New Book: The New Economy of Nature

The New Economy of Nature brings together acclaimed ecologist Gretchen Daily with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Ellison to offer a captivating and informative look at a new economy — a system that recognizes the worth of natural systems and the potential profits in protecting them. The authors present intriguing profiles of charismatic trailblazers who are finding new ways of making conservation profitable, including the story of John Wamsley:

Australias John Wamsley has made it his lifes work to fight biodiversity loss. As founder and director of Earth Sanctuaries, Ltd. (ESL), he and several thousand investors make money by zeroing in on peoples self-interest as a reason to care about Nature. At a time when many conservationists still oppose the notion of imposing bottom-line accounting on Nature, Wamsley embraces the trend. He scorns the more traditional technique of waging fund-raising campaigns for animals about to go extinct, saying they only create inefficient bureaucracies. Instead, he has found some remarkable ways to make a numbat turn a profit.

The 61-year-old former mathematics professor lives at the site of his highly successful Warrawong nature reserve, near the city of Adelaide in South Australia. Warrawong is the smallest and busiest of three private wildlife parks managed by ESL and open to the public (six others were under development as of mid-2001). Wamsley applies the same formula to all: buy pristine wilderness or degraded farmland, fence it off, remove harmful non-native species, and restock the land with native flora and fauna. As he describes it, we “set up a bit of Australia as we think platypus would like it, rather than as people would like it.

Not surprisingly, people like it a lot. Some 50,000 Australians and foreigners tour the Warrawong Sanctuary each year. And in 2000, Earth Sanctuaries became the worlds first publicly traded company with a core value of conservation, when Wamsley listed it on the Australian Stock Exchange.

At that time, he and 6,700 private shareholders controlled 225,000 acres (351 square miles), with the goal of managing native biodiversity in a full one percent of Australia – about 30,000 square miles, roughly the size of Maine.

Barbara Harkness bought ESL stock at 36 cents a share in 1994, thinking of it as charity, and watched it nearly quintuple in value in six years. Its amazing to see how its grown and how this place has grown.

Wamsley contends conservation is one of the few world concerns still working under socialist rules, and that ultimately you cant save anything on which you cant put a price. Ive always found the concept of charity bizarre, he says. To be effective, you have to be realistic. There are really only two motives that drive people: greed and fear. And the fear is the fear of missing out. Once you realize thats happening, theres no problem with these kinds of investments… Idealism hasnt worked.

Wamsleys message is that conservationists have to start acting more like business people, if they want to survive. He also believes that business people will have to start behaving more like conservationists. “The majority of businesses will do it this way in 25 years. Theyll simply have to start looking after the Earth, or theyll fail as businesses, he says.

Sitting among his kangaroos at Warrawong, he boiled down his philosophy like this: Look, he said, You can say lets change the world, or you can say weve evolved the way we are, and were a lot of bastards, and lets work with that.

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