Null Finding

How It StartedI can remember almost the exact moment when I first began to think about "ecosystem services" in earnest.It was in 2005, when an enthusiastic young faculty member delivered a guest lecture at the University of British Columbia, where I was an undergraduate at the time.The notion was then hot off the presses with the recent publication of the MA (2005).As presented to us, the concept seemed (and indeed, was) tailor-made to reconcile classic critiques of conservation-chief among them, its antagonisms with marginalized peoples living in and around biodiversity-with an ostensibly "new" kind of conservation that would protect nature with and for people rather than from and against people.For this newly minted academic biologist, emblematic of a new generation of life scientists who emerged with the release of the MA (as discussed in chapter 5), ecosystem services appeared to offer an auspicious way out of the ongoing failure to stop the catastrophic loss of life documented in the MA's alarming findings.It was for most of my classmates, including me, our first exposure to this curious neologism.The appeal was hard to deny.Indeed, after finishing my degree, I almost joined this emergent field myself.I even briefly considered joining the Natu ral Capital Proj ect, a leading organization that became instrumental in popularizing the idea.I can still recall interviewing at Stanford as a prospective gradu ate student with one of the group's cofound ers, Gretchen Daily: a scenario I can only assume would have yielded a rather dif fer ent research proj ect than the one I eventually undertook.Instead, I ended up at Berkeley where I learned to approach ecosystem services through the theoretical lenses of political ecol ogy.Meanwhile, as the influence of ecosystem services kept on expanding, critiques of the notion were also proliferating.