Nature is Not for Sale

As we saw in the discussions at Rio, the marketisation of nature, through the development of concepts such as 'ecosystem services' and 'natural capital' has, in recent years, become an influential new way of thinking about the ecological crisis. Environmental problems ranging from habitat and biodiversity loss to climate change have been framed in terms of the need to create markets for pollution and to create shadow markets for a whole range of environmental 'goods' and 'services'. The National Ecosystem Assessment indicates that this is the dominant discourse of the UK government.

Many pro-environment NGOs have now fallen comfortably into this new discourse, so that we find WWF supporting a project encouraging payment to protect the health of local water systems. And here we find RSPB producing a detailed guide to exactly how you can go about putting a price of various aspects of the natural world. In view of the heavy support for this discourse from government, NGOs show a remarkable lack of scepticism towards terms like 'natural capital' and 'ecosystem services' that sound as though they were invented in boardrooms and no doubt serve these interests of those who inhabit them.

To be clear about what we mean by valuation, commodification and pricing is of crucial importance. Just as the ecological footprint was a useful metaphor for bringing home to people the impact of their consumption on ecological systems, so the idea of 'ecosystem services' is a useful metaphor for communicating the vast and essential value of the natural world to our economy. However this concept has broken its metaphorical bounds and is now exerting considerable agency amongst powerful decision-makers. The slippery nature of this measure-cum-metaphor is being exploited by those who seek to use the desperation and naïveté is some environmentalists to dismember and make available for sale the very natural world they seek to protect.

The confusion amongst economists and policy-makers is not helped by the fact that many involved in this debate are operating well beyond their expertise. The refusal of many economists to take seriously the empirical realities of climate change, preferring to remain barricaded within their mathematical abstractions, has left the debate around the economics of the environment to those with experience in the hard sciences but little knowledge of the history of theories of economics. The winners of the Blue Planet prize are a good example. While we pay tribute to their work in forcing this issue into political agendas at the highest level, we would suggest that they allow some space for the expertise of scholars of economic and social systems. And to the latter we issue a heartfelt plea that they make this a greater priority of their own research interests.
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There is No Wealth But Life

Finally, in a move that became inevitable once bogus methods of valuing nature were invented by economists with the very same mental framework that produced sub-prime lending and credit-default swaps, a price has been put on the natural beauty of our land. Our country has been degraded into an accounting unit; our beautiful land has been marketised.

This, in my view, is the only possible interpretation of the UK National Ecosystem Assessment, an attempt to put a monetary value on everything that we, the human species, gain from our fellow species and earth's sacred existence. It styles itself as 'the first analysis of the UK’s natural environment in terms of the benefits it provides to society and continuing economic prosperity' and is 'part of the Living With Environmental Change (LWEC) initiative'. That is what we have to do of course: learn to live with environmental change, rather than learning to cherish and respect nature's way. The ideology here is very much about nature learning to live with us, in contrast to the opposing lessons of permaculture.

The naivety of the respectable, well-meaning but misguided scientists, like Bob Watson, Chief Scientific Adviser to Defra, who have become embroiled in this exercise is baffling. The majority appear to be natural scientists, and this, alongside the large-scale funding that was presumably available to support this research, appears to explain their mistaken decision to become involved. Perhaps they genuinely do not understand how economists can, once given something 'scientific' to work with, warp and distort values until they arrive at the answer that suits their profit-driven objectives. The process of discounting is just one such technique.

Knowing exactly how much people would pay not to lose a bit of woodland is a real step forward for a developer. He only has to find this much money and give it to the local authority and he has solved the problem of the devastating loss of the trees. A little bit of carbon mitigation, a few bus fares to travel to the next closest park, and the problem of local resistance to concrete is solved. Profits expand and the irritating impediment to economic growth from nature and those who love nature has been eliminated.

The impossibility of substituting money for nature is a central tenent of a green approach to economics; to imply that we can somehow find a price for nature, a price for life, only proves that those who come up with such calculations need to be removed from positions of authority. If they are allowed to continue to dominate our national life it is clear that our future and that of many of the species we share the planet with is doomed.
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