RANT: THE SMUG CANADIAN'S REPORT: IT'S NOT NICE TO F@*K WITH MOTHER NATURE! Part One

I REMEMBER A FEW YEARS AGO, when I had cable TV and a TV to go with it (aka “boomer-box”), I saw advertisements from time to time—IIRC, from the Chartered Accountants of Canada or some such lobbying organization—which opens with an older gent seated in an armchair. After a moment, he turns to face the camera and, in thoughtful, avuncular manner, comments how the best way, he thought, to protect nature was by putting a price tag on it. That way, he reasoned, we could see how much it was worth to us, in dollars and cents. He didn’t really say what we should do with such knowledge, and I had little sense what such a scheme might involve, though it seemed like a scam to me, but then there were so many scams of one sort or another in those days (not like now, of course). Ho hum. Change the channel.

FAST FORWARD A FEW YEARS, and the agenda and the mechanisms to undertake such an audacious auditing have become much clearer. And not in a good way. 

IN A 2014 Global Transition Initiative article, "Monetizing Nature", BARBARA UNMÜßIG says:

 

“Some argue that monetization, by revealing the economic contribution of nature and its services, can heighten public awareness and bolster conservation efforts. Others go beyond such broad conceptual calculations and seek to establish tradable prices for ecosystem services, claiming that markets can achieve what politics has not.”("Monetizing", GTI)

 

“Valuation” of nature, an idea broached by many environmentalists as a way of bringing the climate crisis to the attention of general public, she goes on to say, is problematic at best and warns it is a “slippery slope” from valuating nature to commodifying it, adding:

 

“…such an approach collapses nature’s complex functions into a set of commodities stripped from their social, cultural, and ecological context and can pose a threat to the poor and indigenous communities who depend on the land for their livelihood.” (“Monetizing”, GTI)

 

IN ANOTHER HELPFUL ARTICLE, this one written last October, Whitney Webb brings us up to date on the mechanics of how financial elites are contemplating slicing up the fresh-baked pie of a commodified nature. And, boys and girls, just for the record: “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!”

Whitney notes that, in September 2021, Wall Street announced a new financial asset class, and a listing instrument to go with it called a “Natural Asset Company” (NAC). An “asset class” is a grouping of securities that have similar characteristics and are governed by the same laws and regulations, like, for example, bonds, real estate, currencies, etc., and now Nature is to be added to the list. NACs* are companies, the "instruments", that purchase rights to various “ecosystem services” that a particular piece of land performs, for example, a forest providing carbon sequestration or a marsh that cleans groundwater. The reasoning goes that such companies, by investing in a particular ecological service, would automatically act to preserve the long-term functioning of the service and the land it operates from.

 

IN AN ARTICLE for ScienceDirect, Robert Costanza, et al, take exception to this view, writing:

 

“The concepts of ecosystem services flows, and natural capital stocks are increasingly useful ways to highlight, measure, and value the degree of interdependence between humans and the rest of nature. This approach is complementary with other approaches to nature conservation but provides conceptual and empirical tools that the others lack, and it communicates with different audiences for different purposes.” (Costanza, et al, “Changes”)   

 

THEY GO ON TO GIVE the example of ecosystem services that were lost, globally, due to changes in land use (urbanization, deforestation, wetland drainage, etc.) between 1997 and 2011, resulting in a loss of ecosystem services estimated “between $4.3 and $20.2 trillion/yr., and we believe that these [figures] are conservative.” Now, when the average reader, like me, comes across such crazy large figures as these, it makes me stop and think that maybe losing¹ that much natural “capital” each year might not be a good thing for human beings or for the planet.

And this might be a reason to put a price tag on nature and the services it provides, stating in monetary terms just how much we have to gain, or to lose, from it. However, their article concludes with a critical reminder that such analyses—like calculating in dollars and cents how much a wetland, say, provides a region in terms of clean water, shoreline preservation, habitat maintenance, etc., —should only be undertaken, “to measure, and value the degree of interdependence between humans and the rest of nature.” Such calculations, they add, should not be used to treat ecosystem services “as private commodities that can be traded in private markets. Many ecosystem services are public goods or the product of common assets that cannot (or should not) be privatized.” (Costanza, et al.)

 

ANOTHER ARTICLE, IN BIOSCIENCE, shares similar concerns. Marc Tadaki and Kai Chan in a review of Jessica Dempsey’s 2016 book, Enterprising Nature, note that Dempsey supports Constanza’s conclusions against privatizing nature. She begins her study with some historical background on the concept of “selling nature in order to save it”, an argument, Dempsey says, that has been debated in environmental circles for decades. Putting a “price tag” on nature, taking inventory of its “capital” and “service provision” resources; assigning them monetary values has, in the end, “born sparse and stunted fruit” (Tadaki), in terms of conservation efforts or adopting policies to combat pollution and climate change. In the 1970s, the environmental movement dropped its more radical critique of capitalism as the main culprit behind ecological crimes, and instead began to promote a kind of ‘enviro-business’ model, which brought corporations inside the environmental movement as ‘solutions-partners’. SHE SAYS THIS POLICY has been an overall failure. Think about today, for example: does anyone take seriously a “Green New Deal” in whatever country you pick, as something having any relevance combating climate change? The proverb about not letting the fox into the hen-house should come to mind. 

