In the name of saving the natural world, governments are privatising it.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying "this is mine", and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody"(1).
Jean Jacques Rousseau would recognise this moment. Now it is not the land his impostors are enclosing, but the rest of the natural world. In many countries, especially the United Kingdom, nature is being valued and commodified so that it can be exchanged for cash.
The effort began in earnest under the last government. At a cost of £100,000(2), it commissioned a research company to produce a total annual price for England’s ecosystems. After taking the money, the company reported – with a certain understatement – that this exercise was “theoretically challenging to complete, and considered by some not to be a theoretically sound endeavour.”(3) Some of the services provided by England’s ecosystems, it pointed out, “may in fact be infinite in value.”
This rare flash of common sense did nothing to discourage the current government from seeking first to put a price on nature, then to create a market in its disposal. The UK now has a Natural Capital Committee, an Ecosystem Markets Task Force and an inspiring new lexicon. We don’t call it nature any more: now the proper term is “natural capital”. Natural processes have become “ecosystem services”, as they exist only to serve us. Hills, forests and river catchments are now “green infrastructure”(4), while biodiversity and habitats are “asset classes” within an “ecosystem market”(5). All of them will be assigned a price, all of them will become exchangeable.
The argument in favour of this approach is coherent and plausible. Business currently treats the natural world as if it is worth nothing. Pricing nature and incorporating that price into the cost of goods and services creates an economic incentive for its protection. It certainly appeals to both business and the self-hating state. The Ecosystem Markets Task Force speaks of “substantial potential growth in nature-related markets – in the order of billions of pounds globally.”(6)
Commodification, economic growth, financial abstractions, corporate power: aren’t these the processes driving the environmental crisis? Now we are told that to save the biosphere we need more of them.
Payments for ecosystem services look to me like the prelude to the greatest privatisation since Rousseau’s encloser first made an exclusive claim to the land. The government has already begun describing land owners as the “providers” of ecosystem services, as if they had created the rain and the hills and the rivers and the wildlife that inhabits them(7). They are to be paid for these services, either by the government or by “users”. It sounds like the plan for the NHS.
Land ownership since the time of the first impostor has involved the gradual accumulation of exclusive rights, which were seized from commoners. Payments for ecosystem services extend this encroachment by appointing the landlord as the owner and instigator of the wildlife, the water flow, the carbon cycle, the natural processes previously deemed to belong to everyone and no one.
But it doesn’t end there. Once a resource has been commodified, speculators and traders step in. The Ecosystem Markets Task Force now talks of “harnessing City financial expertise to assess the ways that these blended revenue streams and securitizations enhance the ROI of an environmental bond”(8). This gives you an idea of how far this process has gone – and of the gobbledegook it has begun to generate.
Already the government is developing the market for trading wildlife, by experimenting with what it calls biodiversity offsets(9). If a quarry company wants to destroy a rare meadow, for example, it can buy absolution by paying someone to create another somewhere else. The government warns that these offsets should be used only to compensate for “genuinely unavoidable damage” and “must not become a licence to destroy”(10); but once the principle is established and the market is functioning, for how long do you reckon that line will hold? Nature, under this system, will become as fungible as everything else.
Like other aspects of neoliberalism, the commodification of nature forestalls democratic choice. No longer will we be able to argue that an ecosystem or a landscape should be protected because it affords us wonder and delight. We’ll be told that its intrinsic value has already been calculated and, doubtless, that it it turns out to be worth less than the other uses to which the land could be put. The market has spoken: end of debate.
All those messy, subjective matters, the motivating forces of democracy, will be resolved in a column of figures. Governments won’t need to regulate, the market will make the decisions that politicians have ducked. But trade is a fickle master, and unresponsive to anyone except those with the money. The costing and sale of nature represents another transfer of power to corporations and the very rich.
It diminishes us, it diminishes nature. By turning the natural world into a subsidiary of the corporate economy, it reasserts the biblical doctrine of dominion. It slices the biosphere into component commodities: already the government’s task force is talking of “unbundling” ecosystem services(11), a term borrowed from previous privatisations. This might make financial sense; it makes no ecological sense. The more we learn about the natural world, the more we discover that its functions cannot be safely disaggregated.
Rarely will the money to be made by protecting nature match the money to be made by destroying it. Nature offers low rates of return by comparison to other investments. If we allow the discussion to shift from values to value – from love to greed – we cede the natural world to the forces wrecking it. Pull up the stakes, fill in the ditch, we’re being conned again.
References:
- Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1754. A Discourse on a Subject Proposed by the Academy Of Dijon: What Is the Origin of Inequality Among Men, and Is It Authorised by Natural Law? https://www.constitution.org/jjr/ineq.htm
- https://randd.defra.gov.uk/Default.aspx?Menu=Menu&Module=More&Location=None&Completed=0&ProjectID=14752
- S.O’Gorman and C.Bann, 2008. A Valuation of England’s Terrestrial Ecosystem Services, a report to Defra.
https://www.fires-seminars.org.uk/downloads/valuation_englands_ecosystem_services.pdf - Petrina Rowcroft et al, September 2011. Barriers and Opportunities to the Use of Payments for Ecosystem Services. Report for DEFRA. https://randd.defra.gov.uk/Document.aspx?Document=PESFinalReport28September2011%28FINAL%29.pdf
- G Duke et al, 14th June 2012. Opportunities for UK Business that Value and/or Protect Nature’s Services. Ecosystem Markets Task Force. https://www.defra.gov.uk/ecosystem-markets/files/EMTF-VNN-STUDY-FINAL-REPORT-REV1-14.06.12.pdf
- Ecosystem Markets Task Force, July 2012. Update on work to date.
