{"id":209677,"date":"2022-05-09T12:00:19","date_gmt":"2022-05-09T11:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=209677"},"modified":"2025-01-10T15:06:43","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T15:06:43","slug":"the-defense-of-nature-resisting-the-financializaton-of-the-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/05\/the-defense-of-nature-resisting-the-financializaton-of-the-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"The Defense of Nature: Resisting the Financializaton of the Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Panoramic view from ‘Tower of Heaven’ (Menara Kayangan) on Mount Silam over Darvel Bay, Lahad Datu District, Sabah, Malaysia.
Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link<\/p><\/div>\n

1 Apr 2022 – <\/em>On October 28, 2021, political leaders in the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo signed an agreement with the Singapore shell company Hoch Standard, without the knowledge of Indigenous communities, giving the company title to the management and marketing of \u201cnatural capital\/ecosystem services\u201d on two million hectares of a forest ecosystem for one hundred to two hundred years. Although the full nature of the agreement has not been disclosed, journalistic investigations and a lawsuit filed by Adrian Lasimbang, an Indigenous leader in Malaysian Borneo, have revealed that the Nature Conservation Agreement allowed Hoch Standard\u2014a holding company with two officers and a paid-up capital provided by shareholders of a mere $1,000 U.S. dollars, but backed by undisclosed multibillion dollar private-equity investors\u2014to acquire commercial rights to the natural capital in Sabah\u2019s forest ecosystem. The revenue from the rights to ecosystem services, such as water provisioning, carbon sequestration, sustainable forestry, and biodiversity conservation, over the next century was estimated at some $80 billion, with 30 percent, or $24 billion, to go to Hoch Standard. It was stipulated that the Sabah government could not withdraw from the agreement, while Hoch Standard could sell its rights to the natural capital in the Sabah Forest to other investors without government consent. Singaporean Ho Choon Hou, who allegedly misrepresented himself as director of Hoch Standard (he was not listed among its officers but is said to be Hoch Standard\u2019s project director and strategic funder), is the managing director of the private equity firm Southern Capital Group, which focuses on corporate buyouts. Financial documents revealed that Hoch Standard, as a shell company, lists a single shareholder, Lionsgate Ltd., a company registered in the British Virgin Islands, where, as a tax haven and a financial base for \u201cdark money,\u201d it is illegal to disclose the name of company shareholders.1<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The Natural Conservation Agreement between the Sabah government and Hoch Standard was brokered by the Australian consulting firm Tierra Australia, specializing in the financialization of natural capital. Peter Burgess, CEO of Tierra Australia, has defended the exclusion of Indigenous peoples from the agreement on the neocolonial, racist basis that if it were necessary to \u201csit around every campfire\u201d talking to Indigenous peoples about the \u201cjungles\u201d they happen to live in, nothing at all would be accomplished. According to Burgess, the Indigenous communities\u2014there are thirty-nine Indigenous ethnic groups in the forest reserves in Sabah, making up a population of more than twenty-five thousand\u2014\u201cactually don\u2019t know that their jungles\u2026are going to be conserved for 200 years\u201d by the agreement, which is aimed at \u201crestoring [their] jungles,\u201d providing benefits so as to \u201cuplift\u201d them, \u201cbringing them back into normal society.\u201d Tierra Australia is closely connected to major multinational banks in the capitalist core, such as Credit Suisse and HSBC, along with major Singapore Banks, all of which have been heavily involved in investments in natural capital. It has partnered with Hoch Standard, along with Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cornell, in devising natural capital platforms for private investment.2<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The two chief promoters of the Sabah-Hoch Standard deal were Stan Lassa Golokin, signing for Hoch Standard, and Jeffrey Kitingan, representing the Sabah government. Golokin is a business partner of Burgess at Tierra Australia and is linked to eleven companies registered in the British Virgin Islands. He was listed as an associate of four companies included in the Panama Papers, a leaked database on global elite financial dealings. Kitingan is second deputy chief minister and state agricultural and fisheries minister in Sabah and was a witness to the signing of the agreement by Frederick Kugan, Sabah\u2019s chief conservator of forests. Kitingan has emerged as the main defender of the deal within the Sabah government. In the 1980s and \u201990s, both Kitingan and Golokin were involved in the Sabah Foundation, which was given a century-long concession to a million hectares of forest, to be managed on a sustained yield basis. Kitingan was director of the Sabah Foundation while Golokin was group general manager of a holding company for the Sabah Foundation\u2019s commercial assets. As evidence of the extraordinary corruption at the time, some $1.6 billion in timber rent went missing under their management, while Kitingan\u2019s personal wealth during his nine years as director of the foundation rose suddenly to $1 billion. During the same period, Kitingan\u2019s brother was chief minister of Sabah.3<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

