For Christmas, among other things, my girlfriend gave me a book entitled: The New Economy of Nature by Gretchen C. Daily and Katherine Ellison.  I’m currently about halfway through the book, but so far, I’ve found it very interesting.

The book begs the question: how would the actions of firms, individuals, and governments change if we placed an explicit monetary value on nature’s services?  For example, what if a firm’s balance sheet explicitly included the value of water purification or carbon sequestration derived from preserving their land?  What if someone who valued clean water from a river passing through his property could offer to buy the rights to pollute from others upstream at a price clearly specified on an open market?

These and many other interesting topics are explored.  One of the most important topics in the book deals with New York City in the 1990s.  Due to an outbreak of cryptosporidium parvum, the city was forced to make serious changes to its water supply.  The first option they considered was building a new water filtration plant.  The expected cost of this plant neared $6 billion, plus yearly maintenance costs.  The second option, revolutionary at the time, was to revitalize the natural Catskill and Delaware watersheds by buying up land and ceasing human development in these watersheds.

 ”Ignoring Global Warming won’t make it go away.”

The New York Times just published a story about Wal-Mart’s push to sell 100 million compact fluorescent light bulbs by 2008.  It’s an ambitious goal - not only from a profit standpoint, but from an environmental one.  If Wal-Mart succeeds, it will result in “saving Americans $3 billion in electricity costs and avoiding the need to build additional power plants for the equivalent of 450,000 new homes.”

For those of you who aren’t familiar with compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs), the benefits of usage are immense.  Compared to a standard incandescent lightbulb, they produce the same amount of light with 75% less energy.  They also last about five times as long as a standard incandescent.  The downsides?  One is they’re slightly more expensive to purchase.  But over the life of the bulb, the energy savings and longevity of the bulb make up for the initial expense by far.  The second is that there is a tiny amount of mercury in each bulb, so if they break there is mercury pollution.  Yet the amount of mercury released into the environment from a power plant running a standard bulb is much greater.  Overall, these bulbs are the biggest win-win solution out there.