Pavan Sukhdev: Natural Capital

This is as concise and data-filled argument as you'll ever see for green accounting and the counting of natural capital.  It's Pavan Sukhdev giving a TED talk, and it's only 16 minutes, well worth your time.

I find two things fascinating:
1) Sukhdev's obvious slant away from the first-world financier's view that tends to dominate global carbon discussions.  He is openly scolding the world for deciding that coral reefs are disposable (in setting a carbon limit above 350ppm), and openly suggesting that bioprospecting should reward local poor communities rather than the prospectors or the host nation.  Sukhdev is, essentially, a reformer of development and a believer that global capital should be subordinate to the public sphere.  This puts him on the far left of the current stage on which ecosystem services discourse plays out.

2) Sukhdev got into this biz through a project of trying to steer the Indian state away from mimicking Chinese-style growth.  This positions his contributions as a kind of postcolonial project in origin (and likely feeding off of the long postcolonial intellectual tradition in Indian political economics), asking the question: how should the Indian state move beyond a colonial world of Eurocentric economies?  How does India become an economic pole in its own right?  Sukhdev's answer was different than the answer of many in India, but still it's apparent that the Natural Capital approach was initially a useful tool in waging a debate over Indian economic strategy, not the kind of grail in its own right that it has been to environmental economists in the US and Europe since the 1970s.

The biggest tell is his repeated commitment to describing global resources as "public" and "common".  This reveals the tension between valuation and marketization -- it is possible to argue for the economic valuation of public goods without calling for their commodification and sale, and defending their identity as public, indeed defending the commons.  This could not be more opposed to Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons, the argument which most natural capitalism talk takes as foundational.

Let me be clear, I find all of this encouraging and it makes me more appreciative of Sukhdev and the internal complexity of dialogues about natural capital.  It is possible that what we've got here is just the latest iteration in the conflict between index-makers and price-theory marginalists that we've seen play out ever since Costanza's article.  In that, I'm not sure we've moved beyond the standard script:

Price theorist: "You say you want to value nature, but the only sure way is to observe price in a clearing market.  To say otherwise is an unforgivable economic heterodoxy."
Index theorist: "Ok, but markets create social inequities and perfect information is always lacking in environmental commodities. Reforming GDP and balance sheets is a good place to start to achieve developmental goals".
Price theorist: "So you're saying markets are incapable of creating optimal social welfare?  Communist."

The problem for people like Sukhdev is that it's very, very hard to make the kinds of arguments he's making without heading down the road toward anti-capitalism.  He just said, essentially, that markets do not produce desirable results, that the commons must be preserved, and that the welfare of low-income people should be given special attention through institutional design.  To believe these things are compatible with capitalism requires a kind of willful averting-of-eyes from the laws of capital.  Natural Captalists, then, tend to be those who believe that these laws can be held in abeyance for certain times in certain places, without damage to the overall thing called "capitalism."  And of course the jury's still out on that.

Are we still panicking over 7 billion, or was that yesterday?

It was fun to see the predictable rollout of "OMG 7BN" rhetoric in the media last October followed by the  pushback by the weird combination of hyper-capitalists and leftists, both of whom have traditionally rejected the kind of Malthusian talk about limits to human ingenuity that has been part of environmentalism since the 1960s.  But that all ended pretty quickly, no?  Time to gear up for the 8 billion panic... it's just around the corner!

But I thought I'd round up some of the saner thoughts, for my own edification (and the teaching of introductory geography courses).  First let's start with a keystone quotation from David Harvey:

The political implications of a term like overpopulation can be devastating.  Somebody, somewhere, is redundant, and there is not enough to go around.  Am I redundant?  Of course not.  Are you redundant?  Of course not.  So who is redundant?  Of course!  It must be them.”

Ok, so there's the real question.  It was not hard to find image after image after image of brown people accompanying the 7 billion stories.  It wasn't subtle... there are too many brown people.  Hell, at PopOffsets.com you can even buy carbon credits by paying for family planning in Africa.  That's right -- let that sink in.  By paying to ensure that there are fewer brown people in the world, you can drive your SUV without adding to atmospheric carbon.

The obvious critique is that it's not, per capita, the brown people who are using most of the resources. 

Nonetheless, NPR went all Malthus on us, as did The New Yorker Magazine. The dependably liberal talk show On Point was flooded with Volvo-driving hand-wringers.

