Depending on how you read that, it could sound like a hippy love-fest or a cold-hearted businessman approach; it kind of falls in between - it shows us how much nature actually is worth to us financially, and in turn how important it is to save it. But I digress.
If you think you get that part and want to save time, then you can skip the next section - if you'd like to see a couple of examples, though, read on in full!
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As one example of how useful nature is, at one point way back when, the water in New York City became undrinkable - we're talking about a full public health crisis. This obviously had to be fixed, and the originally-proposed solution was to build an $8bn filtration plant - which makes an expensive kind of sense. One bright spark noted, however, that if they restored the nearby Catskill Watershed ecosystem to even a fraction of its former state, it would provide the exact same function and cost 1/10th of the price. They did it, and it worked - and still does despite New York's vast population growth since, and without having to pay people to run and maintain it (New York has some of the best water of all American cities). Therefore, the value of that ecosystem service can be put at $7.2bn right off the bat (the amount of money saved), and that's without factoring in other services provided like generating oxygen.
In 1997, a group of scientists and ecologists decided to try to work out the value of the services provided by the entire world - in that year, their closest guess was $33,000,000,000,000.
Thirty-three trillion dollars.
To put that in context, it's about twice the value of the entire world economy. Just to replace the topsoil we grow all our crops in would cost literally every penny, cent, yen etc in the global market today.
In a broader scale, you can even put a price on things like the 'beauty' service nature provides; specifically, the money people will spend to enjoy it. Those of us who go out to look at cacti in the wild will understand this - you likely wouldn't go there if there weren't any cacti, so the money you spend on petrol, batteries for your camera specifically for that trip, any guide books etc are all part of that ecosystem's value. When you consider things like that, hiking holidays etc, you can see that even nature's beauty is actually very good for the economy, which is part of what this vein of study tries to get across. And the added bonus is that once it's all there, nature provides these services for free.
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Thinking along these lines, I've been considering the ways cacti might fit into this topic - and why not?
As noted above, one service that cacti provide is their beauty - even ignoring the happiness and well-being they bring those of us who like them, their beauty makes a measurable difference to the economy. But beyond that, what other services do they provide?
One obvious case is that they can provide a food source - opuntia pads and fruit, for example. This may or may not be a "big" service (I don't know how widely they're eaten in Mexico, for instance), but it's a service nevertheless, and one that can have a value put to it - their sale in markets and restaurants, purchasing from farms, or even the money a family might save on the food bill by harvesting wild ones.
Another example is cacti as fences. I have no idea what the value of these is, and I'd be curious to know. Those of you who have them or are considering them; are they cheaper than regular fencing? Is there an added peace of mind that you could put a value to, and how much would you spend getting the cacti in order to make those fences? How much would you save in the long run, not having to apply creosote or paint them? If they produced offshoots, they could be rooted and sold - there's a further value that could be considered.
Cacti as security items are another one - teddy-bear chollas under the window, anyone? All the fence questions apply again; how much of an effect would they have for you, financially? Taking Mexico as an example again, how much of a market is there specifically for that purpose and for fencing?
So after all that, for those of you who're still with me, what other services can you think of that cacti provide? I'm trying to get even a vaaaaaaague sense for myself of what the ecological value of cacti on a global scale might be - and when I think about all the things above, it begins to occur to me that there may well be much more to them than I first considered
