The Political Fight of Our Lifetime:
Natural Capital is Undoubtedly Our Greatest Socioeconomic Investment
Every four years, Americans gear up for a contentious political season that is undoubtedly dubbed “the most important elections of our lives”. These existential threats unfold with debates and advertisements often zeroing in on issues that, when viewed from the proper distance, look more like minutiae. It’s as if we’re rearranging the living room while the house burns. Can you imagine the astronauts aboard the ISS watching us argue over tax policies, budgets, or even cultural hot topic issues — what is essentially the in-vogue color of our political furniture — while the roof of our planet smolders with climate-induced fires, the planet’s arid lands eroding into deserts, increased hurricane activity, rising oceans, and ecological collapse.
The most ironic tragedy in this narrative? Both sides of the political aisle lose sight of the existential threats facing humanity in their perpetual short-term fight with each other, namely those of climate change and biodiversity loss. And here’s the kicker: while one side may be accelerating these problems faster than the other, neither party has a lasting solution that turns the tide. Why? Because both parties are locked in a global marketplace system that treats nature as an “𝘦𝘹𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺.” Translation: nature’s services — clean water, pollination, and climate regulation to name a few— are taken for granted and not accounted for in the price tag of the market’s goods and services.
Let’s actually look at how Oxford defines 𝘦𝘹𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺: “A side effect or consequence of an industrial or commercial activity that affects other parties without being reflected in the cost of the goods or services involved, such as the pollination of surrounding crops by bees kept for honey.” Take a moment to reread that definition and let it sink in. We’ve created a global economic system that regards the pollination services provided by bees as a freebie. But in this freebie lies the heart of the problem. Without bees pollinating our crops, we have no affordable food; without healthy ecosystems, we have no climate stability. The current market paradigm is blind to nature’s essential services because they don’t show up in quarterly earning reports — until they are forced to do so. And by then, it’s too late.
So, if rotating politicians aren’t equipped with the tools to address the true challenges of our time, who can? Perhaps the solution lies outside political doctrine and inside of a universal language that has already captured the global economic system: financial prosperity. Enter 𝗡𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗖𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 — the idea that nature and its services in itself is a form of wealth, one that can be quantified, grown, and protected like any other asset class. If we once again start accounting for the value that healthy ecosystems provide to our species, we may simultaneously heal our eroding relationship with the planet and with each other. We need to recognize nature’s services as a new asset class, one that is as crucial to our pursuit of meaningful lives as the homes we live in, the factories that produce our goods, or the jobs that provide our income.
Take our bee example yet again. The provisioning side of nature — honey in this case — already has a commercial value. At my local Whole Foods, roughly $2/oz. But the regulating side of nature — the associated pollination of crops — is entirely ignored by markets. Does the role of bees in supporting our global food supply through pollination have no economic value? The definition of value, “the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something”. Of course then, pollination does has value. When we choose to ignore the regulating side of nature, we don’t simply erase it’s value; we find it elsewhere on our balance sheet as costs. Take Florida, where increased weather-related disasters have rendered around 10 million housing units uninsurable and left homeowners “underwater”. Hurricane recovery alone between the years of 2017 and 2019 exceeded $10 billion. The list goes on and on, but here’s the common through line… nature’s checkbook is inescapably balanced in time.
Conservation is no longer a zero-sum game pitted against economic growth as its rival. Once nature stops being seen as an 𝘦𝘹𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 and becomes the Natural Capital system within which our economies exist, investing in conservation becomes an obvious, no-lose proposition. Investing in clean air, safe water, resilient ecosystems, enhanced ecosystem services becomes our planet’s long-term wealth and insurance policy. This creates a cascading effect of measurable prosperity that can’t be undone by the latest election cycle.
If you are a nihilist or reeling from the election results, perhaps this moment is finally the wake-up call needed to see the bigger picture. As the saying goes, “necessity is the mother of invention,” and if you believe the stakes of the next four years are now too high to ignore, it’s finally time to invest in our 𝗡𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗖𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹.
What is built now can, and will, outlast any administration.
Now is the time to think big, to imagine a world where we invest in nature the exact same way that we would with any other asset class. This asset class just happens to be our home planet…