As of February 2022, the Nature Conservation Agreement between the Sabah government and Hoch Standard is in a kind of legal limbo, according to Sabah\u2019s attorney general, since key aspects of the agreement are not binding or enforceable.4<\/sup><\/a> Yet, while the Sabah-Hoch Standard Nature Conservation Agreement is presently on hold, it can be seen as part of the massive \u201cgold rush\u201d to secure rights to the world\u2019s \u201cnatural capital\u201d that is now taking place globally.5<\/sup><\/a> It is no mere accident that the October 28 signing of the Sabah multibillion dollar natural capital deal occurred only a month after the New York Stock Exchange and the Intrinsic Exchange Group announced the creation of a new asset category in the form of Natural Asset Companies, stipulated as financial vehicles for the ownership, management, and control of the world\u2019s natural capital assets.<\/p>\n

Only three days after the Hoch Standard agreement was made, the Glasgow United Nations Conference on climate negotiations began. This coincided with the consolidation and rise to global prominence of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, advertising itself as representing multinational banking and money managements adding up to $130 trillion dollars in financial assets, and led by some of the very same multinational banks, such as Credit Suisse and HSBC, with which Tierra Australia was connected.6<\/sup><\/a> Golokin was present at the Glasgow UN climate negotiations seeking to drum up global finance for the Hoch Standard-Sabah Nature Conservation Agreement, which he claims is designed to draw out the potential of Sabah forest\u2019s \u201clazy assets,\u201d a term referring to ecosystem services not incorporated into the market. Burgess gave a presentation at the International Heart of Borneo Conference in November 2021, aimed at attracting investment in natural capital to Borneo. He depicted Borneo\u2019s natural environment as a prime target for the global movement directed at the \u201cmonetisation of the world\u2019s Natural Capital Assets.\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

It is impossible to exaggerate the extent of this natural-capital rush, now being promoted by global speculative finance, which since the Great Financial Crisis of 2007\u201310 has sought to acquire real assets in the physical environment to underpin continuing debt expansion.8<\/sup><\/a> The transmutation of so-called natural capital into tradable exchange value over the last decade is seen as opening up almost unlimited opportunities for corporations and money managers. In 2012, the Corporate EcoForum, a group of twenty-four multinational corporations including Alcoa, Coca-Cola, Dell, Disney, Dow, Duke Energy, Nike, Unilever, and Weyerhaeuser, published The New Business Imperative: Valuing Natural Capital<\/i> in conjunction with the Nature Conservancy, insisting that the then \u201cestimated $72 trillion of \u2018free\u2019 goods and services\u201d associated with global natural capital and ecosystem services be monetized for the purpose of more sustainable growth.\u201d The report emphasized the enormous debt \u201cleverage\u201d opportunities represented by \u201cemerging natural capital markets such as water-quality trading, wetland banking and threatened species banking, and natural carbon sequestration.\u201d As a result, it was imperative to \u201cput a price on nature\u2019s value,\u201d or, stated differently, \u201ca monetary value on what nature does for\u2026businesses.\u201d The future of the capitalist economy lay in ensuring that the market pay \u201cfor once-free ecosystem services,\u201d which could thereby generate new economic value for those corporations able to convert titles to natural capital into financial assets.9<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In 2016, more than fifty multinationals, led by firms such as Dow, Coca-Cola, Nestle, and Shell, joined with Conservation International in the Natural Capital Coalition (now known as the Capitals Coalition) to develop the Natural Capital Protocol. This was directed at designing a framework for the monetization of the world ecology, using fabricated shadow pricing systems based on the capitalist market system.10<\/sup><\/a> The Natural Capital Protocol was soon accompanied by other initiatives like the Natural Capital Charter, introduced the same year by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.11<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Economist Robert Costanza and his associates valued the world\u2019s \u201cseventeen\u201d ecosystems in 2011 at $145 trillion annually (in 2007 dollars). The net present value of these ecosystem services, discounted at 1 percent over the remainder of this century, is estimated to be worth over $4 quadrillion (4,000 trillion).12<\/sup><\/a> This last figure has been promoted by the Intrinsic Exchange Group as representing a virtually unlimited set of metaphorical gold mines for the taking by natural asset corporations. Economist Wilhelm Buiter of Citigroup expects \u201cto see a globally integrated market for fresh water within 25 to 30 years. Once the spot markets for water are integrated, future markets and other derivative water-based financial instruments\u2026will follow.\u2026 Water as [a natural] asset class will\u2026become eventually the single most important physical-commodity based asset class dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural commodities and precious metals.\u201d In this perspective, the world\u2019s sources of fresh water, representing one of the planetary boundaries designated by natural science, will be monopolized as natural capital by relatively few companies who will be able to charge market rents for the ecosystem services.13<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Plans for the expropriation and accumulation of natural capital by global finance are primarily directed today at the Global South. According to the UN Environment Programme, spatial mapping of natural capital indicates there is \u201ca high concentration of terrestrial ecosystem assets in the equatorial regions, particularly in the Brazilian Amazon and the Congo Basin.\u201d Marine ecosystem assets are highest in Southeast Asia (the South China Sea) and along coastlines.14<\/sup><\/a> Indigenous territories cover some 24 percent of the earth\u2019s land surface and \u201ccontain 80% of the earth\u2019s remaining healthy ecosystems and global biodiversity priority areas,\u201d making these primary targets for expropriation and conversion into marketable natural capital. Sub-Saharan Africa is a target since \u201cit\u2019s estimated that around 90% of land is untitled,\u201d with the result that many Indigenous communities that have lived in these areas for untold years lack official land titles, and their land is therefore open to land grabbing.15<\/sup><\/a> The African Forum on Green Economy, working with the Natural Capital Coalition and the World Wildlife Fund, stated in 2020 that \u201cnatural capital is part of a wider economic system,\u201d implying that Africa\u2019s ecosystems can be completely subsumed within the capitalist economy.16<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The implications of this rapid financialization of nature, which is promoting a Great Expropriation of the global commons and the dispossession of humanity on a scale exceeding all previous human history, are vast. This Great Expropriation is being justified on the grounds of saving nature by turning it into a market, thereby replacing the laws of nature with the laws of commodity value. Yet, not only is the logic behind this fallacious, but it is also likely to widen the associated colossal financial bubbles, while accelerating destruction of planetary ecosystems and of the earth as a safe home for humanity.<\/p>\n