The Guardian fired back, twice, highlighting consumption, and NPR reconsidered its own reportage with a teachable moment on the dignity of individual lives that are often grouped together as "excess people". Even the High Country News weighed in.  And at least some people are making a class-based argument (Occupy Malthus?) about population.

But as my friend Eric Carter has pointed out, it's very easy to lob spitballs at Malthusians... it's much harder to explain how we decouple economic growth from resource use such that the development of a country doesn't lead to more severe per capita impacts on global resources.  The alternative is to celebrate poverty, or still to blame the poor in their millions for the problem. Unless affluence doesn't always lead to higher consumption?

The UN Population Fund has started a webpage devoted to telling the story of the march to 7 billion, while remaining rather agnostic on who is to blame.  Those peacekeepers, always turning the other cheek.

The Economist took the classic old-school liberal (not American liberal) line that more people is better because more human ingenuity is better.  And the BBC gave us something fun to do on the internet by figuring our population number -- I, for example, was the 3,767,313,699th person alive on earth when I was born, and the 77,947,989,929th  person alive in the history of the planet.  (I'm just imagining the poor neanderthal who just missed out being #1.  Didn't evolve fast enough, poor bastard.)

So what should we take from all of this?

Look, there are really two answers: Firstly, to paraphrase an economics professor of mine, if you think resource depletion comes from overpopulation, you probably think milk comes from bottles.  Focusing on the number is the easy way to avoid thinking about deeper causes of shortages and inequality.  Secondly, the thing that none of these sources is getting is that there is NO single, global problem called "overpopulation".  Rather, the question has been posed and answered at a global level because we have convenient global datasets at hand -- we look for the answer where the data is, not where the answer is (the old lost-quarter under a lamppost scenario). 

In any given setting, however, people use resources or abuse them for far more complex reasons than the fact that they exist as part of a 7-billion-large crowd.  I mean, you didn't leave the light on in the hallway overnight because there are 7 billion people, you left it on because your 5-year old daughter is afraid of the dark.  Things are complicated: In some settings, depopulation has been shown to cause environmental degradation; in others, populations are static but resource conservation depends on political or cultural features.  These cases are so numerous that it's a wonder anyone pays attention to the aggregate number.  The Geographer's answer -- or this one's, at least -- is to deny that a term like "overpopulation" is meaningful or useful, and instead to ask only about specific cases and situations in which the relationships between people and resources can actually be studied and resolved.

Unrelated but of great historical interest: James Madison, Conservationist?

*many thanks to the Cultural and Political Ecology listserv contributors for bringing my attention to most of these links.

 

Ocean's 350ppm, starring George Clooney

Any criminal conspiracy that unfolds inside a French discotheque pretty much demands to be turned into a screwball heist comedy.

Also, NB: "It wasn't a REAL financial market, so there wasn't any REAL risk of losing the money you'd invested."  This statement about the European carbon market is worth meditating on.

Ecological Restoration given its raison d'etre: Ecosystem Services

That sound you hear is the sound of thousands of academics cleaning their offices and finding the long-lost surfaces of their desks.

It's that time of year -- those magical weeks when we actually have enough time to answer email from October, return peer reviews a month overdue, and, in my case, get back to blogging.  The semester overwhelmed me just at the point when the "7 billion" panic was hitting its stride (remember that?) in late October, and although I have a longer post planned for that, I thought I'd reboot with just a few tidbits in the news recently.

This little video on the relationship between ecosystem services and environmental restoration is short and is actually beautifully efficient at showing us how ecosystem services policy fits into the long 20th century of policy addressing resource exploitation, overpopulation, and development.  It's a lecture by Dr. Thomas Elmqvist at Yale in their series on TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity).  The following steps have applied to all problems of environment and development since -- oh, let's say the 1950s.  I'm open to revision on that.  But the three-legged stool of most environmental crisis stories is present:

1) As I've written elsewhere, the first step in the management of the environment as sets of service commodities is the creation of a taxonomy so that you know -- and can name -- what you're looking at and trying to manage.  This is where Dr. Elmqvist starts.

2) From taxonomy he moves quickly to overpopulation: the justification for intervening is, at first cut, Malthusian.

