Natural capital: the coming market disruption you haven't heard about

THE Economics of Biodiversity by Partha Dasgupta, a Cambridge University professor, is a report you should read. He focuses the narrative on an obvious point that is almost always taken for granted - that we exist within nature.

Of course we do, but we often do not see it or at least do not think about it because individually, we account for an insignificant speck in the earth's natural cycles. We exist in nature, and our economies, markets, companies, products and services all exist in and depend on nature as well. It takes natural capital to survive and thrive. If we pretend this is not so, or to forget that this is so, we do it at our peril.

The author starts with a summary of how we got here, providing a brief description of humankind's infinitesimal time on earth in the geological scale. We meet everyone's favourite 18th-century killjoy economist, Thomas Malthus.