In order to understand the monumental folly of the monetization of the earth, it is necessary to take a theoretical excursion into the classical critique of the \u201cfetish character of capital\u201d and the confusion of real wealth and debt as developed in the work of thinkers such Karl Marx and Frederick Soddy.17<\/sup><\/a> This will allow us to comprehend the necessary conditions for the defense of the earth in the face of the current financialization juggernaut, requiring the greatest alliance of workers, peoples, and movements in the history of humanity.<\/p>\n

The Myth of the Innate Power of Capital: Marx and Soddy<\/h2>\n

In his critique of \u201cthe fetish character of capital,\u201d in the Grundrisse<\/i> and Capital<\/i>, Marx highlighted the views\u2014far exceeding \u201cthe fantasies of the alchemists\u201d\u2014of the late-eighteenth-century British political-economic writer and nonconformist minister Richard Price, a friend of Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley. Price claimed that, through the magic of compound interest, a universe of riches could be obtained. In his 1772 Appeal to the Public on the Subject of Public Debt<\/i>, Price went so far as to state: \u201cONE PENNY, put out at our Saviour\u2019s birth to 5 per cent.<\/i> compound<\/i> interest, would, before this time, have increased to a greater sum, than would be contained in A HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLIONS OF EARTHS, All solid gold.\u201d18<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

For Marx, Price\u2019s \u201c150 millions of earths all solid gold\u201d was a cosmic fantasy of \u201cthe innate power capital,\u201d in which capital becomes \u201ca self-reproducing being\u2026a value perennating and increasing by virtue of an innate quality,\u201d without any reference to real material and historical conditions. \u201cThe good Price was simply dazzled by the enormous quantities resulting from geometrical progression of numbers.\u2026 He regards capital as a self-acting thing, without any regard to the conditions of reproduction or of labour,\u201d or\u2014as Marx was also to insist\u2014the material conditions and limits imposed by the earth itself. With capital thus conceived, in Marx\u2019s words, \u201cas a mere self-increasing number,\u201d Price \u201cwas able to believe that he had found the laws of growth in that formula.\u201d Indeed, for Price, according to Marx, capital was \u201ca self-acting automation,\u201d embodying \u201can innate property as ever persisting and growing value.\u201d How capital accumulation actually occurred, together with its limits and contradictions, were \u201cquite immaterial to him,\u201d since all of this was superseded by \u201cthe innate quality of interest-bearing capital.\u201d Hence, for Price and those he influenced, Marx wrote, \u201cAdam Smith\u2019s theory of accumulation\u201d as the basis of the wealth of nations is turned \u201cinto the enrichment of a nation by accumulation of debts.\u201d It is here that \u201cthe fetish character of capital\u201d is complete.19<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In Marx\u2019s critique of political economy, all human production has a real basis<\/i> in a \u201cmaterial substratum\u2026furnished by nature without human intervention,\u201d while the labor process \u201cmediates the metabolism between man and nature.\u201d20<\/sup><\/a> A commodity has a dual aspect as both a natural-material use value, meeting social needs, and as exchange value, generating surplus value for capitalists. Use values, constituting real wealth, were the product of both nature and human labor. A particular use value \u201cdoes not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity and has no existence apart from the latter.\u201d Human labor itself had a dual character as both a material-biophysical force, transforming natural-material use values through production, and as a generator of exchange value\/value under capitalism. It was the conflict between production of commodities as use values, on the one hand, and exchange value, on the other, that lay at the core of all capitalist contradictions.21<\/sup><\/a> What nature itself provided, apart from labor time, was in the capitalist system a mere \u201cfree gift\u2026to capital\u201d and not incorporated directly in its accounting of value production, where it was treated as a mere externality.22<\/sup><\/a> Nevertheless, the monopolization of elements of scarce land\/nature gave rise to monopoly rents, which were withdrawn from total surplus value feeding the coffers of owners of natural resources.<\/p>\n

