Natural Resource Conservation | Alliance for Sustainable Colorado

Our natural resources are precious and exceptional in many ways. By protecting the earth’s capacity for self-renewal, we are able to maintain the beauty, value, and quality of the environment. Among others, these resources include water, topsoil, wilderness, forests, watershed areas, plants, and nonrenewable resources such as oil, coal, and minerals.

What are these natural resources worth to us? In one sense, their value is infinite. Natural ecosystems and the plants and animals within them provide humans with services that would be very difficult to duplicate. The Earth’s economies would soon collapse without fertile soil, fresh water, breathable air, and an amenable climate. But “infinite” too often translates to “zero.” According to World Resources Institute, in one of the first efforts to calculate a global number, a team of researchers from the United States, Argentina, and the Netherlands has put an average price tag of US$33 trillion a year on these fundamental ecosystem services, which are largely taken for granted because they are “free.”

For example:

About 78% of the top medicines used in the U.S. come from nature. Of the top 150 prescription drugs used in the U.S., 118 originate from natural sources: 74% from plants, 18% from fungi, 5% from bacteria, and 3% from one vertebrate (snake species). 9 of the top 10 drugs originate from natural plant products.
Over 100,000 different animal species — including bats, bees, flies, moths, beetles, birds, and butterflies — provide free pollination services. One third of human food comes from plants pollinated by wild pollinators. The value of pollination services from wild pollinators in the U.S. alone is estimated at four to six billion dollars per year (Ecological Society of America).

Colorado is a state of scenic wonder, from hillsides of shimmering aspens, to Anasazi ruins in the southwest, to the 52 mountain peaks reaching above 14,000 feet. Organizations all across the state work diligently to maintain this beauty and quality of life by preserving wildlife habitat, protecting our rivers and streams and ensuring safe drinking water, advocating for multi-modal transportation and growth practices, and protecting public lands for agricultural, cultural, and recreational use.

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