An Abundance of Nature
Right now, it’s easier to destroy a wetland than to restore a wetland. To fix that, much of the broader environmental movement has focused on making it harder to destroy wetlands. Whereas we, at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center (EPIC), are focused on making it simple to avoid impact in the first place and making it easier to restore them. This is just one really perfect example of how our work aligns with a new mindset sweeping politics from the local to national levels: Abundance.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book laying out this philosophy can, I think, be summed up well in this quote:
Abundance reorients politics around a fresh provocation: Can we solve our problems with supply? What is scarce that should be abundant? What is difficult to build that should be easy? What inventions do we need that we do not yet have?
But when I read the book a couple weeks ago, I noticed that there was strikingly little discussion of how we increase the supply of the restoration of nature. Sure, there’s plenty of talk about clean energy permitting, and high speed rail is the subject of basically a whole chapter. But those are more about building infrastructure to reduce the impacts we’re currently creating, not about making up for the past impacts we’ve had.
Again, this is in line with how the environmental movement has historically operated. It spends a lot of time talking about how to protect nature or reduce impacts but not enough discussing how to restore what we've lost, much less how to do that more efficiently.
There was one paragraph that stood out to me as a clear acknowledgement that humanity is not just running a deficit with nature; we have incurred a debt.
We still think of air as free. But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water. The price tag on pollution control is high. Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.
How do we repay that debt quickly and cost-effectively? How do we make it easier to rebuild ecosystems? For seven years now–since long before Abundance had a name–EPIC has been working to answer those questions.
Less Process, More Results
A central theme of the book is to be less focused on process and more on results, one of our three core strategies to speed environmental restoration.
The collapse in trust across the same decades that so many processes were being built to affirm that government could be trusted should make us question whether we have yoked the state to a failed theory of legitimacy.
In making this reorientation, we start by thinking about ways to speed up and improve the process. That can look like analyzing the timeline for wetland mitigation banking approvals to find the pain points and actually getting some of them removed. Or, it can be suggestions to make NEPA actually do what it was originally intended to do, and advise decision makers on smart permitting recommendations.
Something similar could be created for green infrastructure, Ruhl and Salzman suggest, with projects deemed important to our climate goals fast-tracked past a slew of normal hurdles.
Utilize Technology
But a lot of it will be about better utilizing technology, another of our core strategies.
It is often the case that no one is more frustrated by how the government works than the people who work in it or who are charged with running it.
Even where bureaucracy seems the most dense of a thicket, government workers aren’t inherently bad people deserving to be fired. They are frustrated! They need better tools!
From identifying the service areas of drinking water providers to improving wildfire communication to developing a model platform to purchase stream restoration credits, EPIC’s technology program has helped empower government staff to use, build, and envision tech products that help them do their job so government can actually build–and especially rebuild and restore–instead of clicking through forms.
We know that funding for restoration should be going to nature, not to paperwork. It should be paying for actual results, not how much someone tried.
The treasury would protect taxpayers by only paying for success.
EPIC has spearheaded the use of “pay for success” contracts, in which contracts only pay after results are verified and base those payments on the amount of outcomes generated. In the Chesapeake Bay watershed, we’ve helped set up five programs across four states that now compromise a market worth over $100 million AND tens of millions of pounds of deadzone-causing nitrogen prevented from entering the Bay. If governments at any level have an Abundance agenda for the environment, this should absolutely be how they pay for it.
Attract Private Investment
By paying more directly for outcomes, we can better attract private investment–another of our key strategies. Innovative financial mechanisms like prizes encourage investment to move towards delivering those outcomes. Capital flows where there is demand.
“The US often makes financial commitments contingent on failure, like loan guarantees, which pay a lender in the event of a default,” said Thomas Kalil, the former deputy director for technology and innovation in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “But we don’t make enough financial commitments contingent on success, like a prize, or advance purchase order.”
We’ve been championing the use of prizes and challenges in government, like for how agricultural waste could power off-grid generators or removing toxic lead pipes, for years. EPIC’s analysis found that the federal government in 2023 actually was using more prize competitions than it was in 2010, but environmental agencies, on average, are not. This trend is particularly pronounced for challenges aimed at developing new technology.
See also an interactive version of this graphic and our analysis of enabling public sector environmental stewardship through technological innovation.
As Abundance grows in our discourse, let’s ensure that restoring nature does not get left out of these excellent strategies the book details.
Clean air, clean water, open spaces—these should once again be the birthright of every American.
