How to Get Wall Street to Hug a Tree

Environmentalists and investment bankers are working together to put a
price tag on nature. The new 'greens' think that human beings are ready
to start paying for Mother Nature's services—and that calculating their
financial worth will save the planet.
Gretchen Daily, an ecologist at Stanford University, wears
butterfly-patterned socks. She's a careful recycler and bikes to work.
She composts.



So what's she doing hanging out with guys from Goldman Sachs?

As a tried-and-true "green," she believes she doesn't have a choice.



"Time is running short," she says. "Appealing to moral sense isn't
enough anymore. We have to make conservation fit mainstream business
calculations."


In her fourth-floor office in the Herrin Labs just off Stanford's main
quad, Daily, a professor of biological sciences and director of the
tropical research program at Stanford's Center of Conservation Biology,
shows me what she means. She clicks open a series of digital maps
compiled for a meeting in New York with Goldman Sachs. The maps' rich
purple-and-blue hues convey information about California's Central
Coast eco-region, which stretches from Santa Barbara north to Napa
County and includes San Francisco Bay. Daily explains how each image
tells a story of the terrain's value—not property value as a real
estate agent would figure it but value in terms of service to mankind.
Where the terrain offers a high degree of flood protection, for
example, the map is the brightest purple; where the flood-protecting
function is comparatively low, the color is light blue. The ecosystems
providing the most overall value to people are shaded to indicate
highest priority.