Capitalism\u2019s exclusive focus on production for exchange value rather than use value, and its treatment of nature as a free gift, led in Marx\u2019s analysis to the robbing of nature of the elementary constituents of production, and thus the creation of the metabolic rift between nature and society, exemplified by the nineteenth-century soil crisis in which essential soil nutrients were shipped to the new urban centers of industrial production, where they contributed to pollution and were lost to the soil.23<\/sup><\/a> In Marx and Frederick Engels\u2019s political-economic critique, the material conditions of production were integrated with the developing science of thermodynamics of their time, which emphasized the environmental\/energetic limits on production.24<\/sup><\/a> In accordance with ancient Epicurean materialism, nothing came from nothing, and nothing being destroyed was reduced to nothing.25<\/sup><\/a> Marx quoted Pietro Verri\u2019s statement that, \u201cAll the phenomena of the universe, whether produced by the hand of man or indeed the universal laws of physics, are not to be conceived as acts of creation but solely as a reordering of matter.\u201d26<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In neoclassical economics, as it emerged in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, distinct from classical political economy, the concept of natural-material use values was removed from the fundamental framework in economics, leaving only exchange value in the conception of wealth. Land as a factor of production, since it was assumed that human-made capital could substitute for it, was eventually excluded altogether from the neoclassical production function, consisting of simply labor and capital. Hence, all necessary relations of capital to nature were extinguished, together with any conception of material production being dependent on the laws of thermodynamics. The idea that the growth of capital was in any way limited by the natural environment was also eliminated.27<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

All of this fed the myth of the innate power of capital. As ecological economist Herman Daly has written, \u201cPerhaps the standard example of misplaced concreteness [reification] in economics is \u2018money fetishism,\u2019 applying the characteristics of money, the token and measure of wealth, to concrete wealth itself. Thus, if money can grow forever at compound interest, then presumably, so can [real] wealth,\u201d as if there were no physical limitations.28<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The ecological\/energetic critique of the innate power of money, introduced by Marx, was taken still further a century ago by Frederick Soddy, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1921 and a pioneer in ecological economics, beginning with the 1922 publication of his Cartesian Economics: The Bearing of Physical Science upon State Stewardship<\/i>. Soddy was one of the pioneers in the study of radiation, introducing the concept of isotopes.29<\/sup><\/a> He was concerned early on about the destructive potential of harnessing atomic energy, indicating in 1926 in his Wealth, Virtual Wealth, and Debt<\/i>: \u201cIf the discovery [of how to release atomic energy] were made tomorrow, there is not a nation that would not throw itself heart and soul into the task of applying it to war, just as they are now doing in the case of the newly developed chemical weapons of poison-gas warfare.\u2026 If [atomic energy] were to come under existing economic conditions, it would mean the reductio ad absurdum<\/i> of scientific civilization, a swift annihilation instead of a none too lingering collapse.\u201d30<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Soddy saw the capitalist economic system, and particularly the debt economy it fostered, as the greatest danger to world stability. In the early twentieth century, during his most productive period as a chemist in Glasgow, he became acquainted with socialist ideas, principally the Romantic-radical tradition, in which the main sources of inspiration at the time were figures such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Walt Whitman, and William Morris. This was a critical milieu that had been influenced by Morris\u2019s Socialist League and by the development of municipal socialism. The miner\u2019s strike in 1911\u201312 paralyzed British industry and highlighted the dependence of production on fossil fuel energy, with Soddy pointing out at the time that the contemporary economic world found its basis in this particular form of low-entropy matter\/energy.31<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Soddy was associated for a number of years with the Independent Labour Party. In 1918, he joined the newly created National Union of Scientific Workers, through which he became closely acquainted with the zoologist, Marxist, ultra-materialist, and author of An Outline of Psychology<\/i>, Henry Lyster Jameson, with whom Soddy carried out an extensive correspondence.32<\/sup><\/a> In the context of his correspondence with Jameson, Soddy entered into studies of Marx and Ruskin, as well as the work of the late nineteenth-century theorist of banking and credit Henry Dunning Macleod.33<\/sup><\/a> The result of these studies was Cartesian Economics<\/i> (originally two lectures presented to the Student Unions of Birkbeck College and the London School of Economics), in which Soddy challenged the innate power of money. Cartesian Economics<\/i> was published the same year as the presentation of Soddy\u2019s 1922 Nobel Lecture and marked a decisive shift in his work from research in chemistry to the criticism of economics and the role of money emanating from the energetic standpoint of thermodynamics.<\/p>\n

