According to the National Network for Child Care, a typical three year-old is "full of wonder and spends a lot of time watching, observing, and imitating. Their days are filled with busy exploration of their world."  Yesterday, on the occasion of NextBillion.net's third birthday, I found myself reflecting on this description – and wondering if it applies to our community as it would a child.

We are certainly busy exploring our base of the pyramid world – a world that itself has grown leaps and bounds since the site's initial launch.  I remember when we could go weeks without posting a relevant mainstream news story related to BoP; now, we post two or three per day.  When NextBillion got started, "next billion" wasn't in the business or development lexicon.  Now, influential actors from the Boston Consulting Group to Microsoft to the World Bank have adopted the term to signify the next billion people to rise from the base of the pyramid, and the next billion in profits for businesses that strive to fill market gaps by integrating the BoP into healthy economies.

The mainstreaming of 'base of the pyramid' and 'next billion' has come about as our community has matured.  There are now hundreds of blogs, web sites, wikis and other resources dedicating column inches to the concept of business-driven approaches to poverty.  On our site, we have recruited a team of talented staff writers from around the world to guide the conversation, and regularly receive thoughtful comments from hundreds of different readers.  The conversation started back in 2005, and it has only grown in sophistication and depth since (at least, that's how I'd like to think about it!)

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Guest blogger Karen Bennett is a Research Program Coordinator at the World Resources Institute. Her current work focuses on mainstreaming an ecosystem services approach to assure ecosystems' capacity to provide humans with needed goods and services. She also provides support to projects in the People and Ecosystems Program.

By Karen Bennett

When you drink a glass of fresh water, do you think about how it may have been cleaned by a watershed upstream? When you eat fresh fruit or grains, do you think about the thousands of species - like bats, bees, birds, and butterflies - that pollinated your food? If you do, you're a minority. Most of us don't think about - or don't even realize - the vast array of services nature provides us every day. We call this myriad of nature's benefits on which we fundamentally depend ecosystem services.

Ecosystem services range from the obvious - crops, fish, fresh water - to those that are harder to see - erosion regulation, carbon sequestration, and pest control. While people everywhere depend on nature, those in rural areas, and particularly the rural poor, are most directly dependent. Products from forests, oceans, and fields are an important source of rural income, and these goods are a safety net when other employment fails. Over a billion people depend on nature for employment - in other words, nearly half of all jobs worldwide come from the environment. Ecosystems, whether healthy or degraded, represent the wealth of the poor.

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