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Natural economy's payoff exceeds cost By C. RONALD CARROLL To reach Sea Island, they crossed miles of salt marsh and estuaries. While most of them probably enjoyed the scenery, I suspect that they were unaware that they were visiting a different kind of economy, the silent economy of nature. Conceivably one could put a market value on this coastal landscape. The accounting would go something like this:
How much is this landscape worth? Priceless. The salt marshes of Georgia embrace some 400,000 acres, about a third of the salt marshes along the Atlantic coast from Newfoundland to northern Florida. The marsh has been described as a great productive nursery that feeds the young and many adults of blue crabs, shrimp, flounder, menhadden, mullet, oysters and dozens of other species of ecological if not gastronomic significance. Describing the productivity of the salt marsh is a bit dry no matter its ecological and economic importance. But on a calm spring night, if you canoed into the marsh on an incoming high tide, you would experience a more evocative meaning of marsh productivity. All around you would hear sounds as if thousands of popcorn kernels were popping. The popping sounds are the feeding noises made by enormous populations of juvenile shrimp as they graze upon diatoms by the millions per square yard and on organic detritus, the byproduct of the vast meadows of salt marsh grass and reeds. The natural economy is the foundation of the human economy of Georgia. Atlanta, often called the economic engine of Georgia among other more pejorative descriptors, is completely dependent on the small watersheds that feed the Chattahoochee and a few smaller rivers that supply Atlanta's drinking, commercial and industrial water. The many small and large wetlands, especially those along the fall line that demarcates the piedmont from the coastal plain, are the recharge sites for the great Floridan aquifer and others that supply drinking water to South Georgia and North Florida. The trees of metro Atlanta form an urban forest, though smaller in recent years, that filters out air pollutants and helps Atlanta meet Environmental Protection Agency air quality standards. The same forest counters the urban heat island effect of Atlanta's concrete and asphalt landscape. For all these important environmental services provided by nature we pay essentially nothing. We too often complain when we are asked to provide some measure of protection for these services. Ironically, we often hear the argument that we cannot protect these natural environmental services because the economic costs are too great or the protective measures are too intrusive on private property rights. Yet, we enthusiastically encourage industries to settle in Georgia because they may provide positive economic benefits and we readily saddle residents with the tax costs of attracting these industries. Why are we unwilling to pay the cost of maintaining the economic benefits of the natural economy? Perhaps we need to more fully understand the costs we would bear to provide those critical services that are now provided free by nature. Consider the potential cost of an alternative to one important environmental service: the pollination of our food crops. Suppose pesticides, disease, parasites and habitat loss decimated wild bees and honeybees, as may well be happening. What would be the cost of substituting for these services? How large would the underpaid and overexploited migrant labor force need to be in order to hand pollinate Georgia's peach, apple and pear trees and its fields of melons, squash and pumpkins, if indeed people could do it? The G-8 meeting was devoted to finding ways to protect and strengthen the world's commerce. We need a new meeting of world leaders to consider ways to protect and strengthen the world's natural economy, a Green-8 meeting. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution June 9, 2004 |
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