Nature’s Fortune Book Summary - Nature’s Fortune Book explained in key points

Nature’s Fortune summary

Name: Nature’s Fortune
Rating: 4.4 (10 reviews)
Author: Mark R. Tercek and Jonathan S. Adams

Mark R. Tercek and Jonathan S. Adams

How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature

4.4 (10 ratings)

15 mins

Brief summary

'Nature's Fortune' by Mark R. Tercek and Jonathan S. Adams is a compelling read that highlights the economic benefits of preserving nature. The authors explore the link between healthy ecosystems and sustainable economic growth, providing valuable insights for policymakers, business leaders and anyone interested in achieving a healthier, more prosperous planet.

Topics

Plants & Trees

Table of Contents

Nature’s Fortune
Summary of 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Learn why the best defense against Mother Nature may be Mother Nature herself.

Mankind has achieved so much in taming nature. We have built barriers to keep out the sea, sewers to channel waste, and dams to hold our drinking water. All our activities seem pretty impressive, right?

Well, what if we have been wasting our time? What if we already had a defense against nature, provided by nature itself? The uncomfortable truth is that many of our most effective pieces of infrastructure are natural, from floodplains to wetlands. In building our great defense systems we might be doing more harm than good.

These blinks explain how we can benefit from nature’s bounty and how we should all be making efforts to protect the environment.

In these blinks you’ll discover

just how powerful an oyster bed can be;
why Coca-Cola is very keen to protect the developing world’s clean water supplies; and
why levees can directly lead to flooding in other areas.

Nature provides services similar to human-built infrastructure.

When we are confronted by dirty water what do we do? We build a sewage plant. When we are faced with a persistently flooding river we contain it with levees. In short, when nature provides us with a problem, we build man-made infrastructure to combat it.

What’s more, we tend to take all this modern infrastructure for granted. So let’s just take some time to look and consider why we build them in the first place.

We primarily set up infrastructure in order to access various services.

For instance, dams and levees provide the service of shielding us against droughts and floods, and sewage and filtration plants provide safe and clean water in our homes and workplaces.

All the pieces of infrastructure mentioned above are examples of human or gray infrastructure, so-called because it is usually made of concrete.

The Hoover Dam, for example, is the largest water reservoir in the United States and consists of 3.3 million cubic metres of concrete. Just for scale, this is the same quantity that would be needed to construct nearly 40 Wembley Stadiums.

But nature already provides us with a kind of green infrastructure that does the same job – lakes and reservoirs are naturally created bodies of water that do the same as a huge man-made dam.

Green infrastructure can provide services to filter water, break down contaminants and store excessive water for use in dryer times. Remarkably, our coral reefs can even provide protection against flooding, as they break down waves before they get a chance to hit the land.

You can see, then, that we already have many of the kinds of infrastructures we need to thrive in place on our planet.

Large companies already invest in nature when their business opportunities are affected.

When we think of powerful companies and their impact on the environment, large-scale catastrophes such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill spring to mind. So it may come as a surprise that large companies are actually increasingly investing in nature, especially as they start to realize how much we rely on it.

Environmental protection has become a trend that is rapidly gaining momentum in the business world.

Investing in nature is often cheaper than investing in gray infrastructure.

If your son came home from school and told you he got a D minus on his report card, you’d be right to be concerned. But what if that was the grade your country was given for some of its critical infrastructure? You may not know that the US levee system and the US wastewater facilities situation is rather dire. In fact, in 2009, both were hit with a D minus from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

The type of gray infrastructure seen in much of the United States is fairly complex and often requires a lot of maintenance, usually demanding extensive construction work and complicated chemical, biological and/or physical processes.

Green infrastructure often works better than human engineering.

Our recent history tells a tale of persistent attempts at bringing nature under our control. In doing this, we’ve accomplished some significant innovations. However, our engineering has also sometimes created systems that changed things for the worse.

It’s probably no surprise that gray infrastructure can come with negative effects or even increase the very risks it was designed to reduce.

Investments in nature have many positive outcomes.

Green infrastructure – such as the oyster reef – usually serves multiple purposes.

Oyster reefs don’t just buffer the land from the sea, they are also an important source of water filtration. Astoundingly, a single adult oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water per day.

Whether companies or the government should invest in nature depends on different circumstances.

Even with the knowledge that investing in the natural world is hugely beneficial, we can’t expect companies to jump at every chance to do so.

That’s because companies want to know how soon they’ll see their returns.

Foster nature in cities to create the best opportunities.

A city park is an oasis in a concrete jungle. Remember the last time you went to a park? How did you feel? But parks need not be the only places city-dwellers can enjoy nature. Investing in greener cities could change the way we live.

Our increasing urban population poses an important challenge. With more than half the people on the planet living in cities, we have become an urban species coming up against a variety of problems.

Creating market prices for nature will help fighting climate change.

Can you imagine a stampede of companies racing to invest in rainforests?

In a competitive market economy, the companies that survive are the ones who are most effective at reducing costs, which leads to an efficient use of scarce resources. Right now, emitting tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere doesn’t cost a company anything, so nobody bothers to reduce emissions.

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What is Nature’s Fortune about?

Nature’s Fortune (2013) challenges our views on economic development and the environment. Drawing on research about the ways we work with and against nature, nature lover and former investment banker Mark Tercek presents a compelling case for investment in green infrastructure, and shows us how economic growth and conservation can benefit each other.

Best quote from Nature’s Fortune

Sustainability is moving from a fringe concern to a core focus of business decision-making.

—Mark R. Tercek and Jonathan S. Adams

Who should read Nature’s Fortune?

Environmentalists
Skeptics who think that economic growth and good environmental practice cannot co-exist
Anyone who works for a company that deals mainly in natural resources

About the Author

Mark Tercek is CEO of The Nature Conservancy, an American charitable environmental organization. Prior to this, he was a managing director and partner at Goldman Sachs.

Jonathan Adams is a conservation biologist, author of The Future of the Wild and co-author of The Myth of Wild Africa.

Categories with Nature’s Fortune

Nature & the Environment Economics Politics

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