How Much is Nature Worth?

Falls #3. Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, 2012

Let us suppose you want to build the waterfall pictured above in your backyard. It measures about 20-30 feet wide and maybe 10-12 feet high. Any idea how much it would cost you for the landscaping prep, the boulders, the waterproof lining, the pumps and piping, the labor, and then the overall mainentance? I would guess maybe something in the $15,000 to $20,000 range initially with a few hundred dollars of annual expenses…then maybe a major rebuild or repair after ten years or so. When I was landscaping our big, wonderful garden at our Texas home, I couldn’t believe how much they charged just for one simple boulder let alone a waterfall like his one!

This was the topic of conversation one fine day in the Rocky Mountain high country when we ran across a particularly delightful section of some anonymous creek flowing down from the Continental Divide. How much is Nature worth if you were to use a good capitalist’s calculator?

Then I started going a bit further…How much would it cost to buy a 15-foot Ponderosa pine and have it transplanted into your yard? It wouldn’t be cheap. Maybe $500 as just a guess. Now, multiply that by the millions of Ponderosas throughout the West…Are the 15-footers worth $500 each on the gardening market? What about the 50-footers? What about Blue Spruce, Limber Pine, Douglas Fir…and then all of the deciduous trees? The wide variety of plants and grasses? How would you set prices on all of these? How much would it cost to either transplant or raise from a seedling one of the famous 200-foot Giant Sequoias? Now that would be a Donald Trump expense for sure!

Here are some other important projects that would certainly prove quite costly…

–How much to hire someone with a tiny syringe to transfer pollen from plant to plant and tree to tree in your orchard/garden?

–How much to lay down a bunch of old organic matter under many tons of surface rock, squeeze it into oil, gas or coal, then extract it?

–How much to have the Army Corps of Engineers build a system of wetlands, swamps and sandbars to protect New Orleans from the next big hurricane? What if you contracted them to do it all along the coast of Florida and north to New York?

–How much to build a big plant or factory to absorb billions of tons of CO2 and spew out billions of tons of O2?

–How much to build a huge filtration system to  purify and de-acidify the world’s oceans?

And on…and on…and on…

In the above examples, the point is that Nature already has systems in place to do all of those things. Do we pay full price for them? Do we at least try to work within their limits and not overload them? No…and no. Not really, although we do give eloquent lip service to conservation and preserving this giant ecosystem that is Earth. Much of what we get from Nature is seemingly “free” and seemingly boundless.

But, thinking with the mind of a good capitalist, what if we had to pay the REAL free market price for Nature’s bounty?

Think about that the next time you fork over $100 to the landscape place for a boulder to decorate your garden.