Gretchen Daily, a biology professor at Stanford University is working towards protecting the environment by quantifying the value of nature’s goods and services that are vital for human life, and factoring these benefits into the dollar values of businesses and governments.
Gretchen Daily
Daily felt the need to convey the value of nature and its loss by identifying ways to calculate the cost of losing it, and hence software program InVEST was developed. The program enables the comparing of various environmental scenarios to ultimately assist policy makers in making choices.
Building on from this, Google Earth Engine, enabling global-scale monitoring and measurement of environmental changes, such as forecasting soil fertility, erosion and deforestation; allows the accumulation and analysis of the data to be processed faster.
This is a great achievement towards protecting our environment.
If only the global predicament, the ominously looming and enlarging threat to everything that really matters was a laughing matter, that would be the best thing. If only the human family was not primary inducers and drivers of this colossal predicament, and therefore principally responsible for it; if only the many too many leaders who understand precisely what it is that we are discussing now here did not willfully deny science and consciously choose silence over speech. That too, would be the best thing.
Thanks to all for speaking out, and for your willingness to consider the ideas that are presented here. More than ever before and most of all, I fear that the silence instilled in many too many by the greedmongers who rule the world in our time is leading to the destruction of everything each one of us is striving somehow, in any way at all, to protect and preserve.