by Feisty Adelie at The Feisty Adelie
In this essay, I describe the current global conservation movement for climate and biodiversity as fundamentally a means of concentrating more wealth, power, and land ownership through the commodification and privatization of nature. The Global Public Private Partnership’s “Nature Positive” strategy centrally depends on assigning financial value to healthy, or intact nature as ecosystem services so that it can be regulated and sold through the market mechanisms they are designing through global governance. I provide detailed examples showing the arbitrary and self-serving nature of pricing ecosystem services, as well as how businesses are starting to profit from selling them. Because the wealthiest people already own a disproportionate amount of nature through concentrated land ownership, they will receive the bulk of profiting from it. I also illustrate how the “Nature Positive” movement includes the interlocking components of “Nature Based Solutions,” “Sustainable Development” and “30 x 30,” the campaign to “preserve” 30% of the earth’s surface. These combined business strategies serve as a license to appropriate land, particularly in the global south, by force in large-scale land grabs. I conclude by arguing that the central problem is not that nature is undervalued in dollars, but rather that it is not universally understood as priceless. We must use this recognition as a foundation for systemic change.
Introduction: The GPPP poses a problem and a solution
It would be difficult to miss the increasing stridence of the global environmental movement over the last decade, especially in the last several years. By “environmental movement,” I mean specifically the actions and advocacy of the Global Public Private Partnership (GPPP) on environmental concerns, as promulgated by the Conventions of the Parties (COP27, etc), the IUCN, foundations, international conservation and other NGOs, and their corporate partners.
The media inundates us on their behalf with desperate pleas for the climate, for biodiversity, for sustainable agriculture – with more and more “asks” from regular people such as to change our diets, own less, wash less, travel less, and go electric. We have also seen increasingly illogical connections drawn between the dire environmental conditions and pathogens, still births, heart disease and just plain old death.
The GPPP of “sustainability” has pushed primarily to halt climate change and more recently, biodiversity loss, or mass extinction with the stated goals of net-zero carbon emissions and a “Nature Positive” world. “Nature Positive” business activities leave the world with more nature than they take, primarily by using “Nature Based Solutions” and preserving 30% of land and oceans by 2030 (or in shorthand, “30 X 30”). Nature based solutions manage ecosystems in a manner that recognizes nature’s contributions to maintaining a habitable planet. For example, maintaining, creating, or restoring habitats (like forests, mangroves, or rivers) or using nature in the built environment (like green roofs) are nature based solutions.
Well, that’s how they talk about it anyway. As we live…
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