3) Lastly, he presents global resource mapping (in this case, a worldwide map of soil degradation) as evidence of the crisis of overpopulation.  We political ecologists have long critiqued the management-by-satellite strategies of global resource managers: we tend to find answers instead on the ground in human interactions. This is a case of the sin of "scaling parsimony," described by Matt Turner (full disclosure: my dissertation advisor).  That is, people tend to look for data and solutions at the same scale at which the problem is defined: population is thought to be a global problem, so we tend to use world-spanning datasets to find answers.  Not always helpful.  But very, very common.

4) The last step is actually newer: the suggestion that ecological restoration is the solution to a crisis newly-defined as one of "ecosystem service provision" (rather than simply overpopulation or soil degradation).  This is becoming common as well over the past 10 years: ecological restoration has gone from a hobby science practiced by retirees and rogue ecologists to a global technology of production -- it lacked only the object "ecosystem services" to give it purpose and direction.  In the mid 1990s, the ecological restoration community was wracked by debates about what, exactly, was to be restored: "authenticity"? "ecological integrity"? "ecologies circa 1492"?  "resilience"?  "culturally-appropriate landscapes"?  These debates had no answer, and appeared incredibly esoteric from the outside.  But now the simple nostrum that "ecological restoration produces ecosystem services" has realigned much of the field of restoration ecology on a sometimes-implicit economic and utility-focused footing.  As Dr. Almqvist says, his definition of "restoration" avoids doctrinal debates about authenticity:

"So this is a very pragmatic definition, that you're not including any specific target -- that you are restoring to certain condition that happened to be at that area 100 years ago or 200 years ago.  This pragmatic definition just tells you that you will assist in the recovery process from a very low productive state."

Productive of what?  Ecosystem services. From my view, this represents a broad repurposing of ecological restoration -- when I began going to conferences and reading resto journals and newsletters in the early 1990s, the field was full of amateur botanists and inspired local resource managers.  Few academics and no economists.  Now, I suspect, the field is very different.


On an unrelated note, this report on "one of the first REDD+ Type projects to be entirely controlled and operated by indigenous communities" is something of an eye-opener for those of us who have become accustomed to seeing REDD policy discussed as either a sort of celebration of non-additionality or a stalking horse for the centralization of political power over resources in rural third-world areas. REDD+ is a little more complicated that that.

Deadly conflict over a CDM?

Ok, this is not good news. 23 Honduran peasants and two others have been apparently killed by private security forces in conflict over the implementation of a CDM project in which the peasants' land was "illegally" sold to developers of palm oil plantations which generate carbon credits.

Environmental protection in developing-world settings has often been linked to militarism, the eviction of indigenous people or peasants, and the strong sense that land-use in the third world is (still) being directed by  first-world economies or politicians.  Geographers have been all over this (google "fortress conservation").

So we're kind of used to thinking about game wardens in the Serengeti with heavy weaponry.  It's long been recognized as a problem that traditional and often sustainable land-users are being driven off their land (often to end up in urban slums) by first-world-initiated environmental protection actions.

But ecosystem services and carbon was supposed to be different -- cleaner, somehow, involving fewer guns and more payments to stewards of the land.  So this news is unexpected in some ways, but in other ways it fits right in with the long and sometimes bloody history of first-world directed environmental policies implemented in the developing world.  As long ago as 2007 this was being referred to as "CO2lonialism".  As a slogan it's catchy, but conceptual and polemical.  However, there's nothing like a body count to change the narrative -- not something that the Kyoto community and the CDM board can afford to let happen.

Wilderness vs. Ecosystem Services

Finally read an article in Science by Peter Karieva et al. from 2007 that I'd had in the docket for a long time. It's a big-time Science-y agenda-setting piece. That is, being in Science, it shapes the debate and defines what constitute appropriate questions and appropriate boundary conditions in the world of Ecosystem Services.  And in that respect it’s a bit disturbing.  Karieva et al begin from the assumption that the world is “domesticated”, that is, that there is no wilderness unaffected by humans – in fact, they come right out and invite us to accept this as an axiom: “If one accepts that virtually all of nature is now domesticated…”.  They do not really defend this assertion, but hey move on to say that, being domesticated, it would be irresponsible of us not to manage global ecosystems as if they were composed of services.  That is, if the world is at the service of humans already, managing it as a bundle of services is merely the ecologically responsible thing to do.  Ergo, wilderness advocates and deep greenies are not only defending a nonexistent world, but harming the real one.

