Latif Nasser

Philippines, Vietnam.

They have value.

Well...

Here's the counter-argument.

It comes from Doug McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The real danger is that we actually succeed, that we convince people that nature is valuable because it makes money, and then we're really in trouble in the many instances where it doesn't make us money.

What do you do in a situation, he says, where, say, a bunch of rivers are running dry and they're, quote, depreciating in value?

You know, by the same logic that you train me to think with, we should go out and liquidate these natural assets.

That makes me feel really uncomfortable.

He says it's just kind of a weird way to think about nature.

We had a proposal here in the state of California to make gay marriage legal.

And economists had a look at this legislation and said, this is expected to generate $163 million annually for the state of California.

Well, it's good to know that.

I appreciate having that information in front of me.

However, when I'm making a decision on this legislation, and I would say that when many legislators, voters, average citizens are considering the issues at hand, they're not thinking about whether they're going to make $160 million for the state.

They're thinking about a different set of values.

They get implicitly assigned a value of zero, according to Glenmarie Lange.

And as we were debating this and going back and forth and back and forth, we bumped into a story about what happens when all of these value of nature ideas are let loose into a world of fruits and trees and human uncertainty.

The Parable of the Bees.

We heard this first from writer J.B.