In addition to other things, coastal salt marshes help to control pollution, protect the water supply, and provide flood control. According to Adam Whelchel, Director of Science for The Nature Conservancy in Connecticut, we can measure the value of all this work. “For flood control, water supply protection, pollution control, it’s roughly about $31.22 per hectare per year,” he says. Add the value of all the plants that feed the fish that end up on our dinner plates, and it’s up to $338 annually per acre. And add in the birdwatchers who support the local economy, the value rises to $490 per hectare, according to Whelchel.
The Biden administration has advocated for this kind of environmental accounting. At the end of the process, the administration says researchers and policymakers will have access to data and statistics that help them take those natural services into account. For Silvia Secchi, a professor at the University of Iowa, this is a good thing: “By omitting these values from the economy, we are giving a false sense of growth and progress,” she said.
But consider the example of Mao County, China. Mao County is a rural area where the main industry is apple farming. In the 1990s the bees in Mao County started to disappear. For owners of apple orchards, this was a disaster. Without bees, the flowers on the apple trees were not pollinated, and without that, there were no apples. Without bees to pollinate their apple trees, apple farmers in Mao County turned to manual pollination. They hired human workers who would go tree to tree with a pollen brush and pollinate each tree, flower by flower. They now were paying for work that the bees had been doing for free.
But there is a surprise ending. The orchard owners found that production of apples increased because humans turn out to be more efficient pollinators than bees. In fact, fruit production went up 30 percent. And there was additional economic benefit: the workers who were paid to pollinate would go to the bar, they’d buy groceries, they’d spend those earnings in their local communities in a way that bees never did. But as workers’ wages rise, will this be sustainable?
Some would argue that it is futile to put an economic value on nature. The philosopher Michael Sandel argues that some things should not be for sale and are corrupted when we try to put a price on them. But others push back. As Nat Keohane, who leads the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, says: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure. And if we don’t put a dollar value on ecosystem services, their effective worth is zero.”
— Discussion Questions —
Should we be paying workers to pollinate the trees?
Should we engage in environmental accounting? Should we attach a dollar value to things like the salt marshes’ pollution control, its ability to provide us with fish, and the revenue it generates from its value to birdwatchers?