Here’s what gets me.  Karieva and his coauthors are late to the party of “there’s no such thing as wilderness” -- it’s depressing (but predictable) that they do not cite the geographers who have been working this seam for a few decades, including Bill Denevan (“The Pristine Myth”), Tom Vale and Bill Cronon.  Denevan was arguing that much of what Euro-Americans have conceived of as wilderness was profoundly shaped by large and active native populations, and that the landscape of even our National Parks is anthropogenic.  Fine.  What do we do with that? 

A) “It’s all fake!  Tear it down!  Kill it with fire!  Preservationists are all deluded! Management regimes must not be based on non-human goals!”

This is the rather postmodern interpretation encouraged by, among others, the Georgia-Pacific timber company, who used Denevan’s work to argue that their forestry techniques were morally equivalent to native uses of the landscape.

Notice the Manichean worldview.  If the world is divided into Pristine Wild and Fallen Human Landscapes, and we discover that there is no Pristine Wild landscape, then all landscapes must be contaminated, human, and fallen.  Domesticated. This view retains the Wild/Fallen dichotomy, and is a view shared by Karieva et al.: if there is no Wilderness, then nature is best understood in terms of human uses and welfare.  Wilderness, or its absence, structures this view, and is best understood as a kind of aporetic presence. (In the Derridean sense.  I know, sorry).   What that means is that the coherence of Karieva’s argument still depends on the power and coherence of the concept of Wilderness.  Its absence is present.

The problem is this isn't at all what Cronon and Denevan meant.  They meant that the pervasiveness of human influence should make us question the concept of wilderness, not that we should declare a previously-existing Eden "gone".  If non-economic approaches to nature are welded to the concept of wilderness, it's a trap -- springing it simply involves showing that humans have some impact on a given tract of land. So how about this instead?

B) “The absence of unaltered non-human landscapes should make us question the very taxonomy that we had previously used to describe nature.  The Wild/Human dichotomy actually makes no sense, so let’s get down to what really matters: what are ecologically and socially sound practices?”

Yeah, this is harder.  But it’s actually what Denevan and Vale and Cronon have been trying to say for 20 years.  It leaves open the possibility that the goodness of treating the world as composed of “services” is (as it should be) an open question to be answered on a case-by-case basis.  As long as Karieva et al. cordon off possible objections to this into the now-nonexistent realm of “wilderness advocacy”, there is no voice for them.

What it comes down to is this.  As always, the act of seeing the world as a set of economically valuable services, or the world as domesticated, is an achievement that has to be constantly reiterated through arguments (most effectively, through high-profile ones in Science).  It must not be assumed away as a boundary condition for debate.

Is the term "markets" useful?

Interesting soapbox going on over at Ecosystem Commons... the proposal is that the term "markets" might be too limiting (or misleading? or incomplete?) to describe what is actually happening in ecosystem services policy.  I think the easy answer is "yes", but that doesn't get at why the term "markets" is so irresistible to policymakers.  My response below:

Agreed -- the concept of “market-based” policy is becoming applied with so broad a brush that it threatens to mean nothing, similar to the argument about “ecosystem services” themselves.  So you get the strict economists like Jim Boyd and Bob Costanza meaning very specific and measurable things when they talk about “services”, and then you get the Millennium Assessment accused of kitchen-sinkery by same.  I’ve always found it faintly absurd that programs like South Africa’s or Australia’s are trumpeted as “market-based!” when in fact they establish a government monopsony (single-buyer market) transacting only as many credits as the state-defined environmental goals called for.  If this isn’t Keynesian demand-management, I don’t know what is!  Even in the archetypal US wetland compensation example, supply and demand are entirely determined by the state: the Corps both certifies credits for sale, and requires their purchase on the part of permittees.

None of this is a surprise to the environmental economists who envisaged this – and most of their intellectual descendents protest vigorously that regulatory markets were never meant to be actual markets, and that state policy was always understood to be an imperfect surrogate for individual utility.  So the vernacular use of “market” seems to signify a policy arrangement that involves some element of negotiation over cost: either the Australian farmer negotiates a bid price for performing state-directed ecosystem mitigation, or the Clean Water Act 404 permittee negotiates a price with a wetland banker.  But these moments occur within an architecture of state-directed policy -- there is always a lack of "hunger" as Kelly Haggar says above. and this was foreseen by the inventors of the approach.