Soddy, like Ruskin, entered the economic discussion as an outsider with only a cursory knowledge of economics itself, coupled with a radical perspective. Hence, his views have generally been ignored by the economics profession. In approaching economics from the standpoint of natural science, he brought back the notion of real wealth as the useful embodiment of matter\/energy, thereby questioning the exchange-value orientation of the capitalist economy. Like Ruskin, he saw wealth as life, or as metabolism, associated with the rational utilization of energy flows, ultimately derived from the sun. Wealth was \u201cthe humanly useful forms of matter and energy.\u201d34<\/sup><\/a> All human production was rooted in energy flows, and it was of this that real wealth was composed.<\/p>\n

In this context, Soddy resurrected the use-value perspective of classical political economy, seeing real wealth as consisting of natural-material use values and distinguishing this from exchange value and mere financial claims to wealth. Via John Stuart Mill, Soddy highlighted the Lauderdale Paradox, named after James Maitland, the eighth Earl of Lauderdale, whereby the destruction of public wealth increased private riches. In illustrating the Lauderdale Paradox, Mill had pointed to the calamity represented by a situation in which clean air became so scarce and monopolizable that it could be turned into a commodity, thereby enhancing private riches at the expense of the community through the monetization of the \u201cfree gifts\u201d of nature.35<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The main error of capitalist economics, for Soddy, was the confusion of real wealth, which was governed by physics, with money\/debt, which was a mathematical quantity. Money itself was primarily to be viewed a lien on future production and thus a debt of the public (the issuer of currency) to the holder of money.36<\/sup><\/a> All \u201cdebts\u201d in a commodity economy, he argued, \u201care subject to the laws of mathematics rather than physics,\u201d and thus are divorced from physical processes and limits. In the case of money\/debt, the entropy law\u2014the tendency of physical systems to greater disorder\u2014did not apply, replaced by the magic of compound interest.37<\/sup><\/a> Real wealth, in contrast, emanated from solar energy and photosynthesis, and was inherently limited and subject to the entropy law\u2014if nonetheless capable of further development in terms of utilization of energy flows. Following Aristotle and Ruskin, Soddy argued that economics as practiced by capitalism had taken the form of chrematistics<\/i> or the mere art of acquisition, rather than oikonomia<\/i>, or household management (from which the words economy<\/i> and ecology<\/i> were derived).38<\/sup><\/a> The economic successes of Britain and the other developed economies, he contended, mainly emanated from the harnessing of fossil fuel energy and exercise of contemporary imperialism, as opposed to the fantasy of the innate power of capital.39<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Soddy highlighted a number of times Marx\u2019s insistence that real wealth in the form of use values was rooted in both nature and material labor (the latter itself a force of nature). If, in Marx\u2019s critique of political economy, as Soddy explained, the exploitation of socially necessary labor power was the sole source of \u201cexchange-value or money-price\u201d under capitalism, this was to be distinguished from real wealth, where nature and labor<\/i> together constituted the fundamental bases\u2014something that many of Marx\u2019s own followers had failed to understand. Marx therefore had underscored the natural-physical basis of wealth.40<\/sup><\/a> Yet, while indicating his admiration at various points for Marx\u2019s analysis and learning from Marxist thinkers such as his friend Jameson, Soddy was himself far from a Marxist. Moreover, by the time he wrote The Role of Money<\/i> in the 1930s, he had moved away altogether from the socialist critique of capitalism and toward schemes for radical monetary reform.41<\/sup><\/a> As distinguished from Marx, Soddy was not at all interested in the social basis of value and capital\u2014partly because, from a physicist\u2019s perspective, he took the view that plants engaged in photosynthesis were the ultimate sources of wealth\u2014but rather in the narrower issue of the conflict between the monetary world and the world of physics.42<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Marx had sharply criticized Macleod for his supposed \u201cdiscovery,\u201d in The Theory and Practice of Banking<\/i>, that \u201ccurrency\u2026is capital,\u201d discounting the question of value.43<\/sup><\/a> Soddy, likewise, was to see Macleod as standing for the fetish of money capital in his advancement of the argument that debt should not be treated as a \u201cnegative\u201d quantity, but rather as a positive economic value in itself. Indeed, for Macleod, \u201cthe great modern discovery is to make the debts themselves saleable commodities\u201d and to build up a whole supreme credit and financial system based on that, which would increasingly rule the capitalist world.44<\/sup><\/a> Banks, in Macleod\u2019s terms, were \u201cshops for the express purpose of buying and selling debts\u201d or for \u201cthe Manufactory of Credit.\u201d45<\/sup><\/a> Macleod\u2019s emphasis on how banks under capitalism internally (or endogenously) created credit money out of nothing, coupled with the explosive character of compound interest divorced from all relations to the physical world, expressed for Soddy the modern money fetish deeply embodied in the capitalist economy, which, in its irrational financial explosion, was imperiling all of existence.46<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Indeed, the extreme fantasies of capital, money, and finance were, in Soddy\u2019s view, pointing the world toward final catastrophe. The illusory pursuit of a perpetual motion machine was propelling the globe toward another world war, as country after country sought unlimited competitive expansion and devil take the hindmost. Moreover, the mythological view that compound interest had a real basis in material reality, in defiance of the entropy law, was generating a set of unstable economic relations that further threatened human self-sufficiency. If economics were not put on a solid, physical basis, the growth of the debt economy would propel humankind to disaster.47<\/sup><\/a> In his 1935 foreword to The Frustration of Science<\/i>, a work whose contributors included leading British left scientists such as J. D. Bernal and Patrick M. S. Blackett, Soddy referred to the loss of productivity of the soil and the general waste in the economy, arguing that society should be ruled by the productive elements of society concerned with \u201cthe creation of its wealth rather than of its debts,\u201d and who retained a connection to the earth. Science \u201cshould speak the truth though the heavens fall.\u201d48<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

