Capital Gains – The Real Returns On Investment In Restoring Our Waters

This article was originally published on Pure Advantage. 

“Most people would agree that restoring and enhancing the waters of our wetlands, stream banks and shorelines is “A Good Thing” – places look nicer, bird and fish life come back and so on. But it costs money and takes time – much of it volunteer time. Do we only properly fund this important work when it’s obvious that the cost of doing nothing outweighs the cost of doing something? In a competitive funding environment, how can we justify more comprehensive, strategic and proactive investment in environmental restoration?

It’s been clear since at least the 1930s that economic indicators don’t measure everything that counts. In response to President Franklin D Roosevelt’s request for a simple indicator of recovery from the Great Depression, Professor Simon Kuznets suggested Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a measure of the churn of money through the economy. Although Kuznets warned at the time that it should never be used to indicate anything else, GDP became the default indicator of economic success…”

Read on at: Pure Advantage.