Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Agenda 21: Capitalism's Hail Mary
Julie Beal does a great job of explaining the pitfalls of the seemingly best program ever.
Saving the planet by commodifying everything on it. A solution TPTB can get on board with is clearly no solution at all.
Via ActivistPost:
Measuring the sacred
At its most basic, natural capital is understood as the earth’s biomass, and the ‘ecosystem services’ it provides; it involves, literally, pricing the seas, the air, the land, and the flora and fauna, and the various benefits they bestow.
Sixteen years ago, Robert Costanza, et al, published an article in Nature called ‘The value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital’ (1997) which included a fully priced global index of all these global ecological benefits, which were estimated to have an average total annual value of $33 trillion, which at the time was almost twice the annual global gross product.
The report therefore proved the tremendous profit to be had from these ‘benefits’, and Agenda 21 and its idealistic proponents have been the perfect vehicle to advance the movement to measure natural capital, and ‘go beyond GDP’. The argument used, you see, is attractive and reasoned to many who hear it: the story goes:
nature and people are the most important things of all;
we are destroying the earth and it would be good to save it;
the current financial and corporate system is screwed.
We all know these things to be true, and once hooked into the storyline, most people fall for the ‘solution’ being offered. This solution insists ‘we must measure what we value’, i.e. ascribe a £ or $ value to each ecosystem benefit. Otherwise, we are told, ‘we cannot manage what we cannot measure’. And it’s the corporations and bankers who are going to do this for us, to profit from an endlessly replenished stock of assets: people + planet.
Read the entire article: http://www.activistpost.com/2013/05/unhappy-green-economy-people-planet.html#more
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2 comments:
But again, there is nothing wrong with trying to quantify and account for different types of capital. What is the problem is the issue of ownership; public commons or corporate commodities, this is the real question that they are missing. There is an assumption that to try and develop methods for accounting for ecosystem services is inherently connected to privatization, but I believe that Costanza is simply trying to internalize (at least some) environmental externalities. I think this article has valid points about the push for privatization that comes with something that can be viewed as an asset class, but is the alternative to ignore natural capital (and the other forms of capital currently externalized) and continue with a system that says it's economical while destroying the mental and physical environments. We need public control over deciding how to allocate natural capital, a natural commons where the rules that are laid out for use allow space for replenishment and increase. Without basic accounting, how can we even know if we are in the red or the black in regards to these alternate forms of capital?
It's a false choice. Putting dollar values on environmental externalities would bring us closer to a true-cost economy in which things like resource extraction would become prohibitively expensive. It is undoubtedly a better framework than the current model. Its a great tool for shifting consciousness. However, the practical application of bringing all of these externalities to the marketplace does nothing but reinforce the overarching capitalist system, hence corporate cooperation (or perhaps co-option). You are correct in pointing out the key difference of commons vs. commodities. However, even government control on such a level would automatically become an ultimate collectivism under an authoritarian regime; the core contradiction of liberal ideology. Eco-fascism is a very real danger. This is about maintaining the status-quo or even expanding the existing power structure to encompass the entire planet. Nothing will be free from direct participation in the economy. Nothing will be free or outside the human sphere of control. Capitalism's unquenchable thirst for growth has, in finally acknowledging the limits of the biosphere, found a way forward by way of extracting wealth from the very interdependencies from which it has so long sought to free itself. It's true we need better methods of accounting for human impact on the planet but the mechanism remains the same, and with it, the structure of society and control. A philosophy of born indebtedness to the Earth is not the same as a born indebtedness to society or a global government. It is nothing more than a smokescreen for a faustian bargain, the continuation of our current trend of ceding liberty and personal responsibility for an illusion of safety and ease of living. I want dirty power plants and factories to be priced out of a new economy but I do not wish the same for sovereignty and personal freedom. I'm happy to pay my debts to nature, just not through the totalitarian state. Where is the binding voluntarism? I only see imposition. Again the motives are questionable at best, diabolical at worst. And what's more; this agenda still requires a crisis for actual implementation, and hence is just the next act in global disaster capitalism. What are you willing to give up to 'save' humanity. Will there even be any humanity left worth saving or will we all be forcibly-medicated, implanted livestock? In this light it looks more like a scheme to legitimize depopulation. After all, what could be more economical and sustainable than that?
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