The Royal Road to Harmony, Post 8

In my "The Royal Road to Harmony" Series, of which this is the eighth installment, I've been exploring the environmental wisdom of Prince Charles, author of Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World. His Royal Highness has written a book to clue all of us in to why we should care about nature and about all matters ecological.

One reason we should care is that our economies depend on ecological matters more than we know.

Honey bee colonies in Europe
and America, in so-called
'colony collapse disorder',
have been mysteriously vanishing

For example, the pollination of flowers by European honey bees (photo from the book at left) gives humankind many of our harvestable edibles. European honey bees are a species we imported from Europe. We did so on purpose. These bees are responsible for pollination of approximately one third of the United States' crop species, including such species as almonds, peaches, soybeans, apples, pears, cherries, raspberries, blackberries, cranberries, watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers and strawberries. Apiculture — beekeeping — is likewise vital to agriculture in Europe and Asia.

'One recent study suggests that the retail value of agricultural products produced in the UK with the help of honey bees pollinating flowers is about £1 billion per year,' Charles writes. But these super-valuable honeybee colonies are in mysterious decline in the UK and also here in the U.S.

'It is not clear yet why such a catastrophic decline is occurring,' writes Prince Charles, 'but, alongside disease epidemics, it seems that chemical pollution and intensive farming have possibly played an important role.'

'Colony collapse disorder' (CCD) is what has most devastated commercial beekeeping in recent years. Worker bees from a beehive or European honey bee colony abruptly, mysteriously, just disappear. It is the worker bees that collect nectar from flowers and pollinate the flowers as a side benefit.

If the workers vanish from the hive or colony, the result is disastrous. If they stop bringing home the sweet nectar which furnishes nutrition to the hive, the hive or colony winds up being abandoned by the remaining bees.

According to an important study, published in the year 2000:

For all of United States agriculture, the  ... value of the increased yield and quality achieved through pollination by honey bees alone ... was $9.3 billion in 1989 and is $14.6 billion today [in 2000, in non-inflation-adjusted dollars].

CCD started to destroy bee colonies in 2006. Colonies are generally transported by beekeepers from one food-growing location to another, a service paid for by farmers and agricultural interests. If the colonies disappear, it hits beekeepers, farmers, agribusiness, and food consumers right in the wallet.

Though commercial honey bee colonies are maintained by man, not nature, they are nonetheless subject to 'environmental stressors' such as mites, pathogens and pesticides. Possibly a contributory stressor is the fact that the colonies are forced by their keepers to migrate continuously to do their jobs.

So here is just one seemingly 'little' way in which we depend economically on other species. Yet — and this is a crucial point which Prince Charles features heavily in his book — when farmers have to charge more for the food they produce, owing to increased pollination expenses, it's counted as an increase in our Gross Domestic Product.

Meanwhile, the reduction in value of the honey bee colonies does not get figured into GDP.

There are innumerable examples like this, Charles says, in which the value of 'ecosystem services' in creating GDP is underrepresented, if it is counted at all.

Accordingly, when we damage the environment's ability to sustainably supply us with valuable ecosystem services — say, by indulging in overfishing in various nations' coastal waters or the deep ocean — the costs of the harm we are doing won't show up as offsets to GDP. If we take so many tuna from the ocean that tuna populations are condemned to a steep decline, we will at some point have to pay a lot more for the tuna we eat. But the resulting increase in commercial tuna prices will, one day down the road, be counted as an increase in Gross Domestic Product.

If manmade climate change gives us more and more natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods, the rising cleanup expenses serve to amplify GDP ... someone, after all, is getting paid to do the cleanup. But that's a perverse way to compute economic output, Charles says. We need another measure of economic productivity, one that adequately takes ecological costs into account.