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Natural capital: The limiting factor

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TLDR
This poster presents a history of restoration ecology in South Africa and some of the techniques used, as well as some new ideas, that were developed in the United States.
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This article is published in Ecological Engineering.The article was published on 2006-11-01 and is currently open access. It has received 54 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Missouri Botanical Garden & Ecology (disciplines).

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The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity: Recent Instances for Debate

TL;DR: In this article, the authors review several approaches to include economic considerations in biodiversity conservation, and show cases where monetary valuation is relevant and other cases where it is controversial and even counterproductive, as it undermines the objectives of conservation.
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Critical natural capital revisited: Ecological resilience and sustainable development

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors revisited the concept of critical natural capital and examined its relation to ecological resilience, and suggested that the degree of ecological resilience is inversely related to the level of threat ecosystems are prone to.
Journal ArticleDOI

Are Socioeconomic Benefits of Restoration Adequately Quantified? A Meta‐analysis of Recent Papers (2000–2008) in Restoration Ecology and 12 Other Scientific Journals

TL;DR: The authors analyzed 1,582 peer-reviewed papers dealing with ecological restoration published between 1 January 2000 and 30 September 2008 in 13 leading scientific journals and found clear evidence that restoration practitioners are failing to signal links between ecological restoration, society, and policy and are underselling the evidence of benefits of restoration as a worthwhile investment for society.
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Impact of rangeland degradation on the pastoral production systems, livelihoods and perceptions of the Somali pastoralists in Eastern Ethiopia

TL;DR: In this article, a survey was conducted in two pastoral weredas (districts; Erer and Aysha) in the Shinile zone of the Somali region, with the aims of assessing the status and trends of rangeland degradation, and understanding the impact on livelihoods and perceptions of the pastoralists over a 60-year period (1944-1974 and 1974-2004).
References
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Geology of mankind

TL;DR: It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch, supplementing the Holocene—the warm period of the past 10–12 millennia.
Book

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

TL;DR: One of the world's greatest living scientists argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge and the need to search for consilience, the composition of the principles governing every branch of learning.
Book

For The Common Good: Redirecting The Economy Towards Community, The Environment And A Sustainable Future

TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the scale of human activity in the biosphere has grown too large and that change is needed in the approach to economic activity: "correction and expansion a more empirical and historical attitude less pretense on being science and willingness to subordinate the market to purposes that it is not geared to determine."
Journal ArticleDOI

The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago

TL;DR: The anthropogenic era is generally thought to have begun 150 to 200 years ago, when the industrial revolution began producing CO2 and CH4 at rates sufficient to alter their compositions in the atmosphere as discussed by the authors.
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Frequently Asked Questions (13)
Q1. What are the contributions in "Natural capital: the limiting factor" ?

The restoration of natural capital, as promoted by the convergent disciplines of restoration ecology and ecological engineering, is the only strategy that attempts to augment the world 's rapidly dwindling stocks and resources this paper. 

The restoration of natural capital, as promoted by the convergent disciplines of restoration ecology and ecological engineering, is the only strategy that attempts to augment the world's rapidly dwindling stocks and resources of natural capital. 

Although the authors support Brown's first two strategies to restructure the economy and to augment social capital, the authors consider it of primary significance that he highlights, as his third point, the restoration of natural systems, also called the restoration of natural capital. 

In search for such a strategy, global analyst Lester Brown suggests a three-prong strategy to achieve sustainability, namely: Sustaining their early 21st century global civilization now depends on shifting to a renewable energy-based, reuse/recycle economy with a diversified transport system. 

It has also led to a huge increase in what Gadgil (1995) called ‘ecological refugees’, and also ‘biosphere people’, and an equally alarming decrease in ‘ecosystem people’ (cf. Dasmann, 1972), all of which have potentially deleterious effects as well. 

The search for appropriate, feasible, yet effective turnkey strategies to mitigate and even overturn the negative environmental effects of the 20th century's growth path is therefore essential. 

Restoration and creation of ecosystems is costly—and this is where an understanding of economics, the study of scarcity, can and should address the growing rarity and precarious health of natural and semi-natural systems. 

Such recognition would have immediate and radical impact on the pricing of goods and services derived from natural capital, as well as the cost of pollution, and on the profitability of ecological restoration. 

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) concluded that humans over the past few decades have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history. 

Ecological economist Herman Daly succinctly framed this proposition that natural capital is the limiting factor to development (and therefore in need of augmentation) when he wrote (personal communication, 25 January 2005): More and more, the complementary factor in short supply (limiting factor) is remaining natural capital, not manmade capital as it used to be. 

Just as conserving what remains of ‘wild’ nature now appears as common sense to anyone who has read Balmford et al. (2002), so restoring natural capital could one day emerge as a vital strategy for sustainability of biodiversity and human welfare (Clewell and Aronson, 2006). 

To move in a new direction will also require that people and firms in the industrialized countries change their wasteful and prodigal consumption patterns to more prudent ones. 

This is the genesis of the globalised economy that depends on resources from elsewhere to survive and accommodate its market demands.