As Daly, commenting on Soddy, explains in \u201cCapital, Debt, and Alchemy,\u201d capital, when defined in financial terms, is an expected \u201cperennial net revenue stream\u201d derived from an underlying asset \u201cdivided by the assumed<\/i> rate of interest and multiplied by 100.\u201d It becomes in the current money form the calculation of a \u201cpermanent lien on the future real production of the economy.\u201d Hence, the capitalist growth economy, while continuing to profit in the course of its creative destruction, is ultimately faced with physical limits of an Earth System, which does not, like compound interest, increase exponentially. Real physical wealth emanating from nature and ultimately derived from solar energy is subject to the entropy law and cannot generate endless rapid growth as in the case of \u201csymbolic monetary debt!\u201d The conflict between finance-based economic expansion and the ecological basis of society is thus inevitable.49<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The Financialization of Nature as a New Ecological Regime<\/h2>\n

The year 2009 will be remembered in world history for two globally destabilizing events, each of which represented a major turning point. Not only did 2009 constitute the peak of the Great Financial Crisis, which began in 2007 in the United States, but it also marked the extraordinary failure of the climate negotiations in Copenhagen. Perversely, when the financial explosion that has characterized modern monopoly-finance capital resumed soon after, it was to be coupled with a search for new real asset bases from which to further leverage global finance. This search immediately came to focus on the financialization of ecosystem services, not previously incorporated within the economy, building on global carbon markets and conservation finance, offering as the solution to the global ecological crisis the monetization of earth, constituting a new financialized ecological regime.50<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The concept of natural capital<\/i>, it is well to remember, was introduced in the early nineteenth century, prior to the term capitalism<\/i> itself, in an attempt to defend land and natural resources from the developing logic of industrial capitalism and the dominance of exchange value. In this original context, it was argued that natural capital or the earth\u2019s capital stock<\/i>\u2014a term that arose at the same time\u2014needed to be defended against the artificial capital being generated by the system of cash nexus.51<\/sup><\/a> This usage of the concept of natural capital, as embodying natural-material use values underlying production, persisted into the twentieth century, but in the last three decades has given way to a notion of natural capital in exchange-value terms, and thus a tradable asset that can be internalized within the capitalist economy.52<\/sup><\/a> This is what George Monbiot, in a 2014 talk to the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, termed \u201cthe Natural Capital Agenda: the pricing, valuation, monetisation, financialisation of nature in the name of saving it.\u201d53<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

