Cav's Place

Since their pockets are one of the many things humans think with when their brains can’t handle the complexity of the process, which is often, a lot of things can be accomplished by using money to generate a response. Humans are just animals, after all. Offer something they greatly desire and they will come to you, and there are few things most people who live in this society desire more than money.
For that reason, such an approach might be advisable, at least in the sense of the ends justifying the means. If those in charge could be convinced that preserving nature could eventually save them more money than they’d need to spend for this purpose, things could happen. In turn, they could use financial incentives to determine corporations to care for the environment, and if those incentives would translate into lower prices for “green” products then consumers would be more inclined to buy them and therefore support environmental responsibility. Not to mention that these incentives could also be applied to people directly, rewarding environmentally friendly behavior and penalizing waste and pollution.

The monetary value of nature is obvious even if you only take health into account. Everyone is hopefully aware that pollution harms humans as much as it harms the environment. Poorer nutrition, which is a result of depleting the natural resources and having to resort to artificial substitutes, is also very harmful. This situation also creates stress and all sorts of mental problems. Plus that modern medicine is more invasive and far more costly than the natural alternatives, which are being depleted along with everything else.
The most obvious result of health problems is a higher reliance on medical services. These services are already expensive and constantly becoming even more so. Because of this, less and less people can afford the care they require. At best, this means that the state must spend increasing amounts of money to offer some sort of medical attention to those who can’t afford it themselves. At worst, it means that people will be left without the medical attention they require.
With the costs of providing medical attention out of the way, let’s focus for a moment on the costs of not doing so. Some illnesses may spread, resulting in even higher costs and/or losses. Sick people are far less productive than healthy people, if they’re productive at all. Caring for them might also reduce the availablity of their friends and relatives, generating an even greater loss of productivity.

But nature provides other, more specific, products and services. Take oxygen for example. Nature provides it for us and we currently can’t generate it for ourselves otherwise. Fresh water is another example. So is trapping carbon dioxide in order to keep the temperature from rising to intolerable levels. We couldn’t survive if nature wouldn’t provide these things for us. If you insist on expressing them in terms of their monetary value, from an anthropocentric viewpoint they are worth however much the survival of the human race is worth.
If that’s not enough, there are also all the animals and plants that many, especially the poor, rely upon. Fishing, hunting, gathering, logging… All of these require healthy ecosystems in order to be possible. Yes, farms could replace nature for a part of these, but not fully and not forever. Farms can’t provide for all, plus that the quality of farmed products tends to drop with time because of the practices used. Sufficient safe havens must exist in order to keep healthy populations of animals and plants away from human expoitation, as that’s the only way to ensure the continued availability of those resources, if that’s how you choose to see them. Exploiting them to extinction, or just to a point from which they wouldn’t be able to fully recover until the next season, will leave a lot of people without the means required for their survival.

Next, let’s take leisure activities into account. Many require nature, or at least the services provided by nature, such as “fresh air”. Most of these don’t require a separate discussion since their lack tends to result in health problems, which have been discussed above, but tourism is different.
Many travel destinations are chosen thanks to the landscape or other natural factors, which means that the number of tourists would be greatly reduced if nature would suffer. (The fact that tourists themselves cause nature to suffer is another matter.) This would cause a lot of economic problems, as some economies rely very heavily on tourism and most others would also suffer if this source of income would vanish. A massive loss of jobs in the hospitality sector alone would be a major blow, considering the fact that right now people need their jobs far more than the other way around and that such jobs are a very popular starting point in many careers. But it wouldn’t stop there, the problems caused by the loss of tourists moving on to also affect other sectors, increasing the losses.

These are just a few very obvious reasons for which preserving nature is desirable even from an anthropocentric and greedy perspective. With such examples, the very structure which is currently destroying the environment could be used against itself. When you try to persuade selfish, violent idiots, which make up the tremendous majority of humans, to do the right thing, you need to take the focus away from nature and move it to them. You need to make them understand that it’ll be the right thing for them, that it’ll serve their own interests, because they just don’t give a fuck about anything else.
Of course, seeing nature in terms of the services it can provide is wrong and potentially dangerous. Such an approach will backfire the moment the means to provide similar services would become available. If people will be taught even by environmentalists to see nature as a provider of services, then they’ll end up caring for it even less and be even harder to convince to continue preserving it once it’ll be no longer absolutely necessary. And in some situations this approach is too wrong to be acceptable even as only a means to an end. But that’s a topic for another time…
For now, this approach could be a workable alternative if handled with great care. It would be better if talks along these lines would be confined to the higher levels. Use this approach when you need to convince governments or corporations and the fair methods have already failed, but don’t bring it all the way down to the average person on the street. Those need to be convinced or, if need be, forced to care for nature for its intrinsic value. Otherwise the magnitude of the disaster will become even greater and environmentalists will have themselves to blame for it.