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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Yes.
Really? I came across it in specialist publications well over half a decade ago. The semi-MSM has been following that up for at least 3 years. Last year even Monbiot caught on. Thought I was carousing with the avant-garde round here. Turns out to be an antechamber to Tutankhamun’s tomb.
What the obscenely Rich don’t seem to understand is…….”Nobody owns anything,…..when we die, it all stays here”……George Carlin.
The Economist from Columbia says ‘we dont deify nature today’. Tell that to global indigenous cultures and communities. Where do you think ‘Mother Nature’ and/or Gaia comes from? The day we put Keynesian Economists in charge of nature, we are screwed.
I am so fecken angry and disgusted at what I’ve just seen. And I could only stomach the first 51 minutes. I’ll watch the rest tomorrow after I’ve calmed down.
This is the logical end result of fecken voodoo economics called Neoliberalism. This is the logical outcome of this cancer on our society.
Such grotesque logic. Some of the creatures that appeared in this film – I could literally see the evil in their eyes.
The financialisation of nature, the financialisation of Everything. All for $$$.
That’s what everything always comes down to. Money. Greed.
I highly recommend the detailed work of Cory Morningstar and only recently discovered the excellent blog Winter Oak.
This is why I come here. Where else would we see a such an important documentary?
Al Jazeera?
Or (as I noticed when I checcked to see the Al Jazeera air dates–without success, but about a couple of years ago) and perhaps more relevant to you, SBS?
Well either OG moves fast or this is a perfect serendipity. https://off-guardian.org/2019/11/04/agrochemical-apocalypse/ Last night I prompted technocracy news to watch ‘Banking Nature’ for a broader appreciation of what is going on to the comment of: https://www.technocracy.news/natures-rights-movement-will-destroy-concept-of-private-property/ The mission creep of regulatory corruption is partly because there is no will or recognition of the need to check it. Give corporations the rights of persons – what could possibly go wrong? Extend them to lakes, mosquitos and any part of the Natural world deemed and authorised worthy of rights – what could possibly go wrong? The idea of theft is recognisable to our experience and so there is a basis for rights of possession – but the theft being carried out globally is the power and the means to capture and remake law by which to dispossess us of our lives for the sustainability of their agenda – but notice – manipulative… Read more »
Behind the heart yes.
Isn’t this tied in with the slight “bad conscience” feeling the uber rich 1% sometimes get? They used to go for a spate of philanthropy but this would be a step up: get bragging rights and more money.
Heroine, coke or crack addicts destroy only themselves plus maximum a few close relatives, big money/power addicts destroy so many more.
You are naively generous I feel Antonym. If you look you closer, see this is intended to use the very destructive outputs as a new vector of persisting in destruction (sustainable plunder) under the guise of good intentions and ‘bargains struck’ by which to offset sins while confiscating the Natural world – using investors such as pension funds. Oh and driving the riff raff from the land into scare-cities and smart prisons for the dumb and dumped. I write to a systemic addiction that runs beneath the logical outcomes of its thinking. behind the guise of good intentions to offset sins that are so easy to see in others. The drug business is much more systemic than your vignette – and is a key part of dark economy, war by stealth and social engineering. I don’t know about the super rich and their conscience. People have to live with themselves… Read more »
If it’s any consolation, the parasites will die, just like the rest of us.
And then everything goes out of existence because the ‘perceiver’ is not there to perceive (all else is speculation).
Even speculation will die because there will be no-one there to speculate either.
No humans = no thoughts.
As for Awarenss, I’m not so sure.
That’s a strange kind of consolation from a strange kind of god. Death in life, or living death – is a kind of substitution for life – usurping the true under false pretences. If we realise we have been deceived – we also realise it never was true – even though we have lived the experience of it belief – perhaps through our whole life! The idea that truth is inviolate is to say it is not IN the always changing. Our awareness of it is down to what we give acceptance to. I see that attachment and identity of any attempt to grasp or control any form of truth sets a polarised struggle within itself. Self Image – or truth? Illusions do not die – because they never were alive – but while we give them life they have all the life we give them. We can be gutted… Read more »
Descartes, the silly old bugger, was too attached to thinking.
