Mark Tercek: Valuing Nature

I wrote the book because I really believe in the arguments of the book. As environmentalists, we’ve got great environmental organizations we can all be proud of, but we have to somehow elevate our game. I don’t claim natural capital is the best or the only strategy, but I think it is a damn good strategy. Why? Because it broadens support. You name the business or government, and I can find ways they depend on and should be investing in nature.

Well, it’s not more important. I never say that. Sometimes, because of my business background, people think I’m arguing that business can be the answer for everything. It cannot. More important than anything else is the role of government through its regulations. So we need strong, effective, smart government.

Government is a bigger investor in infrastructure than the private sector. Infrastructure is generally a shared common good. So even more important than the business case is the government case to invest in nature.

I think business is more nimble [than government]. And certainly for me, it’s probably easier to persuade businesses to act fast now. At a time when government maybe is weaker — a little bit missing in action — having some evident and high-profile progress by business not only is progress in and of itself, but might provide good examples to motivate government.

Oh, a lot more. First of all, the number of companies that have genuine, CEO-led environmental efforts is not huge. It’s growing and there are some really high profile great cases, but we need a lot more players.

A company I admire is Rio Tinto, and we [TNC] work with Rio Tinto in the U.K. You might say, “Rio Tinto, it’s a mining company. Its environmental footprint is huge.” That’s right, but unless humankind radically, and I mean radically, changes its lifestyle, we need the products that come from these mines. And to Rio Tinto’s credit, they want to leave the environment net better than when they showed up, and that’s a bold commitment. So we’re working with them in Mongolia, and their big project in the Gobi Desert, and I think they will live up to that commitment. The mine itself is huge, and has an environmental impact, but they’re using our science to minimize and to more than offset that impact.

There are other players that have really good corporate social responsibility or corporate philanthropy efforts. I think those are very nice, admirable starts, but they are insufficient. They’ve got to go further.

I understand that. Nature is priceless, and most environmentalists, including me, love nature. And we care just as much about those precious ecosystems that don’t provide these quantifiable services that deserve investment. We want to protect everything. In fact, part of The Nature Conservancy’s strategic plan is to protect all habitats. The practical things [some of these habitats] do aren’t as obvious.

Nevertheless, there are some shortcomings to that approach. If you talk about nature just in those terms, some people who are not environmentalists — and remember, the pool of people who are not environmentalists is much bigger — will think, “Oh, I see. Nature is like a luxury good. It’s something that we should take care of after we’ve taken care of everything else.”

And so, poorer countries, or richer countries at a time of economic challenge, think they can’t afford to invest in the environment. I think that’s wrong; that’s why we have to elevate this argument. Because if you read my book or you believe in the environment you’ll see that nature is the vital underpinning of economic progress.

I do. I’m a proud environmentalist, and I’m also a proud pragmatist. And I love nature as much as anyone else. When I joined TNC some people seemed very surprised by my urban upbringing and the fact that I wasn’t an accomplished fly fisherman, and things like that. Nature belongs to everybody. One very nice outcome of that for The Nature Conservancy, and I’m really proud of this, is we’re now looking at opportunities to do TNC-type conservation projects in cities.

At The Nature Conservancy we take this challenge very seriously. We really are a science-driven organization, and so we always look at data. And my chief scientist, Peter Kareiva, [said] when I joined TNC, “There’s troubling data now and on the horizon. Your kids spend less than one-third of the time outdoors than you did when you were a kid.” Now that’s a problem, because if you talked to TNC supporters or TNC employees, in a surprisingly frequent number of cases during their childhood they had powerful outdoor experiences, often because their grandparents had a ranch or a farm or something. Well, let’s face it, the world’s changing. It’s an ever more urban world and kids are indoors. We have to deal with that.

We have a program called LEAF [Leaders in Environmental Action for the Future], where we take inner-city kids from tough circumstances and put them in one of our projects during the summer. We now have more than 500 graduates from that program, and more than one-third have gone on to major in the sciences. Now they’re rolling out of college and going into environmental fields. We think that’s exciting.

The biggest challenge is we are overwhelmed with worthy opportunities. If we take them all on — and it’s really hard not to — we spread ourselves too thin and don’t get things done. So we’ve got to force ourselves to set priorities and stick to them.

I want to protect nature because it’s the right thing to do. I want to protect nature because I want to look my kids in the eye and say I did everything I could to give them a natural world as good as the one I enjoyed. I also want to protect nature for the practical reasons I talk about in the book. And I want to rebuild bipartisan support for nature. I want to do all that as an environmentalist. I want to make it safe and attractive and popular to be an environmentalist.