Invoice from Mother Nature

We all know that without Mother Nature, life on this planet would be horrible to say the least. We also know that we over-use her resources by far. Now what would happen if Mother Nature would simply invoice us for the usage of her resources. just like any other organisation would do?!

It has been calculated that everything we use from Mother Nature results in an annual turnover of 115 billion euro, that is twice the total BNP of all countries in this world. Just one example to illustrate this massive figure! The bees in our country, together with some other small insects, taken care of over half the production of fruit and a quarter of all vegetable production in the Netherlands resulting in over 700 million euro’s per year. Worldwide this little creatures deliver about 1.000 million euro’s worth of produce.

Puma, the german sports good brand, was one of the very first companies in the world to add the cost of usage of the resources of Mother Nature to their total costs incurred. The hefty price tag of € 145 million was added to the consumer price tag to compensate for this.

Just imagine what the world would look like if we could refinance Mother Nature in this way! And while we are at this, let’s also recalculate the health related costs for living in the proximity of a coal operated energy plant as part of the regular expenses of the multinationals operating it. Building such a plant costs app € 2 billion whilst operating it costs a are € 6 billion in health related costs only. If we would send this invoice nobody would every build such a monster again!