What he should have said was:
‘I think, but that’s not who I am’
Great film: though I think is is probably fair to say that there is not too much that will be new to those who have been paying attention? The financialisation of nature is only part of the strategy though. Along with ‘net zero’: the other main pillar of the SDG/GND/4IR corporate green revolution is dematerialisation of aggregate economic flows or ‘decoupling’. Decoupling means the separation of the service economy from source to sink biophysical throughputs: dematerialising production by increasing knowledge intensity of value creation …which will be “innovation driven” (bullshit straight from the WEF). It is also called ‘tertiarisation’ of the economy as it turns to information and data processing; fintech; AI high-speed data connections (information superhighways); overfinancialisation; overcapitalisation; trade in services; blockchain technology; etc. It is this freedom from dirty and polluting manufacturing that will produce so much surplus value that we will all be rich; live lives of… Read more »
As violence breaks out around the world: how many people are willing to demonstrate or fight for less? It is the continuation of our lifestyles that demand more. Maybe this should be assessed before we cast the blame on the power elite? They are us extremised. I quit my career in 2011 from a Swedish power utilities company called Vattenfall. Their commitment to nuclear power after Fukushima was for me the final straw. I have been downsizing ever since, something I have somewhat forced on my immediate family, a process that comes with its own pain, but at least I could afford to manage the transition. What has become very apparent is how you cannot keep up with richer friends and family any more. You kind of ostracize yourself, and trigger whatever guilt they are capable of. We are a social animal. Normativity is something of a bad word in… Read more »
All respect to you,Toby.This is a hard moral decision to make,especially when it involves others such as family and dependents.Only those who genuinely take the step of living by example can institute change.”In the absence of light,darkness prevails”.Thank you for shining.
Thank you, Heathen Tinker. I love that name, by the way.
Your comment reminded me of an Aranofsky film, Noah, in which a God-given command to build the Arc and save the animals leads Noah to confronting a terrible decision. It resonated deeply with me because of my own moral convictions, and the battle between them and how reality actually is from moment to moment in its unfathomable complexity.
I haven’t digested all you wrote but this bit caught my eye:
One of my work mates recently asked if we wanted to be one of the richest people on the planet. The answer, naturally, was yes and she asked if we had bank accounts. We said yes and she said then we were already amongst the richest. The point was well made: that those fortunate to be born into “The West” are, globally speaking, part of the affluent sector. Which goes a long way towards explaining why so many amongst us have as much economic sense as Marie Antoinette and her “Let them eat cake” philosophy.
Sharing in love and gratitude for being is not on the balance sheet. hence a rational psychopathy trades in guilt for the right to persist in hate given social reward. I don’t cast blame for the blind assumption that the framework in which we think is self-existing reality. But it isn’t – and it paints us in a dead world in which scarcity elicits war by force and guile as the ‘way of life’ – but it is a way of death – sometimes apportioned more ‘fairly’ only to be unfairly robbed at system level. Such as those who capture the regulatory bodies, the financial system, the media, the key points of energy supply, the scientific and medical narrative – all of whom are following self-interest as they see it and in the frame that sets their seeing – that is held us the undercurrent gestalt of accepted reality in… Read more »
I wish I could get those in my circle who have bought (sorry!) into the green wash to watch this through a couple of times. The true climate ‘deniers’ are those that only adhere/listen to the Monbiot/Guardian narrative. Planting Eucalyptus in the Amazon to burn, how cynical, how DARE they? Can you imagine how these creatures must laugh when they’re plotting these grotesque machinations? The value of scarcity, what genius. In the next financial crash we can’t allow the banks to fail but this time because we must to save the orangutan. Of course, we only worry about indigenous species when they are not homo sapiens. For thirty years I’ve supported environmental causes. Every magazine/blog I read links somewhere to the carbon emergency. I went to a talk on Swallowtail butterflies in the spring, much was made of the imminent climate catastrophe. I felt like I was living in a… Read more »
Just the first few minutes of this film are enough to send a cold shiver down my spine. It’s like watching a discussion in some asylum for the criminally insane, and the look on some of those faces gives one the impression of looking into a black hole.
I haven’t watched the movie yet, but wanted to comment on the important observation in the article about the systemic need for as much scarcity as possible when we measure value almost exclusively in terms of price/money. For price to be above zero, supply must be less than demand. Anything readily available/accessible in abundance – supply exceeding demand – must have a price of zero. Of course in practice there are several ways of creating artificial scarcity, but the basic logic is sound enough. This means that abundance is a fundamental anathema to market-/price-based economics. The ramifications of this logic seep out in many directions, one of which is the (hopefully) obvious insanity of attaching dollar values and the profit motive to absolutely everything there is, and attempting to understand reality wholly through the lens of price and money profits. What a wasteland of poverty that perspective creates. The beginning… Read more »
“the systemic need for as much scarcity as possible”
Capitalism is predicated on want, dissatisfaction, neediness, goods that go bad or become unfashionable and which therefore need to be constantly replaced etc., indoctrinating everyone into feeling inadequate, unattractive, frustrated, sick etc. The point is that everyone must constantly be looking for the next big thing that will solve all problems but, when it arrives, proves to be yet another arrow pointing somewhere else.
As good a description of dukkha as I have ever read George
Odd you should mention that. I was thinking about the Buddhist concept of the six realms of being and the realm of the hungry ghosts came to mind.
From Wiki:
Animals don’t suffer the illusory cravings that supposedly smarter humans do.
True. And for that to work, commodities, and pretty much everything else, must be scarce, or felt to be so. If there’s we really believe there’s not enough to go around, we tend to want as much of the pie as we can get our hands on, for all the reasons you lay out, and more.
