Creating Environmental Edges in my Thoughts and for our Policies and Directions This Week……
“A goal of the collaboration between Dow and the Nature Conservancy is to create software that helps a company assess its natural resources so that they can be compared with man-made assets. What is a swarm of wild bees worth? One way to answer this question is to determine the coast of pollinating a crop with managed honeybees. To assess the value of a clean river to a soda bottler, you could tabulate the price of purifying a gallon of polluted water. The assumption is that if you want companies to care about nature you must put a price tag on it. Otherwise, as one Nature Conservancy economist told me, “it implicitly gets a value of zero.” The idea is not new: for two decades New York City has been buying up land in its watershed or paying property owner to stop polluting, because the cost is lower than building the purification plants that it would otherwise need. But the Dow collaboration extends this principle much further. They key piece of software, still under development is the Ecosystem Services Identification and Inventory program, which will make it easy for engineers – ideally, in the field, with a tablet – to enter data about a company’s natural resources. The Nature Conservancy plans to make the software publicly available.”
Green is Good: The Nature Conservancy wants to persuade big business to save the environment,” by D.T. Max, The New Yorker, May 12, 2014.
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“Bolstered by Tercek (ed.: The Nature Conservancy’s (T.N.C.) CEO) support, Kareiva (ed.: N.T.C.’s Chief Scientist) promoted his views by giving talks, writing blog posts, and publishing magazine articles. The new science of conservation would be data-based, corporate-friendly, and anti-elitist. It would not fetishize biodiversity. It accepted a world more like, say, the Meadowlands, in New Jersey – where MetLife Stadium shares space with twenty thousand acres of wetlands – than Yellowstone National Park. In ‘Conservation in the Anthropocene,’ an article published in February, 2012, Kareiva and two co-authors, Michell Marvier and Robert Lalasz, wrote, ‘By its own measure, conservation is failing. Biodiversity on Earth continues its rapid decline.’”
Green is Good: The Nature Conservancy wants to persuade big business to save the environment,” by D.T. Max, The New Yorker, May 12, 2014.
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“And the disasters aren’t just projections for the future. ‘The single most important bottom line is that climate change is not a distant threat,’ said White House science adviser John Holdren. ‘It is happening now.’”
Lighting a Fire: President Obamas campaigns to spread new climate-change warnings,” by Bryan Walsh, Time, May 19, 2014.
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“Kleeb had spent the last 15 years looking for dramatic, visual stores to advance political agendas, working on the principle that the best way to convert people wa to show them others who were affected by an issue. Here was one of the best stories she’d ever seen: Conservative American farmers rise up to protect their land. She could use the image of the family farm to reframe the way Nebraskans thought about environmentalism. It wasn’t going to be Save the Sandhill Cranes. It was going to be Save the Neighbors.”
This Land is Our Land: Jane Kleeb has organized an unlikely group to protest the Keystone pipeline: Nebraska ranchers and farmers. Is it classic Nimby-ism or the birth of a new environmental movement?” by Saul Elbein, The New York Times Magazine, May 18 2014.
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“One of Kleeb’s tenets of organizing is that if you want to reach a specific group of people, you have to use someone from that group to help you make your case. ‘One thing the climate organizations don’t get is that the scientific numbers don’t move people,’ she said. ‘People here care about their neighbors. So we are looking for a face.”
This Land is Our Land: Jane Kleeb has organized an unlikely group to protest the Keystone pipeline: Nebraska ranchers and farmers. Is it classic Nimby-ism or the birth of a new environmental movement?” by Saul Elbein, The New York Times Magazine, May 18 2014.
