You get what you pay for

To an economists everything has a price.  Or rather, a value that reflects how desperately we would work to get that thing or how bitter we would be if we lost it.  Economists can readily describe our collective value for some things, but have a much more difficult time valuing other things.  Many ecosystem services fall into the later category, and because of this they often get undervalued or overlooked altogether when individuals (and society as a whole) make management decisions.  There is a growing movement to develop schemes that better 'internalize" (to use economics jargon) the true value of these services into our land management decisions.

Listen to an interesting story from the BBC program One Planet about efforts to develop payment schemes for ecosystem services here.  It is part of a larger series called 2050: An Earth Odyssey.