The Nature Conservancy of Canada is the leading non-governmental land conservation organization, a private, not-for-profit organization that partners with corporate and individual landowners to protect natural lands. The NCC's work is supported by about 40,000 active donors and manages 2.2 million acres of ecologically important land nationwide. The NCC is by all accounts a rare good news environmental story.
What is nature worth? The answer to this question—which traditionally has been framed in environmental terms—is revolutionizing the way we do business. In Nature's Fortune, Mark Tercek, CEO of The Nature Conservancy and former investment banker, and science writer Jonathan Adams argue that nature is not only the foundation of human well-being, but also the smartest commercial investment any business or government can make. The forests, floodplains, and oyster reefs often seen simply as raw materials or as obstacles to be cleared in the name of progress are, instead, as important to our future prosperity as technology or law or business innovation. Who invests in nature, and why? What rates of return can it produce? When is protecting nature a good investment? With stories from the South Pacific to the California coast, from the Andes to the Gulf of Mexico and even to New York City, Nature's Fortune shows how viewing nature as green infrastructure allows for breakthroughs not only in conservation—protecting water supplies; enhancing the health of fisheries; making cities more sustainable, livable and safe; and dealing with unavoidable climate change—but in economic progress, as well. Organizations obviously depend on the environment for key resources—water, trees, and land. But they can also reap substantial commercial benefits in the form of risk mitigation, cost reduction, new investment opportunities, and the protection of assets. Once leaders learn how to account for nature in financial terms, they can incorporate that value into the organization's decisions and activities, just as habitually as they consider cost, revenue, and ROI. Such a rethinking of “natural capital”—nature as a quantifiable asset—can not only increase profitability, but provide crucial protection against the kinds of climate change-driven phenomena—like devastating drought and hundred-year floods—that are no longer the stuff of speculation. A must-read for business leaders, CEOs, investors, and environmentalists alike, Nature's Fortune offers an essential guide to the world's economic—and environmental—well-being.
North America's Great Lakes country has experienced centuries of upheaval. Its landscapes are utterly changed from what they were five hundred years ago. The region's superabundant fish and wildlife and its magnificent forests and prairies astonished European newcomers who called it an earthly paradise but then ushered in an era of disease, warfare, resource depletion, and land development that transformed it forever. The Once and Future Great Lakes Country is a history of environmental change in the Great Lakes region, looking as far back as the last ice age, and also reflecting on modern trajectories of change, many of them positive. John Riley chronicles how the region serves as a continental crossroads, one that experienced massive declines in its wildlife and native plants in the centuries after European contact, and has begun to see increased nature protection and re-wilding in recent decades. Yet climate change, globalization, invasive species, and urban sprawl are today exerting new pressures on the region’s ecology. Covering a vast geography encompassing two Canadian provinces and nine American states, The Once and Future Great Lakes Country provides both a detailed ecological history and a broad panorama of this vast region. It blends the voices of early visitors with the hopes of citizens now.
"In 1997, the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) came to the southwestern corner of Alberta as a complete stranger. Within a decade, however, the organization was the largest landlord, having bought most of the landscape on the eastern side of the Waterton Lakes National Park. Thus was born the largest private conservation initiative in Canada at the time. Key to its success was an alliance with ranchers who were contracted as tenants in return for selling their ranch. With science on its side and ranchers having refashioned themselves as conservationists, the NCC declared that a unique landscape with a wealth of iconic species had been protected. This thesis demonstrates that aside from bringing together unlikely protagonists, the alliance did not remotely generate in practice what it advertises. To begin with, there is no consensus amongst experts that conservation has any prospect where a livelihood dependent on livestock is expected to coexist peacefully with large predators like grizzly bears and wolves. I explain how scientific findings may vary in concert with the dispositions and affinities of the science-makers themselves, and that land-users as well as conservationists select them strategically to advance their respective agendas. I make a case that the cosmetics of conservation gloss over contradictions on several fronts. Disguise is a default manoeuvre when the inflow of money depends on the public perception that donations produce prompt results. The NCC therefore promotes the idea that the accumulation of property rights is ipso facto a guarantee of conservation. This may be the case where human activities are curtailed, but not where interspecies coexistence is mandated. Yet innovative practices have emerged despite the apparent stalemate, and a multi-sited ethnography reveals the dynamics of place that stifle innovation in some places and foster it in others. Discretion perhaps being the better part of valor in conservation, the NCC is locally a silent partner at the moment, but it has positioned itself as a future land-use broker. As I elucidate, the predicaments of this 'working landscape' are so entrenched that it may end up gentrified in the name of conservation." --
