FACULTY SUPPORT

Valuing Nature

Breathe in. The air is free. But we'd all agree it's not worthless. So, what's the price tag on benefits provided by nature?

In 1997, the University of Vermont's Robert Costanza and his co-authors put the answer at $33 trillion in a now-famous paper in the journal Nature. In the decade following, the science of "ecosystem services" has bloomed. This young discipline studies how nature — through climate regulation, soil formation, crop pollination, flood protection, and so on — supports human welfare, and estimates its value in economic terms.

At the forefront of this new field is UVM's Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, directed by Costanza and made possible by a $7.5 million gift from Lulie and Gordon Gund of Princeton, New Jersey, and their sons, Grant '91 and Zachary '93.

"The environment is not a luxury good," Costanza says, "It's a productive asset we have to steward and protect just like we would our factories, or our bodies and our health, and everything else that contributes to our well-being."

The Gund Institute has been able to draw together a remarkable group of more than twenty ecologists, economists, atmospheric scientists, inventors, agriculturists, conservation biologists, and policy experts to "reframe the issue away from a confrontational debate about the environment versus the economy and toward a shared question," Costanza says. "How do we manage our common assets and our private assets in the most sustainable way — a way that maximizes quality of life?"

At the heart of the Gund Institute's exploration of this question has been rigorous transdisciplinary education. "We're deliberately blurring the lines between research, teaching, and service," Costanza says. This blurring often comes in the form of a problem-based course, or atelier (from the French for an artist's workshop), that explodes the conventional understanding of what happens in a course.

"Without some sort of real problem to work on, it's difficult to create transdisciplinary integration," Costanza says. "If you say 'okay, we're going to have an interdisciplinary course on ecology and economics — let's have some ecologist come and give a few lectures and some economist come and talk about economics for a few lectures' — it doesn't really help."

"But if economists and ecologists and stakeholders from the community and others sit together for a semester, or a short course," he says, "and work in the field to try to actually solve a current problem and then publish the results — while involving students in that solution — we find ways to really move forward.

Working with the Ukranian National Forestry University and other partners, a current Gund Institute atelier aims to develop strong public policy ideas for sustainable forestry in the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine.

Another atelier led to the creation of Earth Inc. This non-profit corporation, formed in 2006, works to reframe how corporations measure their true profit. By examining more than just the flow of money, Earth Inc. is developing tools and consulting services to help other corporations measure their broader value (or debt) through "four capital accounting" that measures the worth of natural, social, human, and built assets.

Another atelier explored AIDS education in the Dominican Republic for bateyes, communities of Haitian and Dominican migrant workers that live in nearly complete isolation from Dominican society. One took up the relationship between winter sports culture, communities, and the economy in Aroostook County, Maine. One explored the impact of industrial shrimp on mangrove ecosystems in the Philippines. And there have been many others.

"We certainly have no dearth of problems that need to be solved," Costanza says, "and this is a good way of doing it."

In addition to problem-based courses, the institute has numerous research efforts and other projects in motion. On the global scale, for example, Costanza and his colleagues are working to develop an Earth Atmospheric Trust, seeking to protect the planet's atmosphere. A recent report from the Gund Institute estimating the value of New Jersey's ecosystems was featured in The New York Times. The institute is home to the Ecoinformatics Collaboratory, an innovative project drawing together ecological data with emerging high-tech tools and models of information science — in the interests of better-informed decision making.

And dozens of other projects keep "the Gund" — what students call the institute's home in historic Johnson House on Main Street — a very busy place.

"The bottom line is we're having an influence inside the University as well as connecting the University with the community and helping to change policy and changing the way people think about the economy and the environment," Costanza says. "The gift from the Gund family has allowed us to create an institute that can vigorously do all these kinds of work."