I’m actually ok with this vernacular.  The purist alternative is that there would be no such thing as a market-based environmental policy, and I don’t think that’s a useful position to hold.  A middle-ground might be to adopt something like a tripartite distinction between a) payments that are explicitly a form of subsidy or government aid, b) reverse auctions involving a government (or other) monopsony, and c) market-like situations where many buyers and sellers meet, albeit often under government compulsion.  There is no d) actual real live markets.  Esteve Corbera has written a ton of useful stuff on the PES/CES/MES distinction.

Very good point above by Kelly: the very unsettled debate about the boundaries/definition of the commodity itself prevents the kind of perfect-information conditions of the ideal market from existing.  The challenge of measurement is paramount, and I think paradoxical (I've written elsewhere that the more precise ecological measures we use, the greater the challenge of actual fungibility in an actual market).  Not to caricature Kelly's point, however, but I’m not sure a purist approach is best here (that is, “because the commodity isn’t transparently understood by all members of the transaction, true markets will not arise”).  Big macs and 747s are understood by many, but the existence of advertising has always suggested that information is never perfect.   My gut says Kelly is right, but the facts on the ground suggest that people have historically laid out substantial sums of money for very nebulous objects.   Derivatives, mortgage-backed securities, “land in Florida”, property in Second Life.  And carbon isn’t such a great counter-example in some ways – sure, end-of-stack measurements can be quantified easily, but sequestration in a reforestation CDM is as hard-to-measure and contingent as any ecosystem service.

I think there's always going to be a tension between professional and academic economists, on the one hand, and policymakers, on the other.  Economists are trained to use the term "market" (and all other terms of art) with precision, while policymakers will want to utilize the real political cachet of the term "market". This isn't really a productive debate: lack of adherence to strict economic principles will not keep the term from being used -- we can't herd the term back into its corseted textbook definition.  So yeah, I'd rather see a wider definition, yet one that stops short of "everything".

There are wetlands in the sky. No, really.

Yes, yes, it’s a blog called “Wetlandia” and I haven’t talked about wetlands yet.  Settle down.

I’m reading a book called “The Wild Trees” by Robert Preston – a sort of pop-ecology book of the kind that often annoys me because the narratives are almost always preachy and they’re usually populated by smug and affluent wearers of fleece and tevas.  The first 2/3 of the book is no exception: the author traces the masculinist journeys of a set of boys (and only a few girls), outcasts and creative thinkers, overeducated children of privilege, who want to see what’s up in the redwood canopy 350 feet off the ground.  This collection of people is appealingly odd, but when I say masculinist I mean in the way that so much of what passes for countercultural behavior and eco-political activism has an incredibly male tone.  Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitare was populated by a bunch of boys acting very male.  The guys in Preston’s book are Peter Pans in the trees – the two main characters are, in particular, come across (at least initially) as very tiresome men-children, although I suspect Preston overplays them in this regard.  The redwood canopy is an awesome place.  Using it as the backdrop for nerdboys to bed their beautiful research assistants makes it a less awesome place.  But I get it -- you have to humanize the topic.

But this is not a book review.  What really made me sit up is that about 2/3 of the way through the book, the author gets around to describing the hydrology of the redwood canopy.  Now, keep in mind that these are the tallest trees in the world, and the largest organisms that aren’t landscape-sized fungi.  The meat of the book revolves around the notion that canopy space is a vast ocean above us (to use Rachel Carson’s analogy of the atmosphere), and that it’s full of different ecosystems, different species and different habitats.  And it is never, never, visited by people.  In fact, entirely new climbing techniques have had to be invented just to transport the handful of people who’ve ever bothered to try.  And this: redwood trees often have large boles or crotches in their canopy where the central leader dies and the crown sprouts around it, creating a kind of basin 300 feet in the air.  Big ones, the size of small meadows.  These can fill up with soil several feet thick, with hydrophytic plants, and provide habitat for permanent communities of salamanders and other aquatic species.  A-ha.

