For a keynote speaker at a conference on wilderness conservation, Pavan Sukhdev possessed a strange job title: banker. Sukhdev, a high-ranking executive of Deutsche Bank who helped build India's modern financial markets, had a fiscal message to deliver. The loss of forests is costing the global economy between $2.5 trillion and $4.5 trillion a year, he said. Many trillions more in costs arise from the loss of vegetation to filter water, bees to pollinate crops, microbes to break down toxins, and dozens of other "ecosystem services." 本篇文章是非常典型的环保类专题，这从文章的第一句话wildness conservation就可基本得出。本文开头从Pavan Sukhdev的演讲开始，导出环境与经济发展的关系。后面细节举例部分都是次要环节。 For centuries, economies have risen and collapsed based on the market value of the products extracted from nature—timber, coal, metals, game. And yet the value of much of what nature supplies hasn't been reflected in the numbers. A new movement now seeks to put this right by attaching an economic value to the services nature provides. The idea is predicated on the notion that since a paper mill, say, needs water as well as trees, there should be some kind of economic mechanism whereby it pays to help keep the water flowing. The same is true for dozens of other ecosystem services across a wide range of industries. There's scarcely a business in the world that doesn't rely in some way on natural features that help control flooding, disseminate seeds, fend off pests, and hold soil in place. According to a study Sukhdev is conducting for the United Nations, protecting and restoring damaged ecosystems can deliver extraordinarily high rates of return on investment—40, 50, even 80 percent. "People need to start thinking of 'ecological infrastructure' as something they can and should invest in," Sukdhev said at the conference. 第二段第一句继续论证环境与经济发展息息相关。而从第二句的”yet”一词我们可以预见，后文将出现新信息且为重要信息，即环境给予我们的供给并没有被予以足够的重视。于是后面自然而然出现许多努力要让公众认识到环境的重要性。到本段结尾，作者一直在对这一观点进行论述。 It sounds radical even to talk about nature in the language of finance, but it's quickly becoming a mainstream practice. One of the few tangible achievements expected from the climate talks in Copenhagen this month is agreement on a program called REDD, or Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Forest Degradation, a complex set of regulations that would help developing countries keep their rainforests standing by turning their carbon-storing capacity into a source of income. Trees, after all, absorb carbon dioxide from the air, which can be seen as a service that offsets tailpipe and smokestack emissions. REDD would establish a market in which wealthy countries can pay countries with old-growth forests, such as Brazil, Indonesia, and Guyana, for their carbon stocks, thereby creating an economic incentive to preserve the jungle. 文章的最后一段，作者继续深入主题并指出通过经济的形式展现环境的重要性已成为一种趋势。其中，作者还特别提到了哥本哈根会议通过的REDD项目，指出这一项目将帮助发展中国家将利用其雨林方面的环境优势促进经济的发展。
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