Ecologists Need to be Cautious about Economic Metaphors: A Reply.

I thank the authors of the three responses to my article, ‘Have Ecosystem Services Been Oversold?’ [1], for providing a range of opinions that, to varying degrees, take the debate forward. In the most critical of the three letters, Potschin et al. [2] describe my paper as a caricature of the field, but then go on to caricature the paper itself. I did not claim that the ecosystem services (ES) perspective ‘inescapably leads to monetization’, but only that it provided the conceptual basis for this to happen. Far from proposing that any stage in the conceptual development of ES determined the next, I in fact tabulated alternatives at each stage. I donot evenopposemonetary valuation if it is used pragmatically.