rack the value

Pavan Sukhdev argues that the economic invisibility of nature in our dominant economic model is both a symptom and a root cause of the rapid decline in biodiversity and ecosystems. We value, he says, what we price.

If Shakespeare is right, though, whatever price we put on nature now, we'll have been prepared to have put an even higher price when it's gone. As the Friar points out (a little sententiously) in Much Ado About Nothing:

what we have we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it; but being lacked and lost,
Why, then we rack the value.