 

DEMPSEY ALSO PROVIDES an interesting analysis on what she calls “venture ecology”², which is the use of environmental data by businesses, but to assess where nature will prove most risky to their bottom line, such as where storm surges might occur, or data on flood plains, ground subsistence, water shortages, droughts, etc. BUT all this ecological ‘bookkeeping’ does is to help elites choose more carefully sites for businesses that continue the same rapacious and environmentally damaging practices, only in safer locales. Again, the emphasis is on nature as either a business opportunity or else a threat to profit margins, which are two halves of the same coin: Both see nature as separate from us and as some thing, some other that can be used indefinitely for profit, like a perpetual milking machine, as it were.

She suggests this “business model” version of environmentalism has only institutionalized “structures of extraction and exploitation.” Instead of allying with business, as many mainstream ecological NGOs have done—other “allies” from indigenous, Third World, grass roots, and green social movements need to be partnered with to counter decades of “green wash” and co-optation by corporations and financial elites, and to develop new goals and practices more in keeping with sustainable ecological principles.

 

“Dempsey advocates for a critical ecology that will ‘discard dreams of mastery, to embrace highly dynamic, uncertain, and deep unknowns of the future,’ and she proposes that such an ecology should be ‘conducted… not to serve elite needs, but to serve [social] movements with a real chance of creating abundant, diverse futures.’” (Tadaki)

 

Tadaki and Chan, in their critique of Dempsey’s arguments, suggest her arguments may be valid, but “idealistic” and may ultimately prove unable to turn “the juggernaut of global supply chains and consumer demands when even the fiercest ecological activists cannot escape these relations.”

I don’t accept this conclusion on their part. DEMPSEY IS RIGHT that environmentalism, as a movement, has strayed from its core principles. Corporations have far too much influence in what and how ecological scientists, researchers, and activists study and focus their energies as they address the various environmental crises we face today. Changes are obviously needed, and change can happen, where there are enough wills to shape it!

 

I’VE CITED SEVERAL ARTICLES, all of them suggesting fundamental changes are needed in how we go forward, ecologically speaking. I haven’t mentioned what I started out with, namely the mechanisms with which business elites are making new inroads into the commodification of nature, using new financial tools and tricks to do the job, as discussed in Whitney Webb’s “Wall Street’s Takeover of Nature” article. BUT I THINK I will stop here, as this is a lot to chew on. I’ll do an additional post in a few days detailing Whitney’s examination of NACs and a couple of other items.

 

Enough for now,

Jake.

__________________________________________  

 

* Acronyms may be the death of us yet!

 

 ^1. Nothing is ever “lost”, really. It’s converted into something else: When we die, our bodies are returned to their constitute parts and recombine with the earth and air. (Unless you make other plans, of course.) Or maybe you decide to pave over a wetland, turning it into a parking lot, with the flora and fauna returning to their constituent parts, and asphalt replacing its surface. For a time. So it goes.)

 

^2. Insurance companies are a vast treasure trove of such data, of course, as their business model depends on up-to-date information about where they are most likely to be exposed (in a pecuniary sense) to hazards emerging from the natural world. I imagine historians and archaeologists of the future will find their archives fascinating as they excavate amid the ruins of our civilization, trying to discover what kind of people we were, and what we valued.           

 

 

 

Webb, Whitney. “Wall Street’s takeover of Nature Advances with Launch of New Asset Class”. n. pag. Web:  Unlimited Hangout. 12 Oct 2021. https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/10/investigative-reports/wall-streets-takeover-of-nature-advances-with-launch-of-new-asset-class/

 

Unmüßig, Barbara. “Monetizing Nature: Taking Precaution on a Slippery Slope” (2014). n. pag. Web: Global Transition Initiative. Tellus Institute. 2021. https://greattransition.org/publication/monetizing-nature-taking-precaution-on-a-slippery-slope

 

Robert, Costanza Rudolfde; Groot, Paul Sutton; Sandervan der Ploeg, Sharolyn: J. Anderson; Stephen Farber; R. Kerry Turner. “Changes in the Global Value of Ecosystem Services” n. pag. Web: Global Environmental Change. Vol 26, ScienceDirect. May 2014. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378014000685#bib0045

 

