Is privatising nature a good thing?

In Edinburgh over the next two days the inaugural World Forum on Natural Capital claims that ‘a revolution is taking place in how businesses and governments account for natural capital’, and that ‘there has never been a better time for senior decision makers to exercise leadership for the benefit of business and the planet’. Meanwhile, the counter-Forum on Natural Commons, held by an array of social movements and civil society organisations, believe that this ‘revolution’ ‘is the first step to creating financial markets in water, air, soil and forests’ thus ‘effectively privatising nature’. This seems to be a pivotal moment in contemporary struggles over how nature is best valued, managed and allocated.

These struggles are nicely illustrated by some of the tweets tugging on the concept of ‘natural capital’:

And so on..

In reflecting on the logics pulling this concept in different ways, I offer a few thoughts as follows…

Offsetting nature | disavowing reality[i]
In 1938 the pioneer of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud published a short essay entitled ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’.[ii] In this, he asserts that in order to accommodate traumatic and dangerous reality the ego may behave in remarkable ways. In short, a defensive splitting can be effected such that the threat associated with particular behaviours is both acknowledged and systematically turned away from. Attention instead is directed towards fetishised solutions that facilitate continuation of the dangerous but satisfying behavior, at the same as constituting symptoms of the acknowledged reality of the danger that exists. Freud uses the term ‘disavowal’ to describe this simultaneous defence against and displaced acknowledgement of reality, while the creation of a fetishised substitute as symptom of the recognition of psychical trauma is referred to as a displacement or transference of value.

The insights of psychoanalytic theory increasingly are being brought to bear in understanding our human psychical relationships with current environmental crisis.[iii] A particular intention is to shed light on the multiple defences being erected socially so as to avoid facing the trauma of the broken socioecological systems that are the fallout of modern industrial effort, and that may effect our own demise as a species. These defences act to reduce psychic exposure to such traumas whilst permitting the simultaneous avoidance of behavioural choices that might act to reduce the trauma itself. They thereby permit continuation of the satisfactions generated by practices acknowledged to be causing danger. In this analysis, then, contemporary environmental crisis, and the violence to other species, landscapes and cultures that underpins this, is seen as causes of dangerous psychical trauma,[iv] acknowledged precisely by transferring attention instead towards ‘solutions’ that seemingly ‘offset’ this danger.

Current systemic proposals and policies for the offsetting of environmental harm, through proliferating mechanisms such as carbon offset markets, wetland mitigation banking, species banking and biodiversity offsetting, do precisely this. They can be understood as ‘symptoms’ indicating recognition of the danger posed by the environmental harms caused by economic development and financial investment, that act as artful ways of turning away from the direct effects of this harm and its underlying causes.

In this reading then, offsets, and the market structures on which they are based, are functioning as fetishised substitutes for genuinely pro-environmental behaviour. They are fetishised as solutions to the socioecological dangers posed by capitalist ideology and practice, when instead they permit the sustenance of the satisfactions and privileges afforded through continuation of these same dangerous practices. Thus biodiversity offsetting is proliferating in accompaniment with massive new investment in extractive industry and industrial agriculture, both of which are extremely destructive to local ecologies and cultures. This is creating a paradoxical situation in which environmental care and conservation is thoroughly development-led – paid for and managed by the corporations and structures generating the scarcity (and thus the enhanced value) of environmental health.[v] Indeed, in some cases investment organisations can profit simultaneously from harms caused by investments in development and investments in conservation elsewhere. We heard from one major public financing organisation today, for example, about how financial investment in a conservation bank for biodiversity offset credits is receiving lucrative returns from the sale of these credits, whilst also requiring that investments by the same organisation in development should include offsets in their environmental requirements, which in principle could be purchased from the offsets also provided by the investing company.

