Transmutations at the Frontier of Natural Capital

The GambitOn a sunny Spring morning in 2015, I attended the opening session of the eighth annual Natu ral Capital Symposium held on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.The meeting convened over two hundred participants from over thirty countries and its attendance spanned a characteristic range of organizations-universities and international NGOs, assorted state agencies, development banks, a handful of large corporations, and more-some of them dabbling in ecosystem services and others charging forward with its tools and approaches.The conference was hosted by the Natu ral Capital Proj ect ("NatCap" for those acquainted) which was about to mark its ten-year anniversary since its founding.The significance of this milestone loomed large and was addressed as a theme throughout the symposium.As one of the most widely recognized organizations endeavoring to "mainstream" the concept of ecosystem services, what did they now have to share with their broader community of practice?How would they narrate the story of their first decade?What had they learned?What had all their efforts accomplished?Gretchen Daily, one of the group's cofound ers and a legendary figure in the ecosystem service movement, opened the meeting by tackling these questions directly: I think back to when the Natu ral Capital Proj ect was founded by many of the people working together in this room.We developed, nearly ten years ago, a theory of change.And I won der if this theory still makes sense now-whether the way we were thinking ten years ago is a good way of guiding our work today.Let's think about this together.Our theory was that we could achieve better outcomes for people and for nature by shining a light on all the intimate but hidden connections between people and nature, our dependence on nature, and the ways we impact 2 Transmutations at the Frontier of Natu ral Capital