ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly reviews the impact of mankind on the planet, through hunter-gathering, farming, and industrialisation. It suggests that we are exceeding nature’s boundaries in the ‘ungoverned spaces’ where we fail to fully pay for the resources we extract or the waste we dump. Terrestrial systems are being overwhelmed, and the loss of forests is being driven by poverty, low-input agriculture, and a tragedy of the commons of global proportions, rather than high-input food production. Wild habitats are being simplified by farming on a vast scale, not because domestic species have ecological or economic advantages, but because they are owned and wild species are not. The chapter introduces the concepts of total economic value, ecosystem services, and economic and financial prices, and suggests that forests or drylands can be conserved or rewilded by capturing the full economic value of natural systems in the pricing signals that farmers use to allocate land. Doing so will require new economic institutions that include local ownership and global markets for wild species.
