No net loss: Wetland restoration and the incomplete capitalization of nature

I want to ask you today what the generations to follow will say of us 40 years from now. It could be they'll report the loss of many million acres more, the extinction of species, the disappearance of wilderness and wildlife; or they could report something else. They could report that sometime around 1989 things began to change and that we began to hold on to our parks and refuges and that we protected our species and that in that year the seeds of a new policy about our valuable wetlands were sown, a policy summed up in three simple words: "No net loss."