Stanford Biologist Talks About Nature vs Productivity
Forests near a farm can provide necessary resources, like housing for bees that raise crop yields by going around transferring pollen from one flower to the next.
DB: This is Earth and Sky. Biologist Gretchen Daily of Stanford University wants to balance nature with economic productivity.
JB: For many years, she’s worked in Costa Rica examining the impact of farming on forest cover.
Gretchen Daily: We tend to think of forests unfortunately as being in the way of agriculture, that you’ve got to clear it in order to make room for coffee production or whatever . . . But it turns out that coffee yields are higher, and profits higher for farmers if little bees are going around transferring pollen from one coffee flower to the next.
DB: Dr. Daily and her students captured around 700 species of tiny Costa Rican bees, and found out where they lived.
Gretchen Daily: And it turns out they do mainly live in the forest, and they’re not going to fly hundreds of miles from forest to coffee farm. So in fact, they like to fly only half a mile and no more. That means there is an economic incentive for farmers to keep some forest in and around their farms to maintain pollination services.
JB: The forests also protect the coffee fields from erosion, ease any impact from flooding, and help stabilize the climate globally. Daily’s work suggests that the endless farm fields known today might evolve to include bits of nature sprinkled through the countryside – to provide a higher economic return. Thanks today to texasnonprofits.org – a project of the Beretta Foundation of Texas. We’re Block and Byrd for Earth and Sky.
Our thanks to:
Gretchen Daily
Stanford University
The thrust of Dr. Daily’s research centers around the idea that we should be managing natural resources in the same way we manage capital assets for business, that is, equipment, money, and human skills and labor. Here are some more of her comments:
Daily: We can see ecosystems, the collections of organisms around us, whether it’s a grassland, or forest, or lake, or stream as capital assets. And by looking at them as capital assets that can, over time, supply society with a stream of benefits, we might come up with more clever ways of managing them.
Daily: We’re quite good now at managing other kinds of capital like physical capital or financial capital or even human capital. We’ve had thousands of years to develop pretty intricate institutions for investing in, monitoring, and carefully husbanding resources that fit into the other classes of capital. We all know how our cars are running, what repairs are needed on our house. We all know how much money we have in the bank, and we keep track of the stock exchange. In universities and companies, people are always measuring human capital, the knowledge and skills of the workforce or the student body. And yet we’ve done almost nothing to go out and assess our natural capital. And yet that’s the underpinnings of human well being and economic prosperity. Daily: We’ve done almost nothing to figure out where we get our water from, where it’s actually purified, and what ecosystems help maintain the balance of gasses in the atmosphere that keep climate stable. We don’t know what sort of ecosystems provide us with the precursors to certain medicinal and industrial products. Next to nothing do we know how about how much forest you need to retain in an area to prevent flooding. Forests are very good at soaking up water and meting it out gradually like a sponge.
Daily: Just imagine going to the moon, and asking yourself well, what sorts of species and ecosystems would you want to bring with you on the space ship to set up a decent life up there. Basically no one knows how many species or which types of species or ecosystems are needed to sustain human life. And yet we’re wiping out species and ecosystems at an unprecedented rate.