A turning point in this respect was the initial 1997 article on \u201cThe Value of the World\u2019s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital\u201d by Costanza and his associates, aimed at pricing the planet. This relied on a reductive approach that applied a system of artificially fabricated prices derived from capitalist market relations to significant parts of a given \u201cecosystem service\u201d or function, such as the production of atmospheric oxygen or the synthesis of carbohydrates by plants. Each ecosystem service was then given a single dollar price, followed by the aggregation of all \u201cseventeen\u201d of the world\u2019s ecosystem services.54<\/sup><\/a> Such a system of imposed tradable values is based on treating incommensurable natural processes as commensurable. In such costing of the earth, demand curves are constructed by determining the consumers\u2019 willingness to pay. However, since actual markets for ecosystem services do not exist\u2014that is, they are not commodity products, which are actually bought\u2014consumers\u2019 willingness to pay is imputed by various methods, known as hedonic pricing and contingent valuation. In hedonic pricing, valuation is made by drawing parallels with closely associated marketed services. Thus, in the United States, a category known as wildlife fish user days<\/i> has been utilized to calculate the worth of various species of wildlife in cost-benefit analyses\u2014for example, in determining whether it is economical to eliminate wildlife by constructing a dam. In the wildlife fish user days calculus, the various forms of wildlife are valued by the average amount of money an individual sportsperson is willing to pay in pursuit of particular type of wildlife with the expectation of killing it, thus establishing its value. Similarly, the worth of a particular wilderness area is determined in hedonic pricing by the willingness of consumers to pay for parking to visit it. Contingent valuation, in contrast, takes the form of the creation of hypothetical markets on the basis of which consumers are asked to determine what they would hypothetically pay for a particular environmental service and what compensation they would have to receive for losing it.55<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Based on such studies of inferred consumer preferences, Costanza and his associates apply a \u201cbenefit transfer\u201d (or value transfer) method, extrapolating the imputed value for a particular ecosystem service in one localized context, such as the water purifying role of a particular river system, where consumer preferences have been established, and then extending that to entirely different ecological contexts, in which studies have not taken place. The results are then aggregated to determine the price\/value of the ecosystem service on a planetary basis. This same method is applied to all \u201cseventeen\u201d of the designated global ecosystem services in order to price the planet as a whole.56<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The object of these elaborate exercises is to impute a value to ecosystem services or natural assets that currently lie outside the market. The justification offered for this is that, unless an economic value is placed on nature\u2019s services, they will continue to be treated as a free gift or externality, to be robbed.57<\/sup><\/a> Yet, in the words of heterodox economist Guy Standing, while it is claimed that \u201cunless a price is placed on every bit of nature, it will not be treated as having value,\u201d it is nonetheless true that \u201ca price only comes when something is for sale, when it becomes a commodity.\u201d The UK government is now arguing that landowners by virtue of simply owning and monopolizing land are \u201cproviders of ecosystem services\u201d who deserve to be paid financial compensation for offering these \u201cservices\u201d associated with the land, previously viewed as free gifts of nature, such as ecosystem services of water purification, pollination of crops, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration.58<\/sup><\/a> (Of course, in many situations, especially on conventional farms, current practices commonly generate ecosystem \u201cdisservices\u201d such as water pollution and loss of biodiversity.) The monetization of the environment thus allows for an enormous expansion of the circuit of exchange value and monopoly rent in the name of ecological sustainability. In Monbiot\u2019s words, it means that \u201cyou are effectively pushing the natural world even further into the system that is eating it alive.\u2026 All the things which have been so damaging to the living planet are now being sold us as its salvation; commodification, economic growth, financialisation, abstraction. Now, we are told, these devastating processes will protect it.\u201d59<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The laws of motion of capital are governed by the accumulation process. To monetize the environment is ultimately to draw it into the market and to subject it to the uncontrollable dynamic of accumulation, for which a rational, sustainable relation to the environment is by definition impossible. For example, according to the standard principles of forest management under capitalism, a forest consists of so many millions of board feet of standing timber. Such timber services, according to the market rule, should be \u201charvested\u201d whenever the interest rate exceeds the rate of growth in value of timber, determined by the natural growth rate of the trees. Since an old growth forest, in which trees are sometimes a century or more old, means that the growth rate of the mature trees is much reduced, falling below the rate of interest, the market demands that such old growth be liquidated on the spot, to be replaced by younger, faster growing trees. These are to be harvested within twenty to thirty years, with chemicals increasingly applied during the processing of the wood into lumber in order to make up for the lower quality.60<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In general, the monetization of the earth\u2019s complex biological-physical-chemical web, even in the name of conservation, will tend to replace systems of natural reproduction and evolution with reductionist, market-based criteria, for which profitable expansion is the goal. Following market rules, ecosystem services are analytically embedded within commodity markets dominated by a given accumulation of private riches. Yet, this goes against the sustainable requirements of ecosystems, and indeed the Earth System. In the process of being capitalized, the global commons will be cut up and monopolized by a few private interests, who will turn them into revenue streams to be bundled together as financial assets, including various kinds of derivatives.<\/p>\n

Where actual conservation of natural assets is concerned, a \u201cblended\u201d financial arrangement is typically adopted in which governments take on most of the costs, owning and investing in the forests, and private firms reap the benefits, receiving a disproportionate share of the resulting revenue. Today, alternative sources of finance like carbon credits and debt financing, piled onto the already excessive debt loads of developing countries, are making investments in forests, tradable on the market, more profitable for international capital. In the voluntary carbon market, carbon credits, offered for already standing forests (taken from Indigenous inhabitants) can be purchased or financially managed so as to supposedly constitute offsets for carbon emissions elsewhere in the global economy, thereby making real emission reductions unnecessary, within a net-zero scheme. Carbon credits can be received by simply liquidating a natural capital asset less rapidly than would supposedly have been the case otherwise, relying on fabricated baselines.61<\/sup><\/a> However, some of the problems associated with using carbon offsets\u2014aside from not actually requiring polluters to reduce their level of pollution\u2014can be seen in those cases where the very forests that were traded as offsets for emissions elsewhere have already burned up in the massive global forest fires induced by climate change, thus increasing carbon dioxide emissions.62<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In 2012, the UK Ecosystems Market Task Force referred to the need for \u201charnessing City financial expertise to assess the ways these blended revenue streams and securitisations [of natural capital assets] enhance the return on investment of an environmental bond.\u201d63<\/sup><\/a> Commenting on this and on the overall logic of the Natural Capital Agenda, Monbiot wrote:<\/p>\n

