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

I WROTE THE OTHER WEEK about a new set of financial vehicles which are being taken out for a test run by our friendly, neighbourhood oligarchs. In an article from last October, at the UNLIMITED HANGOUT website, investigative journalist Whitney Webb tipped us off about the latest, high-tech heist being devised by the current crop of robber-barons feeding at the trough. And it’s a doozy! Her investigation reveals that elites, and the financial institutions they control, are closer than ever to monetizing nature.

AND AN IMPORTANT FIRST STEP said environmentalist George Monbiot in a 2012 Guardian newspaper column, is to “rename” nature, calling it instead natural capital, and nature’s processes are now referred to as ecosystem services as if, he states, “they exist only to serve us. Hills, forests, and river catchments are now ‘green infrastructure’, while biodiversity and habitats are ‘asset classes’ within an ‘ecosystem market’. All of them will be assigned a price, all of them will become exchangeable.” He goes on to say:

 

“The argument in favour of this approach is coherent and plausible. Business currently treats the natural world as if it is worth nothing. Pricing nature and incorporating that price into the cost of goods and services creates an economic incentive for its protection.” (Monbiot)

 

But, George says, “such an approach diminishes us, it diminishes nature. By turning the natural world into a subsidiary of the corporate economy, it reasserts the biblical doctrine of dominion.” And he succinctly concludes:

 

“Rarely will the money to be made by protecting nature match the money to be made by destroying it. Nature offers low rates of return by comparison to other investments. If we allow the discussion to shift from values to value – from love to greed – we cede the natural world to the forces wrecking it.” (Monbiot)

 

WRITING NEARLY A DECADE LATER, Whitney Webb shares Monbiot’s concern that the corporate imperative of maximizing profits and shareholder wealth will ultimately come at the expense of nature and its natural processes, especially now, as the new financial devices she discusses re-imagine nature as a suite of up-for-grabs  profit centres. Last week I used the metaphor of a “perpetual milking machine” to describe the workings of unrestrained capitalism, where the machine continues milking the cow long after the cow is dead. Preserving a land’s ecological integrity by creating an artificial market that incentivizes investment instruments to milk purchase certain “services” the land provides, opens the way for investors to influence which services (i.e., the most profitable) will be allowed to operate there. I will be honest and say that I am cynical about the quality of care any individual or business that does NOT have a truly vested interest in the long-term health of a piece of land will ultimately provide for it. More on this in a moment.

 

    "There's GOLD in them thar hills!"

SINCE LAND may once more become a ‘hot property’ in a twenty-first century version of “the gold rush”, it’s good to consider where it will all be coming from. Economist Ellen Brown, in a recent SHEERPOST article, points out that the August 2020 pledge made by the United Nations to conserve 30% of the world’s lands and seas in conservation zones—of which the framework is currently is being negotiated through the COP15 Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD)*—envisions that most of the land will be “conserved” in developing countries. And at face value, it sounds like a good idea, conserving the land and seas, keeping a portion of the world free from human exploitation and depredation. 

THAT'S THE PLAN, at any rate. In fact, there was an earlier proposal, made in 2016 by biologist E.O. Wilson and others, to set aside half of the earth for conservation! But a 2017 study by Nature Sustainability found serious flaws with this ambitious proposal, stating it would act to the detriment of nearly one billion people, displacing hundreds of millions, as lands were nationalized, park lands expanded, land trusts created, etc. By 2020, the CBD had adopted a goal of “thirty percent” to be set aside for global conservation, one that was nevertheless significantly higher than its original target set in 2010-11. 

 

CRITICS POINT OUT such global conservation efforts will “largely target indigenous communities in developing world.” (Brown) And Steven Corry of Survival International makes a pointed criticism of the scheme: 

“The call to make 30% of the globe into “Protected Areas” is really a colossal land grab as big as Europe’s colonial era, and it’ll bring as much suffering and death. Let’s not be fooled by the hype from the conservation NGOs and their UN and government funders. This has nothing to do with climate change, protecting biodiversity or avoiding pandemics – in fact it’s more likely to make all of them worse. It’s really all about money, land and resource control, and an all-out assault on human diversity. This planned dispossession of hundreds of millions of people risks eradicating human diversity and self-sufficiency – the real keys to our being able to slow climate change and protect biodiversity.”

  

NOT ALL LAND will be conserved in the developing world, however. In a statement made prior to the UN’s climate change conference, COP26, the Biden administration in the United States pledged to set aside 30% of its land mass and seas for conservation efforts, as have Canada and other developed nations. Criticism of the plan, one far from a done deal, suggests in the United States the President does not have the constitutional authority to set aside government lands or to expropriate private or indigenous property for such a purpose. [At least there will be work for lawyers on both sides in the years ahead! Ed.] Some say it would be easier for private interests to acquire such lands because they would not be tied up by bureaucratic red tape. Thus, it cannot be a coincidence that billionaire Bill Gates has recently become the largest individual landholder in the United States, while the giant financial asset manager, BlackRock, has been buying up houses and land hand-over-fist since the start of the pandemic. They are betting that the 'nature train' is about to leave the station, and they're climbing aboard! 

