The greatest market failure of our time may be how little we’re willing to pay for the ecosystems and nonhuman life that sustain us: effectively zero. Now the bill is coming due. Species are vanishing at rates of tens to hundreds of times faster than before modern humans arrived on the scene, a crisis some scientists call the sixth mass extinction. Fixing this has become the mission of former war correspondent and novelist Jonathan Ledgard. He now works as a financier opening bank accounts in the name of nonhumans.
His nonprofit Tehanu recently gave bank accounts to gorillas to spend on their own survival. Ledgard ultimately wants to give far more plants and animals financial safety nets of their own to safeguard their future and the ecosystems that sustain all of us. “It’s truly insane that we’ve built these economic systems without … understanding that we also have to reward nature for its services,” Ledgard told me in a video interview from his home. On August 2024, Tehanu logged its first interspecies transaction, a payment of 5,000 Rwandan francs ($3.42) to a local ranger for removing a snare from Gisubizo, one of the roughly 350 mountain gorillas in Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda, according to the digital receipt. Other micropayments followed, including for tree planting, path clearance, anti-poaching patrols and veterinary observation. The gorillas’ spending was funded by the Rwandan government and private donors. For the first time, the primates weren’t a charity case, but paying clients. Wild gorillas and other non-human species can’t tell us exactly what they need. But wildlife biologists, combined with artificial intelligence trained on hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers on mountain gorilla biology and behavior, identified the animals’ priorities.
Whenever someone took action to advance the gorillas’ interests, they were eligible to receive micropayments in Rwandan francs via their mobile phone. (All actions were verified by human experts, but Tehanu plans to automate this with AI and cameras in the future.) Each gorilla in the project received a digital identity based on their unique set of nose wrinkles, known as ‘nose-prints,’ and was tracked through the park using motion-activated camera traps. Gorillas in Volcanoes National Park, what Ledgard calls “the Tom Cruise of the animal world,” are well protected compared with most species. He sees the bulk of money Tehanu manages ultimately flowing to ecologically critical but unglamorous species outside parks, from bats to fig trees. They contribute tens of trillions of dollars in essential ecosystem services that benefit all of us, according to a UK study, from clean water to pollination. Yet most species get almost no conservation funding. Pilot projects are being considered for ancient beech trees in Romania and straw-colored fruit bats (Eidolon helvum) in the Congo rainforest. Conservation as practiced today, Ledgard argues, is too slow, too imprecise and virtually absent where it’s needed most, “at the end of a dirt road” where nature and civilization collide.
Giving wild plants and animals a financial voice in their own survival will be an experiment to see if capitalism and ecology can coexist — or whether one can survive without the other. Read my interview with Ledgard in this week’s column. How much is wildlife worth? Write me at climatecoach@washpost.com. I read all your emails.
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