If everyone who depends on a plant-based diet were to contribute just one cent a year to the conservation of agricultural biodiversity, the result would be a fund of $70 million a year. That would conserve an awful lot of agrobiodiversity.
This revolutionary idea is not, I confess, entirely original. It sprang, more or less fully formed, shortly after I read Entertainment Value: Should the Media Pay for Nature Conservation? by Paul Jepson, of Oxford University, and his colleagues, in today’s Science.
Jepson et al. point out that broadcasters make a bunch of money by showing us the wonders of nature and yet they contribute little to its conservation. By the same token, I reckon that people who eat make little contribution to the conservation of the agricultural biodiversity on which their food security, now and in the future, depends.
The devil is in the details, I know, and Jepson et al. have some nifty discussion of those details as they would apply to broadcasters. But think about it. One cent a year. Even if you’re on less than a dollar a day, that ought to be affordable.