Welcome

On Wednes­day 17^th April Fauna & Flora Inter­na­tional (FFI) hosted a din­ner for it’s Con­ser­va­tion Cir­cle mem­bers. The theme for the evening was ‘Putting a Price on Nature’, for which FFI had the priv­i­lege of hav­ing Tony Juniper, for­mer direc­tor of Friends of the Earth and lead­ing envi­ron­men­tal­ist, as their guest speaker. The pre­sen­ta­tion was recorded espe­cially to share with FFI’s sup­port­ers on Oryx Cir­cle. FFI encour­ages the dis­sem­i­na­tion of the Oryx Cir­cle con­tent, so you can see and hear his inter­est­ing and thought pro­vok­ing speech here.

Tony Jupiter talks about the val­u­a­tion of nature and that up until now ecol­ogy is sub­servient to econ­omy. When address­ing the some val­ues of nature in the mar­ket such as tim­ber, tuna, land that is good for agri­cul­ture which we recog­nise hav­ing value in the mar­ket, he notes:

He pro­vides a lot of exam­ples why nature’s diver­sity should be fos­tered and val­ued to ensure its con­ti­nu­ity. For instance, if we not had let the frogs go extinct that brooded tad­poles in their stom­ach we might have found an excel­lent cure for gas­tric ulcers exam­in­ing this phe­nom­e­non. Unfor­tu­nately, these frogs do not exist any­more. And what will hap­pen he won­ders if we do not eco­nom­i­cally value the work of bees as pol­li­na­tors, which is an impor­tant ecosys­tem ser­vice. He explains why the use of the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal diclofenac in cows in India led to an increase of human cases of rabies on the Indian con­ti­nent. Well, this and more in the video below:

(Source: Oryx Cir­cle, 25.04.2013)