https://www.defra.gov.uk/ecosystem-markets/files/Ecosystem-Markets-Task-Force-One-Year-On-Update2.pdf - Helen Dunn, October 2011. Payments for Ecosystem Services. Defra Evidence and Analysis Series, Paper 4. https://www.defra.gov.uk/publications/files/ecosystem-payment-services-pb13658a.pdf
- G Duke et al, 14th June 2012. Opportunities for UK Business that Value and/or Protect Nature’s Services. Ecosystem Markets Task Force. https://www.defra.gov.uk/ecosystem-markets/files/EMTF-VNN-STUDY-FINAL-REPORT-REV1-14.06.12.pdf
- https://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/natural/biodiversity/uk/offsetting/
- DEFRA, July 2011. Biodiversity offsetting: guiding principles for biodiversity offsetting.
https://archive.defra.gov.uk/environment/biodiversity/offsetting/documents/110714offsetting-guiding-principles.pdf - G Duke et al, 14th June 2012. Opportunities for UK Business that Value and/or Protect Nature’s Services. Ecosystem Markets Task Force. https://www.defra.gov.uk/ecosystem-markets/files/EMTF-VNN-STUDY-FINAL-REPORT-REV1-14.06.12.pdf
Hi George,
That’s brilliantly put flat on the table. Recently, we could suppose some deep understanding by the decision making levels about the extend of degradation of earth systems. But before even to begin fixing by relying on the ones who have proved to know how to do it easily, quickly and cheaply, we already see that, their proposed means of action are merely the replication and transposition of the same dynamic involving academia/business schools/corporate/financial institutions according to the neo liberal culture of grabbing, policing, monopolizing commodities, and derivative trading.
Just to make sure the power remains in the same hands. We know what that destructive dynamic has already produced!
Currently trying to put my head around implementing a broad acre project and to understand what we may have to put up with, I’m reading a big bunch of reports and studies visibly prepared by very proper influencial people, various universities, UN and aid agencies.
All are filled with interesting relevant data and posh graphics nicely detailing the frightening dimension of the problems. Nevertheless, through most of these reports clearly transpires the will to develop the tools and strategy for the ultimate assault on nature. Once again legitimizing growth to the wall, cash profits, exclusive rights to destroy by a few, primacy of markets to establish value and needs, and first of all to keep local communities away from decisions and the indispensable right to live in, use and to manage appropriately through education and chosen ancestral practices.
Reports all seem to show the intensity of the brainstorm amongst authorized ones: “Okay, now we understand the situation thanks to these hippies and brown ones, How do we do to use it to our advantage before the awareness and the tools leak too far onto uncontrolable grounds?”
Visibly those very informed people have now for a few decades discretely gathered and recorded the progress made by the ones on the ground making the experiments et developing the technics in their backyards and little farms, showing, educating, chiefly Permaculture and associated off springs proving their understanding and capacity to act at any scale as long as strategies are based on the participation of communities and spreading the knowledge in the culture.
All what academia and its corporate/financial masters have been unable to grasp and act upon is now being used to strengthen their decision power, squeezing the sense and meaning out of the insights for the profit of a few, striping the ecosystemic objectives to bare financial and services offset targets.
I sometimes feel worried to hear and read so many permies referring gloriously to how we can sequester carbon as if it was relevant to justify their action, by the way giving legitimacy to the ones imposing that way of thinking you describe so well George. As if we could pack the rest of the vision and needs as long as we can sequester the bloody carbon.
What then? Shout to the wind: “I have 10000 ha to reforest where people need shade food and water, give me 20 millions?” I surely will.
So far participation and proximity have been a chief factor in successfully spreading the practice, that’s a sure bet. We can definitely keep educating people on the ground as fast as possible, communicate, demonstrate even at small scale, linking nearby small projects to evolve in larger ones, get the odd rich guy to let us repair his big chunk of land, convince the local council or government to get involved, put land in trusts, and as permaculture teaching is quite a transforming experience, work to address PDCs to business and large agencies people to challenge and induce change beyond their egos, lifestyle and careers, we can surely get some of those in a positive mode.
Convince the odd medium or large company to finance the project, that will look so good on its marketing material and side benefits like easy access to onsite leisure facilities, no much harm there, seize the opportunity to give PDCs to some of its execs and staff. That could easily become a trend. But certainly not try to induce them to expect direct cash return as I feel this is getting onto dangerous grounds, facilitating the development and installation of entities pushing for offset and derivative trades and other insane nature processes patenting.
Also the still centralized autonomous governments mostly in the dry south, immune from sterile multi-polar sterile “democratic” debates, often directly suffering from dramatic system degradation and social unrest seem to offer potential for support to larger scale projects.
We should be grateful to have so much to do in fact, it’s not going as bad considering the size of it,
Thanks Bill and Geoff for showing the way and helping to mobilize so many resources.
Sorry guys, that was a bit long,
Fx.
Maybe the end of cheap oil and the collapse of the world fiat monetary system plus global warming and attendant ills will solve our current problems by eliminating globalization of transport and commerce. Today’s problems, seemingly intractable because dependent on some sort of global consensus, will get solved by creating an even bigger set, localized, not global, and amenable to local small-group solutions. Get off it George, Mother Nature’s handling this for us!