When Vincent Van Gogh was still alive, he earned so little from his paintings that he sometimes overpainted his own work instead of buying new blank canvases. Yet today, we pay millions for a Van Gogh and we dearly protect his work in expensive buildings. Would his work still be around if he was never discovered as an artist?

The discovery

The discovery of an artist is usually what makes the difference between a low priced painting and a high priced art work. Being discovered is not an event though. It’s mostly an evolution during which some credible flag bearers of the art scene jump on board and others follow in their steps.

In the financial system, the same terminology is used. When something really new hits the markets, it is common to speak of ‘asset discovery’ and ‘price discovery’.

Nature has been just timber for centuries. It is still mainly referred to as timber in many places. A new word is taking over from timber today and that is trees, clearly an upgrade. The uprising of trees and the demise of timber in the vocabulary is mainly linked to carbon, the symbol of climate disruption. But the discovery of nature is only beginning. In the conservation scene the singular focus on carbon is decreasing for being too reductionist. Mainstream awareness for biodiversity is finally lurking around the corner. And that will be a revolution for the forest.

From timber to ecosystem

Today, for many people, the Amazon forest, Congo Basin and the Borneo rainforest are still just interchangeable mass collections of trees. With carbon as a value driver, and referring to them just as ‘carbon sinks’ that is indeed more or less the case.

With biodiversity as a value driver though, the natural world instantly falls apart in thousands of puzzle pieces which are all unique ecosystems. One ecosystem can be 1,000,000 hectares while another may be just 5,000 hectares. As a consequence nature becomes a non-interchangeable asset, similar to art works. Just like Picasso has Guernica and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the Amazon biome can have this unique sub-ecosystem where the jaguar roams and another other unique sub-ecosystem where the clean water for a whole city downstream depends on. Art is a prestige asset and so can nature be.

Fractionalized ownership

Both expensive art and large plots of nature are mostly in the hands of the very few that can afford it. Legal and technological innovations are currently creating an interesting case for many other aspiring owners in the world. We saw a first experimental wave of fractionalized ownership in the NFT scene, first with digital art, but some experiments were made with real world art as well. One artwork can be legally divided into 10,000 parts, just like a company is divided into shares. The same can be done with the very large land titles on which nature grows. Rather than an untradable monolithic land title of 30,000 hectares in the hands of one, this can be 30,000 parts. Then why not choose hectares as the unit?

The digital side of the NFT scene seems less relevant in this context. Given that the (art)works in that realm are more defined by their relation to each other than to their maker, most of the NFTs find themselves in the collectibles scene rather than the art scene.

Fractionalization can perfectly rely on more universal concepts like stock listing. Real Estate Invesment Trusts (REITs) effectively fractionalize real estate assets to make them tradable.

Art but with revenue

Art does not generate a dividend or recurring revenue stream. It is mostly an investment that counts on appreciation of the asset. You could add that art can be looked at in your living room and rainforests are far away. But a lot of the world’s most valuable art is just stored in tax free airport safes where there is nobody to enjoy the esthetic pleasure.

Nature is also an asset that can appreciate. There’s the very low price point for entire hectares today, its unique characteristics per territory and the prestige component. But where the art market stops, natural assets go beyond.

The offset markets are still young and today we count with just carbon, whereas countries like Australia already experiment with biodiversity offset. A primary rainforest can generate not only several carbon credits per hectare per year; the case will be even stronger for biodiversity. And then we don’t even mention value created for the weather, regional humidity levels, erosion control, soil fertility and so on.

Relation to its maker

Guernica would not nearly be the artwork it is today, if it was not linked to Picasso. For art, the maker has a defining role and is always human. For nature the maker is millions of years of unique mutation and selection processes and is by definition not human. Perhaps it is time to introduce the idea of human art and natural art.

People usually don’t destroy expensive stuff. “Is this art or can I throw it away?”

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