In this episode, we explore the implications of even well-meant attempts to apply a monetary valuation to nature itself
This morning I noticed a small headline in the online newspaper: “US, Aus will be valuing nature”. Which sounds great, at first, much-needed and all that. Except that there’s a catch: they’ll be ‘valuing nature’ solely in monetary terms. Not A Good Idea…
Why isn’t it a good idea?
Well, two reasons, really.
One is that there’s no real way to do it that makes honest sense. Oh, sure, we can fake up a whole bunch of plausible-seeming ‘value-transforms’ - but if we’re honest about it, we’d have to admit they don’t actually work in real-world practice. Not really. For example, how exactly would you do a monetary ‘valuation’ that covers every element - literally everything, over indefinite periods of time - that’s in or part of or happens in or to or interacts with the small forest that’s currently out the back of this house?
The other reason is that it’s already been tried before, at many different times, in many different ways, and hence we already know now that none of them make sense. We can sort-of-pretend that it sort-of makes sort-of sense as long as we apply that ‘valuation’ to an arbitrary subset of the whole, or via an arbitrary perspective on the whole - but it simply falls apart into an embarrassing heap of absurdities as soon as we try to apply it to nature as a whole, nature as itself. Even if we do that only to an arbitrarily-bounded subset of nature, such as that small forest above.
For example, we can put a nominal ‘valuation’ on the putative monetary worth of the timber represented by those trees in the forest, either in the present, or in some possible future. But that valuation would become ‘realised’ only when all of those trees are cut down - which among other things, means that they’d no longer be ‘nature’ by that point, because they’d be dead. And it doesn’t take into account (yeah, another monetary-economics term there…) the hidden costs, in every sense, of all of the collateral damage that would or could occur when these trees are cut down - such as destruction of habitat, disruption of water-catchment, soil-erosion, and all of those other issues that magically become Someone Else’s Problem forever onward. Oh, and that monetary valuation can itself also vanish in an instant if some other perspective takes priority - such as when the logger discovers that the whole place is listed as Endangered Species habitat, and can’t be cut down anyway.
The same applies to mining, to farming, housing-land and just about everything else that treats land or landscape or whatever currently exists on or in or over or under that space as some kind of ‘saleable commodity’. Sure, we can fudge up some kind of monetary ‘valuation’ for any of these: but it would be neither honest, nor real, nor defensible in terms of nature itself.
Another example, if slightly more real, was the attempt some while back to describe nature in terms of ‘ecosystem services’ - provision of oxygen by trees, reduction of soil-erosion by tree-belts, provision of crop-pollination by insects, and so on - and then put a monetary valuation on that. It did sort-of make sense - sort-of, anyway. But the big problem - much like what happened with the earlier ‘Wages for Housework’ campaign - is that that perspective highlighted so much the utter inanities, absurdities and iniquities of the entire money-based system of economics that it was quietly and rather pointedly ignored and then carefully forgotten. Oops…
And that’s the real point, really: the only thing that the money-system is actually good at, and ‘good’ for, is causing enormous non-recoverable damage in the longer term. Oh well.
As writer Jeff Sparrow put it in a comment-piece in the same online-newspaper:
The call to 'put a price on nature' can be appealing but it misunderstands what's at stake.
Yeah, exactly…
So what does work, then?
Short-answer: valuing nature as itself.
Always on its own terms.
Nothing else than that; nothing more than that.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to do so in our current possessionist economics: it will always frame things in terms of possessions, of assets and commodities, of ‘rights of possession’, of price and money and the like. It is literally and inherently incapable of understanding the world in any other way.
Which, for this kind of context, is most definitely Not A Good Idea.
To make it work, we’d need to replace the current possession-economy with a responsibility-based economics, building outward from its core practice of stewardship.
Although, yes, some places would be best left alone, in most other contexts that stewardship would be an active practice, not a passive one. To give a real-world example, the current state of most forests round here in northern Victoria is best described as a time-bomb: tired straggly trees are randomly spaced, often tightly overlapping with each other, and dense, tangled undergrowth and oil-laden tree-litter everywhere that can explode at any time into a devastating firestorm. Yet when the Europeans first arrived here some two hundred years ago, the forests weren’t like that at all: that undergrowth just wasn’t there, instead huge trees so widely-spaced that it was said a horseman could ride at full gallop between them. The difference was that for many, many thousands of years, the Aboriginal communities here had actively stewarded those forests, with care, maintaining a balanced, near-perfect habitat for all of the varied flora and fauna of the region. Yet once those curators had… uh… - let’s just use the euphemism ‘moved on’, shall we? - the forests reverted back to their uncared-for ‘valueless’ state, viewed only as firewood and fire-hazard, nothing more than that. That’s what happens in an imposed possessionist world, when stewardship ends, and everything seen only as an asset to be mined into oblivion, or else abandoned as a worthless ‘anti-possession’, Someone Else’s Problem, until all value and meaning is lost.
Sad.
That’s perhaps the only word that fits there, really. Oh well.
We need to value nature in a better way.
Valuing nature for itself. And as itself.
Responsible for nature. Responsible with nature. Taking care of nature, as its stewards, its curators, onward into time immemorial.
Not least because there’s no separation here: we are that nature too. Valuing nature as itself also helps us learn how to value ourselves as well.
Great article, Tom.
Inspired by the writings of Charles Eisenstein (Sacred Economics, for example), you could summarise the problem of monetary valuation of nature as follows: money is designed for a single purpose only: to extract value from the environment so it can be transferred into someone's possession. The moment you put a monetary value on nature, it becomes framed as something one can extract value from. Even more, because we also have an economy that can only sustain itself by constant growth, at some point that extraction become inevitable. In other words: the moment you put a price on anything, someone will feel compelled to cash in on that price. And that always reduces the original 'value' of the untouched thing.
Hi Tom,
Great topic for your article.
As the "lungs of the planet" we cannot put a price on the ability to breath, as we continue to decimate large tracts of nature to accommodate human expansion and agricultural production, we are really producing an unsustainable balance sheet where the benefits are immensely outweighed by the devastating impact of such activities.
With a multiple year turnaround to replenish natural habitats, will we have enough time at our disposal to ward off climate change events which are being accelaerated by such valuation efforts?