Economists once treated a forest chiefly as a stockpile of timber, valuing it by the board-feet it would yield once felled. Recent work, however, prices the standing tree itself: the water it filters, the carbon it sequesters, the floods it blunts downstream. By this accounting, a logged hillside may register as a loss even when the lumber sells at a profit, because the services that vanished with the canopy never appeared on any ledger before. Critics call the new figures speculative, and they are not entirely wrong — assigning a dollar value to a watershed invites guesswork. Yet the older method was not neutral; it simply assigned those services a value of zero.