Nature Markets

Putting a price on the rivers and rain diminishes us all

George Monbiot

Payments for 'ecosystem services' look like the prelude to the greatest privatisation since enclosure

'The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'This is mine', and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, 'Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody'."

Jean Jacques Rousseau would recognise this moment. Now it is not just the land his impostors are enclosing, but the rest of the natural world. In many countries, especially the United Kingdom, nature is being valued and commodified so that it can be exchanged for cash.

The effort began in earnest under the last government. At a cost of £100,000, it commissioned a research company to produce a total annual price for England's ecosystems. After taking the money, the company reported – with a certain understatement – that this exercise was "theoretically challenging to complete, and considered by some not to be a theoretically sound endeavour". Some of the services provided by England's ecosystems, it pointed out, "may in fact be infinite in value".

This rare flash of common sense did nothing to discourage the current government from seeking first to put a price on nature, then to create a market in its disposal. The UK now has a natural capital committee, an Ecosystem Markets Task Force and an inspiring new lexicon. We don't call it nature any more: now the proper term is "natural capital". Natural processes have become "ecosystem services", as 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.

Way Out

Where there’s a Will there’s always a Way.

Let’s imagine we’re a not so distant observer, viewing the blue-green jewel of the Earth over the last century – watching the gaily canopied merry-go-round of Gaia spinning and wobbling from the wings of the solar stage. What would we witness from the perspective of someone who can see the Big Picture?

Obviously, we’d be amazed by the spreading, glowing weave of beautiful illumination as the darkness of night was gradually dispelled across the faces of continents. We’d watch a bright network of energy, spreading tendrils from node to plexus of some strange, glowing organism’s rapidly growing nervous system.

We’d see that almost every piece of living green touched by this unearthly light rapidly died out, all the land around it swiftly burned into desiccated desert. And we’d note that this fey light was the spoor of a spreading mass of insect-like hives that grew like the tall nests of termites.

Most obviously, we’d note the rapidly changing colours and textures of the planet, and probably realise that something that lived in those nodal nests had destroyed most terrestrial and aquatic life forms in an amazingly short time. Ancient, irreplaceable forests and ecosystems that took millennia to grow, gone in the blink of an All Seeing Eye.

We’d watch what the insectile denizens who inhabit the sterilising nests are trained to call ‘the march of progress’, rapidly reducing the fertile Earth to sand, rock and mounds of bleached bones. We’d see the rivers dry up and the oceans turn toxic. It would all turn pretty ugly with amazing speed.