Here’s a science-fiction scenario for you: Your friendly local wetland registers as a company and starts sending you bills for its services. A network of sensors constantly monitors the quality of water inflow and outflow, so the wetland’s systems know exactly what kind of crud is coming in, and how much water filtration work needs to happen to create the pristine water that comes out of the aquifer down the road. If you hold a fishing permit, there’s an extra charge for fish nursery services. Big polluters get bigger bills.

Not much of this is particularly outlandish, or even new. Canadian writer and futurist Karl Schroeder sketched a scenario very like it during a talk at the O’Reilly Media Open Source Conference in 2009. The only really hard part will be setting up the legal frameworks and getting people to accept their responsibility for paying the bills; almost everything else is already in place.