How much is that Tyger in the window?

Last week to Doddington for the launch of the Greater Lincolnshire Nature Partnership. Having had a part to play in the construction of this august body, it was a pleasure to see it slip into the water at last. The great and the good in conservation, land custody and administration were there to cheer it on its way – and it made me think again about a strange topic that I came across during my work on the Partnership.

The topic I’m thinking of is how to put a price on nature. It’s one that probably only a few are aware of, and even fewer understand. I’m in the first group, but not in the second – here’s why.

The idea has been around for a few years, and now has the backing of the UK government, in the form of policy and committees. At the heart of it is the notion that we have failed to look after the natural world properly, because we failed to value it correctly.

Yes, we swooned at a sunset, gasped at the Grand Canyon and aaahed over Attenborough and his animals, but we didn’t put an entry in the credit and debit columns, nor in the cashflow accounts.

We may have priced nickel ores, pork bellies and grain stocks, but we held back on sticking a ticket on an attractive view, a quiet countryside, fresh water or even clean air. Where we acted to conserve, we did it not because the financials stacked up, but because some of us thought it a good idea, even though others did not.

So along came some bright economists and conservationists, looking for a lingua franca to guide or stay development. ‘We use cost-benefit analysis all the time in projects’ they said, ‘so why don’t we simply include the environment in this analysis?’

Why not, indeed?

Well, one small snag is finding a way of actually assigning monetary values to nature. A couple of basic approaches have emerged – one values the services that we derive, such as fresh water, oxygen, better health, consumable commodities. This has become known as PES, or payment for ecosystem services. It’s a kind of cashflow accounting, but applied to the environment, and it’s been embraced by Defra, poor thing.

The other is called natural capital accounting (NCA). It attempts to assign capital values to the environment, just as I could place an asset value on my house, my car, and my goods and chattels. There is a government committee - called with admirable directness the ‘Natural Capital Committee’ - which reports directly to the Second Lord of the Treasury, possibly more familiar to you as Mr Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Not surprisingly, this committee concerns itself with promulgating the notion of NCA as it applies to UK plc.

The supporters of the two camps don’t seem to get on too well, I fear. Professor Dieter Helm chairs the NCA committee, and he’s on record as saying that PES is fundamentally misguided. Defra, on the other hand, don’t give the time of day to the natural capital approach. But whether they’ll be going to each other’s Christmas parties or not, they’re both heading in the same direction – putting a price on the great outdoors.

Does this make sense? Will it work? My answers are ‘yes’ and ‘no’.

My short time working in its service convinces me that the conservation sector will never achieve a thing if it carries on in the same way. It is full of well-meaning specialists of unbelievable expertise who together have achieved precisely none of their goals. The world economy is even more unsustainable than it was after the war. Population growth is unconstrained, habitat disappears hectare after hectare, extinctions loom. Aside from the odd small win, such as whaling controls, CFC bans, DDT eradication, the big picture remains as depressing as ever.

So a wholesale change in approach is called for. Stop gathering loads and loads of data, and hoping it will somehow gather up into a rational case for the prosecution. Finally take your place at the table, get in where the dirty decisions are made and force your case. And to their credit, I think this is how the whole ‘valuing nature’ thing has come about. This is what someone thought, I think.

They thought “Maybe, just maybe, talking the language of the destroyers will make them change their minds. Maybe talking dollars and cents will help them see the error of their ways.”

But then again it may not.

There are two problems. The first is that I think it just can’t be done. Pricing is the hardest thing to do in business, to my mind, and more projects have failed because the expected price wasn’t what people were actually prepared to pay than for any other reason. And that’s when you’re talking about motor cars and breakfast cereals. Start up with nebulous things such as the world’s fresh water supply and the view from the top of the Lincolnshire Wolds, and you’re on very shaky, if attractive, ground.

How do you price a natural resource? The price of anything depends on the situation. I’ve owned a house worth £72,000 and one worth £180,000. Trouble is, it was the same house, just time shifted a few years. I’d be prepared to pay a few pennies for a litre of water if it came out of the tap in my kitchen, but if it’s in a bottle, and I need a drink when I’m out and tired and thirsty, then a couple of pounds sounds just fine.

I can buy a book of Blake’s poetry for just a few pounds – about the same as the cost of McDonalds’ meal. Does this mean the poems and the meal are worth the same?

Now, don’t make the mistake that I think that McDo is junk food. I don’t think there’s any such thing, and even if I did, I wouldn’t put Ronald’s lot into the junk pile. It’s made with good ingredients, it’s well-designed and well-prepared. I’ve never had a bad burger from them, while I’ve had appalling meals in expensive restaurants. The point I’m making is that value and price aren’t always related. In fact, price can often be the bastard child of value.

What if I’m hungry and someone offers me a book of poetry?

What if I’ve never heard of Blake and I’m stuffed to bursting?

Here’s the thing. I could buy the book and burn it. Then what would we have we lost?

Well, I would have lost my book. The world would still have Blake. There’s the internet, where you or I could find all the poems I could want to read in a few minutes. Culture is only ever a quick Kindle away. The only loser of the book-burning would be me.

But what if there was no internet? What if the printed copies were the only way of preserving and enjoying these works?

What if the printing plates had been lost? And the printing press had fallen into wrack and ruin?

What if only a thousand copies of the poems were left?

A hundred?

Ten?

One?

What price do you put on this book, now, Mr Accountant?

Today, one book means nothing. You can rip it, toast it, boil it, lose it, and you’ve still got the poetry. It can be recovered, restored, rebuilt, enjoyed in some other way. But go back to the days of manuscript, and a fire in the library loses you everything. Period.

And I think this is where we’re headed with nature. The price we would put on it would be today’s price. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creep in this petty price, ‘til the last vestige of recorded wilderness is gone before you know it.

Yes, biodiversity offsetting is a clever way of letting us have our cake and eat it. As long as I’m nice somewhere else, you’ll let me be bad here, it says. But my question is – how nice do you want me to be? Just how bad are you willing to let me be? If my pockets are deep enough, will you really let me knock the last remaining habitat of the lesser-spotted thistlebill into orbit? – well, the accounts say I can…

The decision we’re really trying to make is – do we think this a good idea or not? Excepting the extremists at either end of the spectrum, we pretty much all like the Western world, where food is always there, we’re never cold and there are more things to do than you could even dream of in a lifetime.

But we pretty much all like the natural world we live in, too. It’s where we live, and without it we’ll die. It’s not a difficult thing to like.

The real question is – how much of which, and where? Prices won’t help you answer it. It’s fundamental, and difficult, and ours to decide. It’s a much deeper decision that has to be made, by heart-searching and thinking and balancing and agreeing - not by constructing a facile algorithm, turning the handle, and doing whatever the printout says.

If all we have to unite us is a set of figures on a spreadsheet, we're pretty much sunk already. What really binds us are our values and beliefs - surely these are what we should gather around, not numbers.

Here’s what I think the whole malarkey boils down to  - if you think that progress consists of more of Man, then it lets you get on with it, pretty much unhindered.

And if you think there’s far too much of us on this planet already, you can still feel that you’ve done your bit. You’ve tried. You had a go.

The practice of giving monetary values to nature lets both sides get on with life.

But the trouble is that it seems life can’t get on with us.