Marc Tadaki, Kai M. A. Chan. “Economizing Nature as a Political Strategy: Is it Working?” Review. n. pag. Web: BioScience 67. 8 2017. https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/67/8/770/3861058

 

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE and STEVEN DONZIGER

 

BOOK REPORT: AGAINST THE GRAIN: A DEEP HISTORY OF THE EARLIEST STATES by JAMES C. SCOTT

 

“How did Homo sapiens sapiens come, so very recently in its species’ history, to live in crowded, sedentary communities packed with domesticated livestock and a handful of cereal grains, governed by the ancestors of what we now call states? This novel ecological and social complex became the template for virtually all of our species’ recorded history.” (Against, 1)

 

JAMES SCOTT DOES A BROAD OVERVIEW OF EARLY STATE FORMATION and their antecedents, beginning from roughly 5000 BCE. He focuses on the early Sumerian civilization in what is today southern Iraq, and his survey begins in the millennia before there were settlements or towns in the region and continues up into Greek and Roman times (along the way discussing briefly other centres of emergent civilization). He concludes by examining what he interestingly calls the “golden age of barbarians” which ended, he recons, during the late sixteenth century CE. It’s quite a span of time, and Scott divides his chapters thematically as he gradually moves into the Common Era. For example, the chapter titled “Population Control: Bondage and War”, examines how establishing states coped with movements of their most precious resource (people) both from inward migrations and raiding by so-called “barbarians”, as well as the outflow of state subjects exiting the “grain core” for the frontier for a variety of reasons.¹

Two topics I found most profitable to read were those on the locations of early states—why they grew where they did, and secondly, his interesting discussion on the complex relationship between early states and their barbarian neighbours.

 

    James C. Scott

I’VE ALWAYS HAD the vague notion that civilizations like early Sumer, the Harappan culture of ancient India, and the early kingdoms and dynasties of Egypt and China, for example, came about because clever fellows and gals had the swell idea of building cities and temples, plowing up the surrounding fields, and planting crops of wheat, barley, rice, and what-have-you. Exactly how that occurred, in what order and so on, was a bit unclear. Scott’s book helps answer some of these questions. While his focus is on the rise of Sumer, the nod he gives to explaining the growth of city states in early Egypt is perhaps the clearest example. 

 

WHEN I THINK OF EGYPT, I THINK OF PYRAMIDS and great temple sites, monumental sculpture, cities, and towns rich from river trade, and fields lush with alluvial soils brought annually to basin lands by the great and storied Nile River. On maps we see the river’s vast delta region and say, here, then, is where the land of the Pharaohs began. Not so, says Scott. What we call “dynastic” Egypt began further south, upriver and beyond the rich delta lands. In such complexes of marshes and wetlands as found in the Nile delta, there was an incredible variety of food sources from “turtlebacks” and fish, mollusks, shellfish, birds, game animals and harvested reeds, that the peoples “practised little if any agriculture; they were not part of dynastic Egypt.” (128) Those who’d migrated there over the previous millennia lived what we call a “hunter-gatherer” existence. It was only further south, where the land was somewhat drier and the soils still rich from the annual flooding and deposits of alluvium from the Nile waters, that Egypt proper had its start. And that seems somewhat counter-intuitive: Why didn’t it begin in those obviously rich, delta lands? Scott’s answer is because, “wetlands abundance…could lead to incipient urbanism and commerce but did not lead to state formation without grain growing on a large scale.” [italics mine] (129) And this was not possible in an ecological region like Egypt’s estuarial wetlands. There were areas of wild grasses and grains that were utilized by the peoples of the delta, but they were treated like all resources of mobile foragers.

 

SIMILARLY, IN THE RICH DELTA LANDS OF ANCIENT SUMER formed by the blending of the two great rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, there could be no large-scale grain production (which was key to state formation), because the water-laden lands, also called “subsistence basins”, were otherwise rich in resources suitable for hunting and foraging cultures, which made the cultivation of crops like wheat and barley impractical and unnecessary, involving as they did much hard work, and were time-consuming and tedious. There was plenty to be had in the wetlands and waters, including plots of wild grains that could be foraged, along with game animals, nutrient dense nuts, berries and fruits. There was no need for fields of grain and farmers. Foragers and hunters had better things to do with time than slaving away with in fields!

SCOTT MAKES THE INTERESTING SUGGESTION that a gradually drying, cooler environment, a product of long-term climate change in the post-glacial Holocene, may have made large-scale cultivation of domesticated grasses like the wheat and barley increasingly practical, and necessary, as the delta lands became less productive for forage and game hunting. As the wetlands dried and water levels lowered, pre-existing rivers and streams between hillocks and settlements, that once had facilitated the water traffic of migrating peoples, over time became the irrigation canals of newly reclaimed agricultural lands. And it was from such agricultural systems that the irrigated croplands of towns, then the incipient city-states of Sumer that we know from history, were established. Scott’s analysis makes for a clearer understanding of the complex interactions existing between climate, landscape and the people inhabiting it, and the factors that led to the growth of states and civilizations. We are products of our environment and the lands we inhabit, as much as we may deny that's the case in these modern times.