The defence of the collective capitalist ego (if its possible to speak of such a thing) is thereby sustained precisely through deepening the rift between acknowledged danger and the substitute ‘solutions’ that mask this danger, such that satisfying yet danger-producing behaviours can be sustained. In psychoanalytic terms such intensified splitting engenders conditions ripe for psychosis – for a disavowal of reality that becomes pathological. It constitutes a rejection of both the reality of development-related environmental harm and of the redress and prohibition of satisfactions that this reality suggests would be rational (reduced consumption or desisting from the harmful practices, for example). It thus creates the artful possibility of disavowing the harm caused by corporate enterprise and global patterns of consumption, and the associated dangers for our species as well as the other species that are our companions here on earth. It is a brilliant move that sustains the fantasy that corporate capitalism is good for nature, as well as creating opportunities for connected corporate capitalist entities to profit from conservation solutions that become fetishised substitutes for the destruction that these solutions seemingly offset. What is in fact sustained here is the control over the global economy and the global environment vested in a closely entangled ‘super-entity’ of corporate and financial organisations and their shareholders. This is why offsetting as a solution to development engendered environmental harm is contested by social movements and civil society organisations globally.[vi]

Biocultural diversity
This is of concern for a number of reasons. For one, it masks the massive environmental destruction on which the current global political economy and its structures of investment is built. More worryingly, it masks the time-lag of environmental debt that will it seems catch up with us sometime soon. This is in terms of the major pressures that will be caused by anthropogenic climate change generated by our human experiment with fossil fuel burning. It is also in terms of the lag in species extinction associated with reduced ranges and habitats. The latter situation is addressed in part through expansionary aspirations in establishing protected areas globally, but this generates its own crises. It frequently entails the eviction of local and indigenous peoples,[vii] or at least the significant modification of pre-existing land use and access practices. The irony here is that frequently it is these same cultural practices that have generated the landscapes now of such value as areas to be protected for modern conservation purposes.[viii] The associated massive loss of emplaced biocultural diversity is a tragedy not only for the cultures and peoples directly affected but for all of us who have much to learn about how to live directly with other species as living companions,[ix] rather than as contemplated exhibits, viewed from behind protective barriers and as on-screen and dramatised natural history spectacles.[x] And even these ‘protected areas’ seem not in fact to be protected when it comes to finding that they also house economically important fossil fuels and minerals. Thus licences have been granted for the mining of oil from under the UNESCO designated Biosphere Reserve of Yasuní National Park in Ecuador (considered the most biodiverse location on the planet), the boundaries of the UNESCO World Heritage Site Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania have been adjusted to make way for uranium mining, and numerous other examples abound.[xi] Not to worry though – the harms caused by these extractive developments no doubt will be ‘offset’ through both biodiversity and carbon offset investments, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief and continue with our busy consumptive lives. Of course, this is of little reassurance for the indigenous Huaorani forest communities – including Tagaeri, Taromenane, Oñamenane and Huiñatare – who live in voluntary isolation in Yasuní, and whose sustaining lifeworlds hang in the balance of decisions made in distant government and corporate boardrooms. Or for Tanzanian villagers finding that mining concessions can override pre‐existing land uses within so-called Wildlife Management Areas bordering Selous,[xii] and who now also have to attend to the projected environmental health impacts of industrial uranium mining.

Indeed it is starting to appear as though the clearing of people from landscapes for conservation is rather systematically linked with the creation of cleared landscapes for industrial mining activity. In this, then, above and below-ground ‘natural capital’ are in competition with each other, and, it seems that only the size of the flows of capital will determine which will be invested in. This has been seen rather tragically in the case of Yasuní, wherein funds from the international community to ‘keep the oil in the soil’ have not materialised and, since money seemingly is the only measure of value, the choice instead apparently is now to exploit the oil. This choice enhances biodiversity crisis, the production of CO₂ emissions associated with global climate change, and control by global corporate wealth whilst demolishing local cultures with much to offer regarding how to live in long-term attunement with other species. Hence pathology.

The nature of ‘natural capital’
The remaking of nature as ‘natural capital’ enters this scene as a pragmatic metaphorical tool for increasing the value visibility of nature within the contemporary global market economy. The metaphor has a history that is coincident with the expansion of neoliberal governance forms that took hold with the Reagan-Thatcher years of the 1980s and in the wake of the Washington Consensus agreed in 1989 as the austerity-inducing guide to International Monetary Fund and World Bank lending practices. Indeed, the origin of the term ‘natural capital’ is attributed to the late Professor David Pearce – the environmental economist who was also economic advisor to Margaret Thatcher.[xiii] The metaphor is powerful in its conception of ‘nature’ as a ‘stock’ of ‘assets’ producing goods and flows, or ‘ecosystem services’, as modern conservation and economic science would have it. It is considered that bringing nature as ‘natural capital’ into modern accounting and economic practices will enable nations and corporations to better recognise their natural capital wealth and thus manage this for both sustainability and profit. The whole enterprise is built on increasing the visibility of nature to capitalism, the argument being that nature has been violated because it has not been measured, costed or priced appropriately in contemporary market structures.[xiv] The utopian vision here is that capitalism will thus become better aligned with ‘nature’, so as to generate the multiple wins of a ‘green economy’ wherein economic growth is maintained and ‘natural capital’ is too.[xv]

