Nature Has Value. Could We Literally Invest in It?
Summary
If the company is listed on an exchange, the proceeds from the public offering of shares would provide the landowner with a revenue stream and pay for enhancing natural benefits, like havens for threatened species or a revitalized farming operation that heals the land rather than leaching it dry. In 2021, Intrinsic announced its plan to list such companies on the New York Stock Exchange, along with a pilot project involving land in Costa Rica as well as support from the Inter-American Development Bank and major environmental groups. Through both grass-roots organizing and high-level lobbying, it argued that natural asset companies were a Trojan horse for foreign governments and “global elites” to lock up large swaths of rural America, particularly public lands. “I think we’ve seen that when that is turned into a financial asset that has a whole secondary market attached to it, it creates a lot of distortions.” Another environmental group, Save the World’s Rivers, filed a comment opposing the plan partly because, it said, the valuation framework centered on nature’s use to humans, rather than other living things. “So let’s say Bayer is doing regenerative agriculture, and they’re going to say, ‘And now we get these biodiversity credits, and we get this, and we get this, and we get this.’ How does someone like me compete with something like that?” Such opposition — the kind that stems from deep skepticism about financial products that are marketed as solving problems through capitalism, and questions about who is entitled to nature’s gifts — may be hard to dislodge.