Can Everything Be Quantified?

Here is something I always think about:

People are intruding on nature. Where trees grew, people cut them down. Where marshes formed, people filled them in. By driving, manufacturing, and modernizing, people are polluting, destroying, and diluting what is not rightfully theirs.

This article brought this thought to my mind. Something about defining nature monetarily seems intrusive. What right do we have to evaluate the ecosystem as if it is our property? Nature does not belong to us, people and nature share the planet that we live on.

The way that nature’s processes can be studied and analyzed is a new and interesting idea to me, but it does not appeal to me. I understand why nature has an economic value, and I believe that it does. But our lives only evolved the way they did because nature was there first. People would never have settled in the middle of the ocean. Does that mean that the land has a monetary value? It is true that we would pay trillions of dollars to remove the water from our homes, but our homes would not be there in the first place if nature hadn’t invited us in.

Do you think that nature should be viewed as a commodity? Or should people be mindful of the fact that we are organisms sharing the ecosystem, that we are another facet of said ecosystem?