Mark Tercek knows a thing or two about money. For years he worked at the mega investment firm Goldman Sachs, where he headed the Corporate Finance and Equity Capital Markets divisions, and later went on to found the company’s Center for Environmental Markets. Since 2008, he’s been the president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy. Given his background as a Wall Street titan, it’s not surprising that Tercek has taken his market mentality to TNC and tried to focus its efforts on making an economic case for preserving wild places.

A recent article in the New York Times about the work Stanford University biology professor Gretchen Daily is doing in Africa and Costa Rica highlights the importance of ecosystem services, or putting a value on ecosystems. Daily co-founded the Natural Capitalism Project (NCP) in November 2006. NCP, as Daily told the New York Times, works to "quantify in biophysical and dollar terms the value of conserving the forest and its wildlife."