This is a laudable vision. At the same time there is considerable slippage here between aligning capital so that it works better with ‘nature’, and conceiving of nature so that ‘it’ is better aligned with capital. I have used the metaphor of a doubled-edged sword to describe this move that is able to cut both ways, and have suggested that there is cause for concern in current endeavours to account for nature literally as if it can behave, i.e. be put to work, as money capital.[xvi] The simple observation here is that money capital is leveraged through practices that split actual stored capital so as to create more financial value and thus greater liquidity or flow of money in the system over all. These practices include: fractional reserve lending, in which the total value commanded by a bank is a vast multiplication of the value it actually houses; the splitting of debt into complex tradable packages that turn it into assets on the portfolios of ‘securities’ managers; and the management of large virtual funds of money through betting on ultimately unpredictable market probabilities. Nature revisioned as materialised capital, i.e. as capital that is visible in financial/ised accounts, might be leveraged through similar processes. Indeed, a growing raft of financial products are being constructed so as to capitalise the ‘value’ stored in standing nature, and then to leverage this value in such a way that more money can be made.[xvii]

Plutonomy
Notwithstanding the presence of well-meaning individuals and organisations within the natural capital nexus, there is a shadow side to the current revisioning of nature as ‘natural capital’. ‘Nature’ is being painstakingly conceptualized, abstracted and constructed such that ‘it’ is made more visible to an economic system led by concentrated wealth and power. This is a system associated not only with extreme disrespect regarding the finely-tuned system of life within which we are embedded, but also with desperate and growing socioeconomic inequality. Ideology aside, recent systems theory analysis by Stefania Vitali and co-authors – an analysis that considered connections and material flows between over 43,000 trans-national corporations and financial institutions – has demonstrated that the financial flows controlled by the corporate world are dominated by what they describe as a super-connected corporate ‘super-entity’.[xviii] They write that overall the global network of Trans-National Corporations and financial institutions ‘consists of many small connected components’, but the largest connected component, consisting of ‘3/4 of all nodes contains all the top TNCs by economic value’ and accounts ‘for 94.2% of the total TNC operating revenue’. This entity of corporate and financial connections consists almost entirely of major international financial institutions, and these few organisations and associated individuals are basically able to act as a bloc to determine network control and ownership. This is indicative of extreme inequality in wealth distribution and economic control. It is a mirror of the extreme poverty that means that [xix]

Some of the organisations identified as part of this concentration of wealth and control have a presence at the inaugural World Forum on Natural Capital taking place over the next two days in Edinburgh. It is thus tempting to see in part an interest in nature as natural capital as a new attempt by this bloc and its associates to conjure and invigorate a new frontier for capital accumulation.

In this reading then, increasing the visibility of nature as capital to capitalist enterprise means finding coherent modern methodological accounting abstractions that can create and perform nature as if it is money. It has little to do with reconfiguring human relational approaches to the embodied forms and relationships that constitute ‘nature’. For this we need to turn towards different sorts of practices based on the energetic, affective and also material exchanges that come from direct relationships with entities in themselves.

There are many routes towards such different value practices and culturenature entanglements. What is interesting, but unsurprising, is that these also propose systematic redress and unlearning of many the Enlightenment ‘truths’ we have inherited in our collective cultural urge to be ‘modern’. These include recognising the socioecological benefits of commons as a coherent form of organisation based on more equal sharing and representation; and approaching the myriad entities that surround us with curiosity and affection (or biophilia) – understanding these to be kin rather than as disconnected and threatening ‘aliens’ to be managed and instrumentalised from afar. They include pragmatic choices such as procuring closer to home and thereby reducing the embodied energy and other impacts of globalised production systems, as well as generating energy from renewable sources and consuming less overall. These are some of the themes picked up on by the Forum for Natural Commons that is occurring as counter to the Forum on Natural Capital in Edinburgh. The former emphasises a view that market-based solutions are not necessarily the best route towards solving market failures.[xx] Or, as Einstein is reputed to have said, that ‘we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that created them’.