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