So what it comes down to is this.  There are wetlands in the rainforest canopy.  Wetlands with permanently saturated soils.  Wetlands that meet all of the criteria laid down in the 1987 manual, the 1989 manual and probably even the crap 1991 manual.  Until the SWANCC decision of 2001, hell, they were probably jurisdictional wetlands in the air!  And if the current draft EPA/Corps guidance on establishing jurisdiction by finding a nexus between a wetland and a navigable river can be applied in just the right way, they may still be jurisdictional (and therefore protected by the Clean Water Act’s Section 404 permit program).  Some of these trees are rooted in floodplains, and so the wetlands are connected to navigable waters by the tree itself -- are they "neighboring" in EPA/Corps' sense?  Should the list of (a)(3) "other waters" be amended to include airborne wetlands? Of course, they might fall under the silviculture exemption, and it’s hard to imagine how you might trigger a 404 permit by dredging or filling in the upper redwood canopy.  But that’s not the point.  The point is that we can look up to see the bottom of a wetland.

For a wetland regulator, this is somewhat mindblowing.  The stats that Preston presents are impressive, and he seems to have consulted with some good hydrologists.  A hectare of canopy can hold thousands of liters of water, and take an immensely long time to both dry out and recharge.  The canopy does not only hold water (yeah, that’s just “canopy interception” to a mass-balance hydrology equation), it holds them in wetland ecosystems.

Water Quality Trading to scale WAY up

I listened in on a webinar last week that laid out a possible future for water quality trading.  The problem for WQT is that no one has "gone big" so most people have gone home -- whereas carbon credits can be traded worldwide, and wetland/habitat credits usually are traded within a service area that is large enough to support a market, no one really knows how big a market area for water quality credits CAN be, to provide ecological benefits, or HAS to be, to survive economically.

The Ohio River Basin Trading Project wants to find out.  Previous WQT projects have spun up where farmers generate water quality improvements that are quantified as credits, then sold to downstream end-of-pipe polluters (usually sewage treatment works) who exceed their permit limitations.  But the watersheds involved are typically very small -- the Greater Miami in Ohio, the South Nation in Ontario, etc.  Escape velocity and market thickness have never been achieved -- failure to thrive, failure to launch, whatever you want to call it.  WQT has always sputtered. The Ohio River Project is happening on the scale of the entire Ohio River basin, all the way from Pittsburgh, PA to Cairo, IL, and is getting everyone in the same room to figure out what kind of rules and conversations might be needed to allow a farmer in Ohio to sell credits to a power plant (say) in Indiana.

Can we avoid pollutant hotspots?  What differences from other environmental markets may exist because rivers flow directionally and carry pollutants only within their watersheds?  We just don't know. But we might in a few years.  Very interesting!

Ecosystem Services in the NY Times

It's right to start this blog with a consideration of Gretchen Daily, surely one of the most forceful and admirable advocates for the Ecosystem Services approach in policy today. She was featured last month in a NYTimes writeup that served to introduce readers to her work and the concept of ecosystem services. I don't really have an issue with Daily's work as it's presented, but rather the journalistic framing. I wrote the following up as a letter to the editor that I never sent, because I decided to start a blog instead.

While Dr. Daily’s work, and the work of the Natural Capital group, has been pathbreaking, it is not the only path. The “ecosystem services” approach is presented in a slightly cartoonish, Goldilocks fashion as the rational middle ground between a kooky deep green environmentalism on the one hand and rapacious economic exploitation on the other.

We know how this drama plays out. The piece casts Dr. Daily on a too-familiar stage: on the one hand, “nature’s intrinsic worth,” and on the other, the blinkered but practical and “anthropocentric” calculus of economic worth. Maintaining the mutual irreconcilability of these approaches has been very convenient for both economics and environmentalists, and its invocation is a kind of ritual. As long as nature’s true wealth is “vast, immeasurable,” economists are allowed to ignore it or honor it in the breach – it appears on stage only to be quickly shuffled off.

Likewise, deep green environmentalists are allowed to forego calculation at all, having ceded the entire exercise of quantifying value to economists. The two views simply talk past one another, and the common conceptualization of ecosystem services does nothing to change this. The profound barrier between what Dr. Daily describes a nature’s “own realm” and the realm of “current decisions” must be overcome.

If we must render values equivalent through money it should be in the service of the larger goal of establishing decision frameworks where no values are illegible. Ecosystem services policy can either aim to find money equivalences for more and more elements of nature, or it can lay bare the limits of economic calculus by addressing the values of that vast, immeasurable country beyond.