AS ELLEN BROWN SAYS: “The federal government may have no constitutional authority to take the land, but a megalithic private firm such as BlackRock could do it simply by making farmers and local residents an offer they can’t refuse. This ploy has already been demonstrated in the housing market.” And an even greater case for potential exploitation could exist in countries with less regulatory or legal protections for small landowners, farmers, etc. A land grab on an unprecedented scale might be in the works, all under the guise of saving the biosphere and combating climate change. 

 

ONE METHOD OF ASSISTING ELITES TO ACCESS the Global South’s private and public lands is through standardizing laws and regulations around the purchase and exploitation of said lands. If the legal regimes of a variety of nations can be negotiated within a single body of jurisprudence, then, from financial elites' perspective, more efficient and cost-effective deal-making can occur. One can only imagine the type of pressures that could be brought to bear on farmers and small landholders in developing nations when their own governments sign off on international treaties such as those that are currently being struck at the various meetings of the COP15 Conference on Biological Diversity being held this year. What does the CBD’s “thirty percent” conservation mandate truly represent? How will powerful lobbying interests for Big Ag (“Big Agriculture”) and those of elite finance affect negotiations over international land-use policies at the CBD and future UN climate change summit talks? Critics point to the growing influence that private interests like think tanks, charitable foundations, and lobbyists have on international institutions like the United Nations and the WHO. Confidence in their impartiality and their acting for the benefit of the commonweal is eroded when, for example, more than 500 lobbyists from 100 fossil fuel companies attend last November’s COP26 Climate Change conference in Glasgow, “more than any single country” as reported by CNN. People are right to be concerned that private wealth increasingly seems to be co-opting what was once exclusively part of the public domain.

 

INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS on land and sea conservation that favour private interests; the hype around "Green New Deals" (for who, BTW?), and new types of exploitation investment portfolios are the latest venues where good will and good intentions are compromised or altogether co-opted. AS WHITNEY WEBB POINTS OUT, to come full circle in this, if Wall Street’s plan to float new investment schemes like those mentioned in an earlier post (i.e. Natural Asset Companies or NACs) come to fruition, they will “allow ecosystems to become financial assets, [including] the rights to ‘ecosystem services’, or the benefits people receive from nature…These include food production, tourism, clean water, biodiversity, pollination, carbon sequestration and much more.” (Webb, "Wall Street")

WITH THE TRACK RECORD, SO FAR, of wealthy elites and of “free market” capitalism in general, how much confidence should we have that corporations, investment firms, asset managers, and billionaires will act to preserve the ecological integrity of their newly acquired lands, and how far will they really go in conserving what is, and should always be, a common good for us all?

 

Cheers, Jake.

  

____________________________

 

*The conference was held in September 2021, just prior to the COP26 Climate Change summit in Glasgow. The COP15 CBD will conclude later in 2022 with a framework document signed by UN member countries, whereby “a draft text for the COP15 nature pact [will include] a core pledge to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030.” (Brown) Stay tuned for more! (Perhaps even a reaction from Mother herself!)

 (Screen grab from CBD "core pledge" document: CBD/POST2020/PREP/2/1: page 5 in above link.) 

And here is link to a helpful interactive map outlining the case for indigenous land rights.  

 

 

 

Webb, Whitney.. “UN Banker Alliance Announces Green Plan to Transform the Global financial System”. N. pag. Unlimited Hangout. 5 November 2021. https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/11/investigative-reports/un-backed-banker-alliance-announces-green-plan-to-transform-the-global-financial-system/

 

--“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/ 

 

Brown, Ellen. “Ellen Brown: Wall Street’s Latest Scheme is Monetizing Nature Itself” N. pag. Web: SHEERPOST. 4 November 2021. https://scheerpost.com/2021/11/04/wall-streets-latest-scheme-is-monetizing-nature-itself/

 

Goering, Laurie. “What is COP15 Biodiversity Summit—And Why It is So Important?” N. pag. Web: Reuters-Thompson Foundation (30 August 2021) Global Citizen Explains. Global Citizen. Org. 31 August 2021. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/what-is-cop15-biodiversity-summit-nature-cop26/

 

Monbiot, George. “The Great Imposters”. N. pag. Web: Monboit.com.  6 August 2012. https://www.monbiot.com/2012/08/06/the-great-impostors/  

 

Conniff, Richard. “What’s Wrong with Putting a Price on Nature?”.  N. pag. Web: YaleEnvironment360. Yale School of the Environment. 18 October 2012. https://e360.yale.edu/features/ecosystem_services_whats_wrong_with_putting_a_price_on_nature