USA: Sally Collins runs Obama’s Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets

…a new bureaucratic mouthful called “Office of Ecosystem Services
and Markets.” It’s part of the US Department of Agriculture, which not
only works with farmers and ranchers but also includes the US Forest
Service and its 193 million acres. Heading the new office is Sally
Collins, a former Forest Service ranger who reports directly to new
USDA head Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa.

Click link for full text/increase funding for writer/producer of these
words: http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2009/02/03/new-us-office-takes-fresh-approach-to-carbon/

Ms. Collins believes the approaches of her office may open a new era
in which urban industrial emitters of carbon dioxide will partner with
private landowners to plant new forests or crops to soak up CO2, or in
which revenues generated from a carbon tax will pay for planting trees
in federal forests lost to wildfire. The idea is to nurture food- and
fiber-producing activities that are more climate-friendly. Over time,
Collins says by phone from Washington, “Where we go from here will
alter the discussion of how the country thinks about natural
resources.”

The program will be similar to payments farmers currently
receive to rest their land in order to preserve the soil, restoration
of wetlands along rivers by municipalities to promote water quality
and flood control, and “biodiversity banks” in which landholders that
affect habitat for endangered species are required to provide equal or
greater amount of habitat elsewhere. “For the ecosystem service
concept to generate real results, it will have to go beyond valuing
ecosystem services to actually contracting for them,” says Terry
Anderson, executive director of the Property and Environment Research
Center in Bozeman, Mont., a free-market economist who advocates
resource protection based on economic incentives rather than
government regulation. “Just as the Forest Service produces trees and
sells them to loggers or produces recreational services and sells them
through its fee programs to hikers, it will have to think of itself as
a supplier of ecosystem services for sale to those who value them.”

Click link for full text/increase funding for writer/producer of these
words: http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2009/02/03/new-us-office-takes-fresh-approach-to-carbon/

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