On Natural Capital: The Value of the World Around Us

For just about everything of value in life, there is an economic model. If it matters to us, we have found a way to put a dollar amount on it—to quantify its importance in our lives and society. These models and metrics tell us that our economies are healthy because they are growing. And yet for as long as they have existed, our economic models have served us an incomplete picture; they fail to account for the fact that our growth is driven by a resource that we take for free and treat as infinite: nature. Indeed, for centuries we have been using nature as if it were limitless, but more than ever, we are recognizing that our demands on the natural world are unsustainable.

In On Natural Capital, award-winning Cambridge University economist Sir Partha Dasgupta lays out a seminal new approach to economics that asks, what if we were to put a value on nature just as we value everything else? Rooted in mankind’s struggle against climate change, Dasgupta’s approach examines the existential need to rethink our relationship to nature and see its preservation as an economic imperative. Challenging much of economic thought that has come before, Dasgupta presents an urgent call to transform the focus and structures of global economics with a profound new model—one so radical that only an economist of his stature could make the world take it seriously. On Natural Capital is a bold and groundbreaking book that could, truly, change everything.