By Dr. Robert Thorson

Mothers work hard for their families, often without much acknowledgement by the world at large. The same is true for Mother Nature, whose behind-the-scenes contributions to human well-being are vastly underappreciated.

Economists have begun to identify and put a price tag on household “mother services.” I do not refer to the intangible services of turning a house into a home or healing a child with a hug. Instead, I refer to things such as driving the kids to their soccer games, planning for a birthday party or paying the household bills. The value of these services performed by a typical middle- class mom is over $100,000 a year, based on what it would cost to hire a chauffer, a caterer or an accountant to do the same jobs. Such calculations put the term “home economics” in a whole new light.

Ecologists are doing something similar to help us better appreciate the economic value of Mother Nature, at least from the human point of view. They’ve come up with a concept called “ecosystem services,” those things that natural ecosystems do for us, whether we know about them or not.

Take forests, for example. They provide timber for construction, pulp for paper and wood for fuel. They provide habitat for animals, which, in turn, provide human food. Woodland hiking trails provide low-cost opportunities for recreation and exercise. Forested watersheds are natural “sponges” for heavy rainfall, offering a flood-control service that would otherwise be met by expensive dams and reservoirs. Forests are cleansers for polluted air and water, sopping up carbon, nutrients and toxins that would otherwise heat up the Earth, turn our ponds green with algae and undermine our health. Finally, we human animals find spiritual values in sacred groves.

Putting a dollar value on a forest’s marketable commodities (fuel, wood, pulp) is fairly straightforward. Valuing a forest’s other services (water treatment, recreation) is more challenging. The total value of marketable and less quantifiable assets of a given forest yields a price tag for its ecosystem services.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a four-year project involving 1,300 scientists from 95 nations, has just come up with such a price tag for the services provided by the whole global household. They did this by summing up the often hidden value of forests, grasslands, rivers, oceans and the like. The four technical volumes of their final report, Ecosystems and Human Well- Being (Island Press), is a world inventory for the economic value of nature, employing a similar approach used in estimating the economic value of motherhood.

For example, the assessment project put a dollar value on forest services for eight Mediterranean countries: Portugal, Italy, Croatia, Turkey, Syria, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. In Syria, forests are worth $89 per hectare, per year, with nearly all of the value coming from non-market services such as aesthetics. In less arid countries such as Portugal and Italy, the forests are worth more ($344 and $253, respectively), and, like Syria, their greatest value comes from non-market services.

In contrast, the forests of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Croatia, and Turkey are valued more for their marketable wood products than non-market services, either because these countries have more forest or because their residents are more desperate for wood products.

Within the past 50 years, the global conditions for human beings have greatly improved, at least when measured by medical health, political freedom and global security. Unfortunately, many of these gains have come at the expense of the environment. Effectively, we have been mining the economic value out of our ecosystems as if they were inexhaustible. If such trends continue, human population will eventually exhaust the services now being provided free of charge by global ecosystems. After that, we’ll have to pay dearly for what is now take for granted.

From all this I draw three conclusions that apply equally to Mommy Dearest and to the Big Mama of us all (Mother Nature):

Both kinds of mothers are worth more than you think.

Much of what they do is taken for granted.

They need a break to keep on giving.