 

HIS DISCUSSION OF THE SO-CALLED “BARBARIAN” PEOPLES—those who lived at the periphery and in the hinterlands of states—outlines an equally complex and diverse, and fluid, relationship that existed between the two.

The word "barbarian" comes from both Greek and Latin and is supposed to mimic the sounds spoken by tribes and clans living beyond the polis or state, sounds that were grating to the ears of “civilized” folk. They were barbaric sounding: “Barbarbar….” One might suppose that Greek or Latin could sound equally unpleasant or unintelligible to people living outside the boundaries of city states, in the wilderness beyond the civilized world. Which, as James Scott recons, was most of humanity up until around the end of the sixteenth century CE. So, for millennia, anyone was a ‘barbarian’ unless they had Greek or Roman citizenship, or the imprimatur from other states or kingdoms. 

 

WE OFTEN have the impression that non-state peoples were primitive and lacked the requisite skills and intelligence to develop complex cultures and societies. I think it safe to say that such a view is a mis-characterization of non-state peoples, and it begs the question of why didn’t everyone flock to join civilization or forge ahead creating their own versions of it, if it was so superior? And more importantly, why were there outflows of people from the city-states to the hinterlands. There were environmental and practical reasons why people remained aloof from neighbouring states, as well as cultural reasons for their remaining separate. FROM THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL RECORD, and from examinations of skeletons, burial patterns, written records, etc., being a farmer or living in a city wasn’t necessarily good for your health. Bones of city-dwellers often suggest muscle damage due to overwork. And their skeletons were smaller, on average, than those of contemporaneous barbarians. Illnesses due to endemic diseases and malnutrition, were commonplace in crowded towns and cities, and lifespans were on average less than those of barbarians. As well, diets of early states’ grain cultures were less diverse than those of non-state peoples who migrated through various ecological niches, foraging and hunting what was at hand.  At various times, people left, even fled, cities to start lives as a hunters and foragers, “going native,” as European settlers were pejoratively said to have done, to find better lives among the Indigenous tribes of North America. Scott notes that walls were built around early city states to keep people in as much as to keep them out. Elites could not afford to lose their agricultural work force, and so walls blocking the entrance to agricultural lands curbed potentially destabilizing relations and trade between barbarians and state citizens, as much as they helped deter raiders from the hinterlands.

 

SCOTT CONCLUDES HIS SURVEY OF BARBARIAN CULTURE by reminding us that, up until the sixteenth century, if you were to look at a map of the world, you’d find settlements of cities and states were located in specific ecological niches: coastal harbours, river valleys, flood plains, and while populations were dense in these regions, the rest of the map was blank. Except, that was were most of humanity lived. The majority of the world’s population lay in the hinterlands of civilization, and it was not until various technological achievements were made to sails and ship design, mechanization, harnessing wind and water power, the manufacture of guns and gunpowder, etc., that the hinterlands and their resources could be systematically accessed. Trade and war between state and non-state actors was ongoing, but eventually people living in the hinterlands were incorporated into neighbouring states, or else adopted to their ways, until the population of the civilized world began to outpace the rest of the world. Agricultural imperatives and sedentary lifestyles were key drivers of the civilized world's population increase; mobile lifestyles, by contrast, made child-rearing more challenging. 

 

JAMES SCOTT’S BOOK IS A FASCINATING AND ACCESSIBLE LOOK at the development of early states, but he makes clear that, while much has been gained with the rise of civilizations in our world, much also has been lost.

 

Cheers, Jake.

____________________________ 

 

 

1. By “grain core”, Scott refers to the central region of a state which contains the cultivated fields of “…early wheats—einkorn and, especially, emmer—along with barley and most of the ‘founder’ pulses—lentils, peas, chickpeas, bitter fetch, even flax—could be said to belong broadly to the ‘grain’ family, as they are self-pollinating annuals and do not readily cross with their wild progenitors (unlike rye).” (73) 

In fact, Scott says, it is grains that are foundational and necessary to the formation of large states. Factors such as visibility (they’re above ground crops and are thus more confiscable and taxable by state actors), along with other characteristics such as predictable growing/harvesting patterns, ease of transportation and storage. He adds, these are the reasons there are no “chickpea states, taro states…breadfruit states, yam states…peanut states…”, etc., (129) with their more complex growing/harvesting/transportation, etc. factors.

 

 

Scott, James, C. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2017. Print.

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE and STEVEN  DONZIGER