I share your frustration, Chief, because I remember having a very public debate with the C.D. Howe Institute's chief economist one year in a public setting. He asked me to prove in dollar terms how much a wetland system was worth. I said to him publicly that it was intellectually dishonest, and that as the social scientist/economist he was, he had to prove to me that those wetlands were worth zero. Once he proved they were worth zero, we could talk. Of course he had no answer.
In the discipline of economics and business, you're right, the free market has not found a way to factor in natural capital services, eco-services, the intrinsic worth of the DNA we sit on, the 70,000-odd species in this country. We don't even know if it's 70,000. We now have about 7,700 under consideration.
I'm trying to get a better sense, through your wisdom and perhaps with Elder Marcel's insight, of how might go about stopping the fiction that all this is to be drawn down, that it's a limitless form of capital. Species can be put at risk, species can be made extinct, but we have no calculation for it. We don't track it. There's no dollar value assigned to it. GDP keeps going up, natural capital keeps coming down.
How can we crack this nut? I still believe it's the challenge of this next 100 years.