This was for a contest in The Economist. I didn't win--but I like the essay anyhow.

Do We Need Nature?:
Questioning Ecology and Economics to Nurture Nature

“Do We Need Nature?”
ABSTRACT
One question prompts five others in this essay on economic perspectives of ecology. Examining the use of natural phenomena in a cross-cultural comparison, the essay emphasizes that human thought shapes cultural responses to the environment. The economic values assigned to ecological resources can be reevaluated in accordance with their life-sustaining functions on this planet. Economic valuations must encompass more data than the market prices of finished products to accurately assess the true value of natural areas.
Urban settings do not have to be completely removed from nature to be functional. City plans like those of ancient Rome and modern day Amsterdam exemplify how nature can be incorporated into urban design as revenue-generating and recreational features. Suburban sprawl, by contrast, dilutes financial and social resources.
Site planning, construction methods, and politics must change to ensure the sustainability of industrialized society. These changes are wide-sweeping, but are more a matter of perspective than technology. In fact, the thrust of the essay is the benefit derived from knowing when to use technology, and when to let nature take its course.

The question “Do we need nature?” has been raised, prompting another: “Are you kidding?”
The question itself reveals a bias in human thinking: that humanity is somehow separate from all the rest of nature. Whether at its mercy, or lording over it our perceived mastery, we don’t view ourselves as being part of nature. Worse, we don’t recognize the economic potential of nature.
We see human industry as opposed to the capricious whims of nature; we carve a living out of nature despite its complete indifference towards us. We sometimes imbue nature with malice, as news broadcasts declare the plight of deluged flood victims, or children mauled by animals; homes are destroyed by “raging” forest fires, seaside homes swept away by hurricanes with human names. What we overlook is that people have foolishly built homes in floodplains, wildernesses, the eroding mountains of cliff-side beaches. One may admire such idyllic residential settings, but hardly can be surprised that seaside homes get smashed by ocean storms, that hillsides become mudslides in torrential rains, that rain-swollen rivers inundate floodplains, or that predators who eat kid-sized animals might eat kids. A more relevant question may be “Do we need developers who build in floodplains, the hunting grounds of large predatory animals, or California?”
Rarely do we avail ourselves of the ready power of nature.
In Asia, many farmers rely on geese to keep their fields free of insects, instead of pesticides. Cheaper than crop-dusting, and easier to fuel than machinery—the geese feed themselves on the pests—geese are also non-toxic, and the European Union has no sanctions against Geese-Modified foods. But Westerners see the world through our machinist’s eyes. Our culture’s axiom is that technology not only saves human labor, it yields superior results. In many cases technology is the only means we have of accomplishing a task, but its use is so rooted in the psyche of the industrialized world that we may overlook the obvious solutions to problems—the aforementioned flood victims would need much less relief if their houses had been built above the river valley.
Even out of the floodplain, the typical new American house is not well thought-out: built on a razed lot on which an inflexible concrete slab is laid, nailed to that is a wooden structure, poorly insulated but sealed airtight, requiring a forced air ventilation system. These heat-absorbing boxes lie unshaded in the sun, bounded by rivers of concrete that soak up more heat from the sun than they can dissipate after dark. They’re called “urban heat islands,” but are more like spheres and they envelop our cities, our homes, and us, as we rest encased by polyurethane furniture, wondering why it gets so hot, how the electric bill can get so high, and what did they used to do to get by in the old days?
In the old days, builders capitalized on natural instead of technological processes. Ancient Roman architects oriented their bathhouses toward the sun, built them on hillsides, using gravity to move water and the sun to help heat it. Our English word atrium is a Latin word that Romans used to symbolize the large opening in the centers of their roofs. The atrium let in light, ventilated their quarters, and allowed them to grow plants more-or-less indoors, the plants in turn helping to clean the air inside, but realtors would be sure to point out the sliding glass doors surrounding a modern one. Roman architects built aqueducts and atriums not only as impressive monuments, but of necessity. Without electric power, the Romans were utterly dependent on natural forces to do work. Sunlight, gravity, atriums, and cross-breezes were their ducts, fans, coils, and pumps.
Nature and urbanity need not be mutually exclusive. Amsterdam’s waterways were praised by the eminent professor of urban planning, Lewis Mumford, who admired their beauty and their utility. The canals are vital to shipping interests, but also serve noncommercial needs such as private transit. New Jersey, he contrasted with regret, had missed the boat, their canals being “covered up by . . . express highways.” Canals are no substitute for streets if waiting for an ambulance, but had they been utilized as “the backbone of a system of regional parks,” one easily can imagine lucrative tourist trades associated with watercraft, as well as more eco-friendly freight and transit alternatives to the turnpike.
