A cynic, wrote Oscar Wilde, is a man “who knows the price of
everything and the value of nothing”. Climate change denier Owen Paterson, the
ConDem anti-environment secretary, fits this description down to his toes.
He is championing “biodiversity offsetting”, which puts a
market price on habitat so that
developers can destroy protected wildlife and woodland areas,
if they create a new habitat elsewhere.
Patterson, who earlier this week said that global warming
might be a good thing, claims: "Offsetting is an exciting opportunity to
look at how we can improve the environment as well as grow the economy. There
is no reason why wildlife and development can't flourish side-by-side."
Driving the government’s plans is the Environment Bank which is described
as the “leading trader in the UK in environmental assets”. It brokers deals
between buyers (developers, corporate, investors) and sellers (landowners, farmers,
conservation bodies, land management companies), according to an EU project on the concepts of
“natural capital”.
Like all offsetting projects, this is a market-driven
concept that creates a profit for the “broker”. As the bizarrely-named
Operationalisation of Natural Capital and Ecosystem Services project
acknowledges, “biodiversity offsets have recently been identified in the UK… as
one of the top business opportunities related to valuing and/or protecting
nature”.
Value and sell nature. You couldn’t make it up. But that’s
capitalism for you. The replacement habitat doesn’t even have to be in the same
area as that which has been lost - presumably it can be on any old bit of waste
land. You can be sure it'll be land the developer is happy to be rid of.
Patterson’s department seems to believe (or pretends to
believe) there is some equivalence between a developed habitat and a piece of disused
land. It's like saying that destroying a 1000- year old hedgerow can be offset by
planting a privet hedge!
There is no recognition of the complexity of eco-systems,
where species exist in a naturally occurring web of interdependence that you
can't just reinvent.
As Sandra Bell, nature campaigner at Friends of the Earth,
said: "Nature is unique and complex – not something that can be bulldozed
in one place and recreated in another at the whim of a developer." Others
have called the plan a “licence to trash nature”.
Environment Bank CEO Tom Tew claims that “when you put a
value on biodiversity you are putting a financial incentive for developers not
to trash it". But how does that work exactly? There is no explanation of
how these benefits will accrue. And this is the whole problem with this now
fashionable approach, where all of nature is classified as "environmental
services" or "green capital".
"Green capitalism" was the mantra at the Rio+20
summit earlier this year, and of course governments are going to snatch at this
idea. It suggests you can protect the environment whilst encouraging growth,
without challenging or regulating the activities of the corporations.
But suppose they succeed in fully incorporating every
molecule, every leaf and drop of clear water, into the global capitalist system
- then what? Why, they do what capitalism always does, of course – you work out
a way to make that capital work for you in order to generate profits. That's
what's happening already as corporations buy up wholesale patents on natural
products.
The reality is that the concept of building "whole
earth costs" into planning for development and production can only
contribute to the protection of eco-systems if it is part of a not-for-profit
economic system. Instead of trying to force nature to operate according to the
laws of capital, we need to regenerate and refound our human society to operate
in line with the laws of nature.
As the Cochabamba declaration on Mother Earth
rights states: "The creation of new market mechanisms for nature, the
development of a market for environmental services, will bring us toward a
collapse. We believe it is wrong to break down nature into simple environmental
services subject to economic valorization and market exchange. The laws of the
market, of supply and demand, are in conflict with the laws and natural cycles
of the Planet Earth."
Penny Cole
Environment editor
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