Helping Henry and some others resist that “suasion” as prices rose over the past three years was Alternative Land Use Services (alus), a one-time test program funded by the provincial and federal governments that paid farmers by the acre to drive around sensitive wetlands, keep cattle and machinery out of creeks, plant cover on steeper slopes, and leave patches of native prairie unbroken.
The money was a fraction of what some of the land might have earned in crops. Indeed, with tillable acres earning $100 in profit at harvest time, Henry expects “some young guys would still break them [potholes] up at $50” an acre in eco-service fees. “It’d be ‘I don’t want to drive around it.’” Still, he contends that the payments tip the balance for many farmers like himself, who are predisposed to give a little ground to nature. But now that alus is gone, his family might take a second look at the cost of leaving 200 hectares unbroken. His question for urban Manitobans downstream: “Should we do this alone? Or are you going to help me out with it? ”
THE PARASITE’S DILEMMA
Bill Rees, the University of British Columbia biologist who invented the idea of an ecological footprint, has an uncomfortable analogy for the fix we’re in: he calls it the parasite-host relationship. “The economy,” he explains, “has become parasitic on nature.” The problem for the parasite, of course, is that it can’t become so successful that it kills off its host. Then it perishes, too. Humans, he fears, may be too successful to be good parasites.
Clearly we have to stop destroying our host; saving as many of Earth’s functioning biological factories as possible is a good place to start. If cities need some of the private landscapes around them put into eco-services instead of potatoes, however, they will need to secure the cooperation of the owners and occupiers. “We prefer the system where I agree to provide you something for a period of time and you pay me for it,” says Cam Henry, likely speaking for many farmers. Indeed, paying farmers and others to cultivate nature is one way to give our host a shot at living.
But devils lurk in the details of buying and selling Nature Inc.’s product line. Ecosystems are never simple to start with. Casual observation reveals that tree-shaded, grass-banked brooks flow cooler and cleaner than streams exposed to the sun and trampled by hooves. But scientists have trouble putting a reliable number to the degree of difference a particular change in landscaping or vegetation will make to water downstream. I found nearly identical experiments under way in Manitoba and Mexico to answer that exact question.
The greater problem of low confidence in the unproven currency of any new eco-service has triggered successive crises in the world’s biggest eco-market: the $60-billion, Kyoto-mandated global trade in carbon credits. Enthusiasm for carbon trading has spawned its own ecosystem of carbon practices among financial houses. They trade in credits supposedly underwritten by tonnes of carbon removed from, or not released into, the atmosphere. Backing some are technology investments such as the proposed new carbon scrubbers. Others rest on eco-services, the capture and sequestration of carbon in forests or agricultural cover.
Vancouver consultant Aldyen Donnelly helped broker North America’s first credit sales for cropland (in Iowa), and for carbon captured at a natural gas power plant and pumped underground (in Texas). But the way the carbon marketplace emerged has left her disenchanted. Governments gave away too many credits to begin with. Vendors too often sold the carbon equivalent of the Brooklyn Bridge. At best, they were what Donnelly calls “anyway tonnes,” carbon that would have become trees or switchgrass without any encouragement at all. “I believe we’re pursuing the wrong model,” she says now.
Donnelly has an intriguing alternative: ecological product standards similar to consumer protection laws that eliminated lead in gasoline, or limit how much water can be injected into processed chicken (you didn’t know?). This version would require businesses to meet or beat a target score on their product lines’ ecological footprints. Potentially modelled on the multi-scale leed score that rates new buildings according to environmental benchmarks, her eco-standard would ask industries to account for half a dozen key impacts, including carbon balance, water consumption, and effect on biodiversity. When it’s applied to a handful of big-footprint industries (cement, transportation, energy, and food all make the list), Donnelly says, “You capture about 95 percent of the problem.” Already Britain’s Tesco food chain has taken a step in this direction, promising to reveal to customers the lifetime carbon “content” in each of its tens of thousands of products.
A more prosaic way to compensate landowners for saving critical bits of ecosystem has been around for decades. When cbc cameraman Stephen Digby retired, he began to consider the future of an 80-hectare woodlot he and his wife own near Lake Simcoe in south-central Ontario. The property is unprepossessing. Malnourished second-growth balsam and juniper spread their roots over exposed limestone plates webbed in mossy duff. To a biologist, however, it’s a prime specimen of a shrinking type of rare alvar ecosystem. Digby expected some future owner would “log it off for everything that was there, and what was left would be taken over by the limestone industry.” Instead, any potential future owner will find that “everything that could be protected above the surface, under the surface, and at the surface,” as Digby puts it, belongs to the Nature Conservancy of Canada for the next 997 years. The Digbys kept the title to their property and received a tax receipt for $25,000. That’s it. Similar easements have brought an area the size of Lake Ontario under the protection of the Nature Conservancy, Ducks Unlimited, and other conservation trusts.
