Put a Value on Nature - TED talk

I find two things fascinating:
1) Sukhdev's obvious slant away from the first-world financier's view that tends to dominate global carbon discussions.  He is, essentially, a reformer of development and a believer that global capital should be subordinate to the public sphere.

2) Sukhdev got into this biz through a project of trying to steer the Indian state away from mimicking Chinese-style growth.  This positions his contributions as a kind of postcolonial project in origin (and likely feeding off of the long postcolonial intellectual tradition in Indian political economics), asking the question: how should the Indian state move beyond a world of Eurocentric economies?  How does India become an economic pole in its own right?  Sukhdev's answer was different than the answer of many in India, but still it's apparent that the Natural Capital approach was initially a useful tool in waging a debate over Indian economic strategy, not the kind of holy grail in its own right that it has been to environmental economists in the US and Europe since the 1970s.

I'm interested in his repeated commitment to describing global resources as "public" and "common".  This could not be more opposed to Tragedy of the Commons thinking, the argument which most natural capitalism talk takes as foundational.  Yet another very interesting outcrop of the debate between those who think valuation must lead to markets and those who think it can be made to serve other (chiefly indexical) purposes.

I'm appreciative of Sukhdev and encouraged by the internal complexity of dialogues about natural capital.

Wetlandia, a blog about ecosystem services and some other things.