[Reader-list] commodifying nature

[Nagraj Adve]

They seek to commodify everything.
Naga


Putting a price on the rivers and rain diminishes us all
Payments for 'ecosystem services' look like the prelude to the
greatest privatisation since enclosure

George Monbiot guardian.co.uk, Monday 6 August

Our rivers and natural resources are to be valued and commodified, a
move that will benefit only the rich, argues George Monbiot.
Photograph: Alamy

'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'."

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, 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". 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", while biodiversity and habitats are "asset classes"
within an "ecosystem market". 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".

Commodification, economic growth, financial abstractions, corporate
power: aren't these the processes driving the world's 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. 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 that were
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 securitisations enhance the ROI
[return on investment] of an environmental bond". 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. 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". 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 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, 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.

Twitter: @GeorgeMonbiot