Green means more than money. (Book Review).

Global warming and shrinking natural resources are a tangible threat. Not just panda bears or speckled owls are at risk, but the long-term survival of humanity. In the short term, the deterioration of the environment leads to the appearance of new diseases, often due to water and air pollution, the rupturing of the ozone layer, deforestation and other factors. This is happening not only in the Third World but in developed countries like the United States. The economic cost of the environmental destruction is high. The predicted increase in floods and storms caused by global warming has forced insurance agencies to take urgent measures, almost always in the form of rising premiums.

Since the Industrial Revolution, business growth has had a devastating secondary cost, a kind of collateral damage: the accelerated deterioration of our surroundings. Alarm bells over the greenhouse effect first came from a Swedish scientist, Svante Arrhenius in 1896. But his was a voice in the desert. It wasn't until the 20th century that industrial emissions deforested, transformed into desert and polluted the Earth while turning the sky into a garbage heap. Only by the end of the century did ecological conscience take root, when the damage was appallingly apparent.

If until now it has paid to destroy the planet, why shouldn't it pay to save it? That's the premise of The New Economy of Nature by Stanford University scientist Gretchen C. Daily and Katherine Ellison, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a contributor to LATIN TRADE.

The book turns on the idea of a "new economy" that combines ecology and business, recognizing the economic value of natural resources and the money that can be made protecting them. The authors say the time has come to commercialize the work of ecological salvation because government spending and the donations of private companies and individuals alone are not sufficient to repair and to preserve the environment.

Ellison and Daily present several international pioneers of this new economy of nature: John Wamsley, a former math professor who promotes a company created to protect the native species of Australia via the stock market; Adam Davis, a U.S. executive whose dream is to create a market to buy and to sell "ecosystem service units;" and Dan Janzen, a biologist who conceived a plan to save a natural waste elimination system in Costa Rica by putting it into private hands, those of an orange juice producer. The book also emphasizes the work of the Costa Rican government to save the forests by subsidizing farmers who preserve natural resources.

At the same time, the authors describe ecological conservation efforts run by governments but conceived as moneymakers. They explain how New York City, to guarantee clean running water, chose to buy undeveloped land north of the city instead of constructing a new and expensive treatment plant. That ecosystem from the Catskill Mountains to the city works like a natural purifying system, and New Yorkers are paying for its preservation.

Ellison and Daily also follow the evolution of the Katoomba Group, an association of scientists and industrialists from many countries who put money and knowledge behind daring experiments in ecological business development.

Not all is positive. The book describes the misfortunes that environmentalist initiatives have faced of late. The Internet bubble, the U.S. recession and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 reduced the willingness of investors to risk capital in new and unproven projects. The decision of the Bush administration to reject the Kyoto Protocol, until now the most radical proposal to reduce greenhouse gases, hands another blow to conservationists' efforts.

But the book, when illustrating the viability of a new, ecological economy, creates a feeling of optimism. That feeling is reflected in the words of the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, with whom the book concludes: "Just as there are thresholds in ecosystems, there are thresholds in human behavior, times when cultural evolution moves unexpectedly rapidly.... When the time is ripe, society can be transformed virtually overnight-and that could occur in our treatment of the environment in general and natural capital in particular. Our challenge now is to find ways to ripen the time."

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Excerpt from: The New Economy of Nature:

"In perhaps its greatest environmental success, Costa Rica has enacted an unusual environmental tax on fossil fuels, intended, among other things, to fund payments to landowners in selected areas who agree not to cut down their trees and to restore forest on land that has been cleared." (p.177)