BIODIVERSITY AND HUMAN HEALTH
Executive Summary, page 4
by Joseph Dougherty

Putting a Price on Nature

The value of natural environments is difficult to calculate, and this raises several important problems when we look at biodiversity in the context of public policy. How can we measure the economic value of ecosystem services, such as water purification, or resistance to environmental disturbances? Since the maintenance of biodiversity involves choices and ultimately costs, how can markets (and individuals) reflect and distribute these values appropriately?

Corporate entities tend to react only to the bottom line, or factors that will impact it, such as public sentiment... so that is where the efforts of concerned individuals and groups can most effectively be focused. Government regulation is needed, but grassroots, citizen-led change is far more effective and timely. Individual consumers must vote with their dollars. The task of making conscientious purchasing decisions is relatively painless when the products and materials are derived from the natural world in a sustainable manner. But where no sound alternative exists (as, for example, in the case of fossil fuels) what can one do? The answer: show the corporate and governmental agencies involved that the bottom line is improved, not hindered, by acting responsibly toward the environment. As explained below, a number of valuable product lines, and even entire industries, own their existence to steps taken to preserve biodiversity, such as the establishment of Yellowstone National Park, which later allowed important discoveries to come to light.

Bioprospecting

Hunting through nature for new pharmaceutical agents, commonly called bioprospecting, is one of the most well-publicized means of mining the natural world for useful new products, but is certainly not the only example. New food crops are also a possibility, although to date there have been very few such introductions that have achieved more than regional importance, either dietarily or economically. More intriguing, perhaps, is the use of genetic engineering to extract biochemical processes from the natural world. Research of this kind has found application in biological clean-up, or bioremediation, of toxic waste and oil spills. An even more promising and somewhat more controversial opportunity is found in harnessing processes at the most fundamental levels of biological structure.

Biodiversity has been seen as the total (and irreducible) complexity of all life, including not only the great variety of organisms but also their varying behaviour and interactions. From this viewpoint, no single objective measure of biodiversity is possible, only measures relating to particular purposes or applications. So for conservationists, for example, a measure of biodiversity should quantify a value that is both broadly shared among the people for whom they are acting and considered as being in need of protection.

One of the most defensible arguments for conserving wholesale biodiversity at all levels — as opposed to just preserving those components, or "biospecifics," with proven high value at this moment — is the need to ensure continued possibilities for natural systems to adapt to future changes, as well as to safeguard potential future uses of as-yet unidentified resources.

If we use the apt analogy of an Ark, then the breadth of biodiversity upon which we have to draw is analogous to the clearance we have between us and the rocky shore that might break apart our Ark. In a changing and tumultous world (rough seas for our Ark), we need all the clearance we can get to keep our ship off the rocks, and failing to conserve biodiversity may leave us without enough room to maneuver through a storm.

Consequently, one of the greatests values of biodiversity is likely to be associated with the variety of different expressable genes (those that can show up as potentially useful phenotypic traits or characters, such as different chemicals, morphological features, behaviors, etc.) possessed by organisms. Because we do not know yet precisely which genes or characters will be of value in the future, they should all be treated as having equal value and biodiversity conservation must strive to protect as many different genes and characters as possible. The cache of resources and tools hidden in the spiraling DNA of living things, some of them still unknown to science, is certainly tremendous and may be massive beyond our wildest imaginings.

One example is the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which is used in genetic research and in commercial applications to manipulate DNA. The ready availability of enzymes that serve as catalysts to speed up the rate of cellular replication has made genetic engineering possible on an industrial scale. The enzymes used to catalyze PCR were first isolated from bacteria that can survive only in high temperatures. These bacteria were discovered in the natural hot springs of Yellowstone National Park (Janetos 1997). In this case, to say that an entire new industry depended on the diversity of organisms and habitats in the National Park system is no exaggeration. Substantial prospecting is now underway in these and other extreme environments to find enzymes that will catalyze other industrially-useful reactions.

This is just one example of the unforeseeable value of biodiversity. But intact ecosystems also have many concrete advantages and plainly identifiable benefits, many of which can actually be assigned a dollar-value. Examples of some of these values are listed in the next pages.

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References on this page. Click your browser's "Back" button to return to the spot you were reading.

Janetos, Anthony C. 1997. “Do We Still Need Nature? The Importance of Biological Diversity.” Available online: http://www.gcrio.org/CONSEQUENCES/vol3no1/biodiversity.html.