Toby et al: Are there really so few of us globally that realise holism in and as ourselves: that we have to pander to the majoritarian natural attitude that the value/price object is separate from experience? As soon as we admit – even if in convention – that the value object is separated from us: we have to invent the price mechanism. It is a natural concomitant entailment of separation. The cost of separation is exponential extermination. As soon as we have a price mechanism: the rest of capitalism falls into place. The price is the biosphere as no surplus value can be created without energy/exergy transformation; labour; capital; mass biophysical source to sink throughputs; waste and pollution. As previously discussed at some length. Price is a subjective evaluation of unseen environmental degradation as a function of separation. I hope that is not too dense: as we have discussed the… Read more »
Yup, value cannot be measured; it is a quality of experience. I think Vandana said “Price is a disease of the mind.” And she said it with beautiful passion.
The scarcity issue is the essence of the “last chance knock down bargain” manoeuvre too. Thus are you encouraged to furiously desire items which, with a little thought, you realise you couldn’t care less about.
This manufactured scarcity reminds me of Thorstein Veblen’s notion of industrial sabotage, such that no industrial line ever worked to maximum capacity but was deliberately “hobbled” to ensure that less was produced than was needed – all for the sake, of course, of maximising profits. Veblen said this wasn’t an anomaly but referred to normal business practice. Marx would probably say that such “hobbling” wasn’t necessary since the entire system was already set up to maximise profits and, having this exclusive goal, already entailed a “deformation” of a working practice that could have benefitted all.
I haven’t read any Veblen, but everything I hear from him makes very good sense. Perhaps I should make the time to take the plunge! My own perspective on the roots of the capitalism sickness as being composed of scarcity, fear, a poor understanding of competition and property, and how those components tightly interrelate and sustain each other, is derived from a number of books and sources, but perhaps the most influential was “The Ascent of Humanity” by Charles Eisenstein. As I now see it, there are any number of techniques developed to ‘profit’ from perceived scarcity, and endless names we might give them, but for me the challenge is first a change of consciousness, such that humanity shifts how it sees itself, from being the separated and special centre of a universe of distinct objects, over to being an embedded part of organic nature. Nature is not ‘out there’… Read more »
Interesting points. My wife has always been an animal lover and, since meeting her, I have always had pets. We currently have two dogs and when I look at them I don’t see creatures that are absolutely separate from myself. They obviously have awareness and intelligence. In many respects they have keener senses then I do. And so this notion of some kind of forbidding barrier between humans and the rest of the natural world doesn’t make sense to me. But it seems to me this notion is central to many religions – certainly the Western monotheist ones. I know that it is unwise to “essentialise” about institutions and beliefs i.e. to ascribe a monolithic quality to them so that e.g. Christianity is always assumed to be the same thing. And yet I’m afraid I have noticed what I can only describe as a regressive function throughout much religious thought.
I’m not sure if it’s central to religion or if the central message becomes distorted as psychologically immature humans twist it over the decades and centuries. I suspect the latter is more likely, though perhaps not in every single case. And this latter possibility could be the “regressive function” you reference, though for me it attaches to humanity rather religion per se. We ‘civilised’ ones have a strong, fear-based tendency to want our ‘control’ over ‘nature out there’ to become ever more precise, but as unintended consequences have their uncontrollable way, the quality of our consciousness in responding to that unwanted inevitability tends to regress towards the infantile and narcissistic: hence, e.g., dogmatic Scientism.
As for non-human animals, my eyes were opened far wider by an online film call Speciesism. Perhaps you would find it interesting…
George Mc: Andre Gorz updated Veblen in his ‘Critique of Economic Reason’. As an addendum: he wrote that AI-robotisation of production was being retarded because that would create a leisure society. In a leisure society: the relations of production (class relations) would be equalised …that is the relations of hierarchical rule would break down. Which is unacceptable to the capitalist notions of authoritarian rule. So we got McBullshit Uberisation instead. Sold as the democratisation of labour (freedom from rule by being ones own boss: whilst being a wage slave to three different jobs). Gorz’s theory was that we embrace technology and share the remaining work equally – in a 2-3 day working week. Can you imagine a vast leisure class of auto-didactic politically educated subjects? No, neither can the advocates of authoritarian rule (which is in the neo-universal distribution of the majoritarian natural attitude BTW: not just the ruling class).… Read more »
Your lengthy post has got so much in it that it will take me a long time to digest. But on an initial look, I found myself with the following (possibly utopian) thoughts: The very concepts “work” and “leisure” are defined with reference to capitalism which needs to have a population regulated, on the one hand, by wage slavery and, on the other, by a submissive acquisition of commodities. Thus “work” is that which we must do in order to be paid in order to live and, for that very reason, has an irksome odious flavour. And this is true even for those fortunate to find employment in something they enjoy doing i.e. the very fact they MUST do it for a livelihood is an emotional disincentive. The measure of that is the well known sentiment that we need money itself as an incentive. That monetary incentive stands as an… Read more »
“Those whom the Immortal Gods mean to destroy…”