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WATCH: Banking Nature

How the Financial Elite are Commodifying “Conservation”

This film explores the truly insane & disturbing world of ‘nature commodification’ in all its warped dystopian horror.

Witness men in suits tell us how much a fly is worth or how much unpaid bee-labour adds to the economy. Listen to them talk about the amazing investment opportunities in species-scarcity and show their portfolios of rare owls, turtles, butterflies etc.

Did you know an entire banking system is evolving that deals with something even less real than fiat-money? That buys up land on which – allegedly – endangered creatures live and then sells the ‘credits’ it gives itself for ‘saving’ this land as offsets to other businesses – so they have what amounts to a licence to pollute and destroy?

You didn’t? Well it’s something of a well-kept open secret. Maybe because it’s not a business model that can survive close ethical or practical scrutiny.

However it is also a cornerstone of the ‘Green industrial Revolution’, and the drive to allow corporations free rein to ‘save’ bankable wild spaces. This indeed was one of the barely-alluded to agendas behind the recent media panic over the allegedly ‘unprecedented’ burning of the Amazon (remember that?)

The idea is that big business can somehow ‘invest’ in species and habitats on the verge of extinction and thereby save them.

There is so much wrong with this on so many levels that we can’t develop it here, but probably the major flaw is the obvious one that this business, like any other capitalist business, requires monopoly and scarcity.

If the fly featured in this documentary managed to recover and populate other regions not owned by the corporation that currently ‘protects’ it, then that corporation loses its monopoly, and its commodity (the fly) loses value.

The corporation has an incentive to keep this little creature frozen forever on the verge of extinction. A bankable little living fossil, already set apart from the truly living and integrated wild.

This ‘saving the planet’ model not only incentivises species and habitat scarcity, but equally incentivises the creation of new scarcities and even the promotion of fake ones.

If crisis is your raison d’etre, how hard are you going to try to end that crisis?

The subject of this movie feeds into the parallel issue of Green-washed climate-panic. Many of the same dangers and arguments apply. It’s a major crisis of our time, threatening both increased environmental degradation and massive loss of human freedom.

The fact so few in the alt-media are waking up to this is considerable cause for concern.

For more on this theme, read Cory Morningstar’s fantastic “The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg” series, and visit WinterOak.org.uk

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