Nobody falls in love with a cost-benefit analysis.
The rancher who won't sell the creek pasture even when the offer doubles. The grandmother who takes her grandchildren to the same stretch of river every July. The volunteer who shows up every Saturday to pull invasive species from a wetland nobody else notices. Ask them why and you won't get IRR.
You'll get: "I just care about this place."
Finance treats care as irrational — a soft variable, unquantifiable, irrelevant to allocation decisions. This is an error. Care is not irrational. Care is the most ancient, most durable, and most predictive signal of where value actually lives.
care as signal
Consider what care actually indicates:
- Sustained attention — the carer has observed the system over time, in multiple states, across seasons. They hold more longitudinal data than most monitoring programs.
- Pattern recognition — they notice when something changes. "The water's lower this year." "The birds aren't here yet." "It doesn't smell right after the rain." These are ecological indicators, spoken in plain language.
- Skin in the game — they'll sacrifice time, money, and comfort to maintain the system. This isn't sentiment. It's revealed preference at the deepest level.
When someone says "I care about this place," they're not reporting a feeling. They're reporting a relationship that contains information — information about the system's value, its trajectory, and what it would cost to lose.
Finance ignores this signal because it can't be automated. But care is the reason 45,000 acres in the Roaring Fork Valley are conserved through the Aspen Valley Land Trust. It's the reason elk calving habitat on Snowmass gets $5,000-fine enforcement. It's the reason land trusts exist at all. Care precedes every instrument. It's the demand side that supply-side conservation finance keeps failing to serve.
the intrinsic lives in the heart
Our north star is clear — instrumental serves intrinsic. We build financial tools to protect what matters on its own terms. The price is a bridge, not the claim that a dollar figure is the worth.
But where does intrinsic value actually live? Not in a philosophy paper. It lives in the heart of the person who cares. It's the grandmother at the river. The rancher with the creek. The hiker on the Tom Blake trail who says "I would help protect this" without knowing why.
Intrinsic value is not abstract. It's embodied in specific humans who have specific relationships with specific places. And those humans — the ones with the relationships — are precisely the ones the financial system underserves. They can donate. They can volunteer. They can vote for a bond measure. But they can't easily invest in the ongoing health of the place they love.
The heart knows the value. The wallet has no instrument shaped for what the heart knows. That's the gap.
why care outlasts incentives
Incentive-based conservation (payment for ecosystem services, carbon credit programs, conservation banks) has a structural weakness: when the incentive ends, the behavior ends. A farmer paid to keep a buffer strip will plow it when the contract expires if the payment was the only reason.
Care doesn't have this problem. The rancher who won't sell the creek pasture isn't responding to a payment. He's expressing identity. The grandmother at the river isn't calculating. She's transmitting meaning across generations.
| Motivation | Duration | Brittleness | What breaks it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Financial incentive | Contract term | High — ends when payment ends | Budget cuts, policy change |
| Regulatory compliance | Enforcement period | Medium — ends when enforcement weakens | Political shift |
| Care / relational value | Lifetime + intergenerational | Low — persists through adversity | Only displacement or death |
The most durable conservation outcomes on Earth are the ones held in place by care. Indigenous nations and communities steward the majority of Earth's remaining biodiversity on a fraction of its land (Garnett et al., 2018) — not through incentive contracts but through relationships sustained across generations, on their own terms. That durability is the benchmark, not a comparison point. Land trust easements held by families who love the property outlast easements held by investors who bought the tax credit.
An investment instrument designed for care — one that says hold a position in the health of a place you already love — inherits this durability. The holder doesn't sell at the first drawdown because the position isn't purely financial. It's relational. That's a feature, not a bug.
naturalizing finance, not financializing nature
Here's where the tension gets sharp.
If we say "care is investable," are we financializing the heart? Are we putting a price on love?
No. We're doing the opposite. We're taking financial architecture — instruments, positions, yield, compounding — and bending it toward what the heart already values. The heart doesn't change. The instrument does.
Traditional finance asks: what is this ecosystem worth to the market? Ensurance asks: what does the market need to look like so that care can flow through it as capital?
The difference is direction. Financializing nature forces nature into financial grammar (units, fungibility, quarterly returns). Naturalizing finance forces financial grammar toward nature (condition, relationship, perpetuity, wholeness). The instrument serves the ecosystem. Not the other way around.
from heart to position
The sequence that works:
- Heart identifies value — someone cares about a place, deeply and specifically
- Instrument matches the shape of the care — not "donate to save nature" but "invest in the ongoing health of this system you know"
- Capital compounds toward protection — the position builds over time, funding the upstream watershed, the upwind forest, the whole supply chain that keeps the place alive
- Care and capital reinforce each other — the investor stays because the relationship is real; the ecosystem benefits because the capital is patient
This is not charity. It's not ESG compliance. It's not a tax strategy (though it may carry those benefits). It's investment grounded in relationship — the oldest and most reliable form of stewardship humans have ever practiced, given a financial instrument worthy of it.
what you can do
If you care about a place:
- That care is not irrational. It's signal. The most durable conservation on Earth is held by people who feel what you feel.
- Explore general ensurance (coins) — hold a position in what you care about
- Explore specific ensurance (certificates) — invest directly in named natural assets
- Tell us about it — the place you care about may already be in the protocol, or ready to be
Related:
- this place matters to me — when someone says it out loud
- the body knows before the mind does — the somatic half of the same signal
- either / or is the trap — why priceless and fundable aren't opposites