Realigning Conservation

This Changes Every thingIn 2016, Peter Kareiva-one of the cofound ers of the Natu ral Capital Proj ect, a former vice-president at The Nature Conservancy, and another leading (if somewhat polarizing) figure in the ecosystem services movement-suggested at one of the network's annual symposia that the mainstreaming of natu ral capital was "about changing every thing-it was actually that radical."Yet, as he continued, he also went on to characterize this broad turn toward ecosystem services essentially as a bid for "relevance."What we really meant, way back, fifteen years ago . . .what we were all feeling was that the things we cared about did not seem relevant anymore.It was really about relevance . . .and natu ral capital is one way of entering relevance.It was really about these things that we care about, these things we think are so deeply impor tant, and we look around, we look at much of the world, and we see it's a trivial part of the discussion.But relevant to whom, exactly?At a separate debate framed around whether "money can grow on trees"-in other words, whether "capitalism" and "nature" were truly at odds-I saw him address this point directly."That adversarial position," he lamented."If business is an adversary of nature, nature doesn't stand a chance."Looking back, Kareiva explained how the rise of ecosystem services was, most of all, an expression of this need to convert conservation from something "trivial" into something "relevant": something more broadly amenable to "the people who have the future of the planet in their hands," as another of the Natu ral Capital Proj ect's cofound ers put it, and something that could, as IUCN's secretary-general had admonished, "better resonate in the halls of power, . . . in the boardrooms, . . .and in the heart of the market economy.