By Tom Murphy, Do the Math
Which do you think is more valuable: the web of living animals on this planet, or all the gold accessible in the ground? If given a choice to eliminate one and preserve the other, which would you choose?
By Andrew Curry, the next wave
It came as a bit of a shock to open a government news release that reads more like an editorial in the Ecologist, but I think it’s an indication of the speed at which the landscape is changing here.
By Elsie Roderiques, Common Dreams
The root cause of our social and environmental challenges is neoliberalism and the fetish of the market, which values profit over people and sees nature simply as a commodity.
By David Bollier, David Bollier blog
Language is surely one of the greatest political weapons ever invented because it invisibly defines the world in narrow ways and can impair our capacity to see and think clearly. This is one of the takeaways I had after looking through Sian Sullivan’s new website, “The Natural Capital Myth and Other Stories,” which collects twelve years of her writing (2008 to present) on this theme.
By Brian Davey, Feasta
What is needed is an approach called commoning – the idea that we all share responsibility. We are all are entitled to share natural resources– but only so far as use is made at a sustainable scale.
By Sustainable Food Trust Staff, Sustainable Food Trust
At The Future of UK Farming conference this April, The Sustainable Food Trust’s Patrick Holden chaired a session on “Measuring and Valuing Sustainability”. The panel discussed how to transform the economic environment for sustainable food production by empowering farmers to deliver measurable public goods.
By Eric Holthaus, Grist
The declining health of trees globally is starting to have profound effects on Earth’s carbon cycle. The rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide has been picking up speed over the past few years, even though human CO2 emissions have flattened. The net effect: Climate change is starting to accelerate.
By Tegan Tallulah, The Climate Lemon
It’s safe to say that life would not be the same without trees. In fact, all human civilisation is dependent upon them. Not only as a source of valuable resources, but also for the ecological benefits they provide – called ecosystem services. We all know trees are awesome, but most people don’t quite understand all the important things they do.
By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth
Farming is the most significant human management system of the planet; the future of humans on the planet largely rests upon how we manage our farmscapes. If we accept this then it has profound implications for agricultural policy for it means that ‘managing the planet’ is almost as an important task of the farming system as supplying food.
By Sian Sullivan, The Conversation
But what is “natural capital”? And why use it to refer to “nature”?
By Randall Coleman, Solutions Journal
Soil is a vital resource that the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates contributes about USD $16.5 trillion in ecosystem services annually.
By Laurie Mazur, Mongabay
If a tree falls in the forest, what does it cost?