing (even if we never visit). Since we use these things for free, however, countries are incentivised to exploit the land.
He acknowledges the crudeness of this, but we are the arbiters of a balance sheet which our ancestors will inherit, and this balance sheet must include nature. We must therefore update economic measures to account for our impact on biodiversity, align our incentives with the public good and find ethical ways to facilitate stable population levels.
Here, then, is the can: metropolises, agricultural fields, prosperity. And there is the wall: unstable climate, ecological collapse, human extinction. Solutions were never going to be easy. But even when juggling these stakes, Sir Partha remains coolly academic, formally taking us through the rationale for the continuation of human civilisation — this being the hidden foundation of meaning in our own lives.
We live in an era of culture wars, where stances on anything are dismissed as little more than an expression of factional loyalty. A cynic will read On Natural Capital primed for this accusation, but the book works outside our discourse: it is a mature, spiteless, ideology-free work of illumination. This makes it a masterclass in persuasion, and an honest blueprint for how we must proceed.