Technology allows us to import foreign solutions to local problems, instead of devising new ones more appropriate to the locale. Many Arizona homeowners, new to the desert, solve the problem of ground cover by planting grass sod. In Kentucky, that’s sensible, but planting grass in Arizona causes problems. The smell of manure fertilizer permeates entire neighborhoods and allergies are at an all-time high. The non-native plantings around homes, luxury resort golf courses, and businesses have hydrologic demands so high that to supply them, the state of Arizona made plans to divert some of the Colorado River from its natural course into California, where it long has been used for agricultural irrigation. Growing grass in Arizona reduces produce grown in California, reducing jobs for migrant agricultural workers and providing a de facto control on the influx of illegal immigrants, who typically fill those seasonal agricultural jobs. It also keeps produce prices up, diverting more middle-income money back to the banks via mortgage payments on the farms, and to the Feds in the form of FFA loan payments. Ecology and commerce are linked like a capillary system, and all parts affect all other parts.
Do we need nature?
That’s like asking Wall Street, “Do we need capitalism?”
Forget the despoilment of natural beauty arguments—we can survive without beauty. But we cannot survive without a worldwide ecosystem. Already, carbon dioxide emissions are severe enough to prompt “ozone alert” days announced by weather forecasters who advise people to limit their exposures to being outside. This pollution is somewhat mitigated by the respiration of large ecosystems like the Amazon rain forest, but forests are steadily being cut down. Rates of deforestation are debated, but it is undisputed that wilderness areas are shrinking. Also undisputed is the fact that all of the breathable oxygen on Earth is created by plants.
The savvy analyst sees the economic value of ecological functions; Costa Rican rain forests provide environmental services worth an estimated $1,092 per acre per year. However, Costa Rica can’t bottle air, like the French do spring water. So farmers cut down this more valuable resource because on the cleared land they can raise crops or livestock, much more market-ready commodities. In the form of emissions quotas, as suggested by the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, Costa Rica could “sell” clean air back to polluting countries, compensating locals for preserving the forests. The rain forests are cleaning the air, after all, an invaluable service to us all, but one for which Costa Rica is not actually compensated, leaving the farmers with little choice but to clear more land, and clean less air.
Nature is the foundation of all human industry. We harvest nature’s resources, are sheltered by its geologic actions, and dependent on its bounty. Our biologic and economic functions are inextricably tied. A better question might be, “How well can we manage nature?”
What we must do is obvious: preserve enough nature to keep ourselves going.
What we can do is bounded only by our perspective. We can choose, as individuals and as societies, to enhance our economic profits by enhancing our planet’s ecologic well-being. Humans make culture and assign values to all things encompassed by their cultures. We can choose to re-value ecological assets, as Costa Rica has done.
Residents of Portland, Oregon, recognizing that the natural setting of their city enhanced its appeal, was moved to confine its urban development; civic regulations prohibit construction outside the city’s perimeter. Their revitalization projects have made for a high standard of living and attract industry to the “Silicon Forest” (Nike is headquartered there, among others). Light-rail and bus services allowed the removal of a four-lane highway and the creation of a downtown riverfront park, at which community events generate revenue instead of smog.
Unregulated development of areas outlying established communities destroys ecologically valuable natural areas. Furthermore, the practice draws development resources away from inner-city areas, promoting decay and urban blight, as well as throwing the residents of the “new homes in a natural setting” into the company of wolves, cougars and bears, floods, forest fires and mudslides, as mentioned earlier. Instead of consolidating tax revenues into better public services, the tax base is split between bedroom communities and city centers, much of it to construct and maintain roads that would be unnecessary if people lived nearer to where they work. The cost of extending municipal services such as water, waste collection, ambulance, fire and police, to the newly developed area is a further drain on the resources of the greater metropolitan areas.
There are only three possible situations in which life can exist: symbiosis, parasitism, and predation. The last two spell certain doom, for they attack the host. Our future on this planet must be symbiotic, for the Earth cannot sustain the current industrial practices. As it stands today, we are predatory; we eat up nature to sustain ourselves, without contributing anything to sustain the environment. Ten thousand years ago we were parasitic. We didn’t contribute anything then, but there were so few of us that nature easily could recover from the damage we cause. There are six billion of us now, and with us, an untold number of machines, manufacturing plants, and strip mines. The level of damage is exponential. But not irreversible.
We can choose to change our situation. We can choose to nurture nature so that it will continue to nurture us. This is a great challenge, for it requires us to do the two things most difficult for us: change our thinking, and change our habits. But we can change those things. We should.
Indeed, we must change.
Because the question we have to keep in mind is, “Does nature need us?”
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