On Natural Capital
The Value of the World Around Us
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- CHF 12.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
What if we were to put a value on nature just as we value everything else?
For as long as they have existed, our economic models have served us an incomplete picture. The models and metrics tell us that our economies are healthy because they are growing. However, this doesn’t account for the fact that our growth is driven by a resource that we take for free and treat as infinite: nature. We know now, more than ever, that our demand on the natural world is unsustainable. It’s no longer sufficient to only see part of the picture; it’s time that our economic models show us the whole thing.
An urgent call from renowned Cambridge economist Sir Partha Dasgupta to transform the focus and structures of global economics, On Natural Capital is a bold and groundbreaking book that could, truly, change everything.
'the most important person you've never heard of' - The New York Times
'Partha Dasgupta provides the compass we urgently need… by bringing economics and ecology together, we can help save the natural world at what may be the last minute – and in doing so, save ourselves.’ - David Attenborough
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What would it mean if people placed an economic value on nature in the same way they assess other resources, goods, and services, asks Cambridge University economist Dasgupta (The Economics of Biodiversity) in this bold treatise. Unlike produced capital (tangible assets like roads and buildings) and human capital (intangible assets like education and aptitude), natural capital (living organisms but also nonliving resources like water and forests) has historically been left out of economic considerations and treated as free and infinite. The result, Dasgupta writes, is an impoverished biosphere, marked by species extinction (currently at 100–1,000 times "the average extinction rates in the previous several million years") and depleted ecosystems that can't sustainably meet demands for their resources. Dasgupta also persuasively shows that the export of natural products from poor countries to wealthier ones, rather than having a positive impact on the former, actually consists of significant wealth transfers from exporting to importing countries. His comprehensive analysis of basic ecology and economics are lucid and accessible, but his conclusion that people need to care about their local communities and preserve biodiversity where they can feels insufficient in the face of the global challenges he identifies. Still, this is an urgent call to transform humanity's relationship to nature.