What we are talking about is giving the natural world to the City of London, the financial centre, to look after. What could possibly go wrong? Here we have a sector whose wealth is built on the creation of debt. That\u2019s how it works, on stacking up future liabilities. Shafting the future in order to serve the present: that is the model. And then that debt is sliced up into collateralised debt obligations and all the other marvelous devices that worked so well last time around. Now nature is to be captured and placed in the care of the financial sector.\u2026 The same Task force says we need to \u201cunbundle\u201d ecosystem services [from the rest of the Earth System] so they can be individually traded.64<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Once unbundled from the rest of nature, these ecosystem services can then be rebundled as financial assets to promote financial gains. In today\u2019s carbon market, focusing on offsets, financial interests purchase credits in large numbers from suppliers so as to \u201cbundle\u201d them, combining various tranches of derivatives and gathering these together in portfolios, consisting of carbon and offsets associated with widely different forms of natural capital.65<\/sup><\/a> The financialization of biodiversity within conservation finance now involves mechanisms for \u201cstacking and bundling,\u201d referring to the \u201cdifferent ways of packaging multiple ecosystem goods and services including biodiversity for sale in environmental compensation schemes or to attract [monetized] incentive-based conservation funding.\u201d66<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

As indicated in Credit Suisse\u2019s 2016 report, Levering Ecosystems<\/i>, conservation finance is becoming increasingly reliant on debt financing, based on expectations of rapidly growing revenue from natural capital.67<\/sup><\/a> Such approaches rely, in the first place, on the notion of the \u201cinnate power of capital\u201d (what Marx called \u201cthe fetish character of capital\u201d), coupled with a recognition of the increasing scarcity of natural capital, allowing for the widening of the circuit of exchange value to all ecosystem services. The financial goal in these circumstances is to \u201cmonetise ecological credits,\u201d generating a \u201cblended return\u201d from natural capital management \u201cthat can be astronomical.\u201d68<\/sup><\/a> The ultimate result, however, is to impose a system geared to economic growth and debt expansion on top of natural systems, which are physically limited, and where the crucial conditions are those of reproduction and sustainability. For Burgess of Tierra Australia, in a paper on capitalizing the world\u2019s ecosystems, beginning with the natural capital of Indigenous populations in Australia and Malaysia\u2019s Sabah state in Borneo, the monetization of the world\u2019s ecosystem services can underwrite a whole new global financial system, providing through \u201cits productive value\u2026the underlying asset for a stable universal medium of exchange.\u201d69<\/sup><\/a> In reality, what is meant is the leveraging up of the credit\/debt system worldwide through the financialization of the earth, with the expropriation of Indigenous lands as its basis.<\/p>\n

The negative consequences to be expected from extending the capital fetish to nature as a whole are planetary in scale. According to one critical study by ecological economists,<\/p>\n

High-debt dependent production systems exert negative effects on the capacity of the economic system to enhance the sustainable use of natural resource stocks.\u2026 The model of debt-fuelled growth requires ever-faster growth rates to allow the repayment of the ever-increasing debt.\u2026 Thus, the profit-seeking behavior of firms and speculative agents\u2026drives the inappropriate use of credits (debt), which consequently brings about systemic instability.\u2026 Debt-bearing economic systems can result in a complete collapse of both natural and economic systems.70<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As John Maynard Keynes observed in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money<\/i> in 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression: \u201cSpeculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation.\u201d71<\/sup><\/a> Today, this has become more serious still, at a time when the \u201centerprise\u201d that is being turned into a \u201cbubble on a whirlpool of speculation\u201d is the metabolism of the Earth System itself.<\/p>\n

The first published estimates of the global value of natural capital\/ecosystem services led to a celebration in financial circles of this new \u201casset class\u201d and the huge market it portended, consisting of hundreds, if not thousands of trillions of dollars, now potentially open to expropriation and exploitation by capital. In this view, the pricing of the planet had resulted in a huge increase in global wealth. Yet, operating on the principle of thinkers such as Marx, Ruskin, Soddy, and Daly, in which real wealth consists of natural-material use values, and indeed the earth itself, what was being measured in the pricing of ecosystem services was not real wealth, but rather the increased drain on the world\u2019s resources, their growing scarcity.72<\/sup><\/a> Based on this, the realm of commodity exchange was being enhanced\u2014not for purposes of conservation, but as a further basis of capital accumulation, representing the acceleration of processes that had created metabolic rifts in nature\u2019s ecosystem processes in the first place. The trajectory, at present, unless stopped through global collective action, is toward a world of widening catastrophe capitalism<\/i> marked by interconnected financial and ecological crises, based on the myth that nature can be transformed into a new speculative asset class.<\/p>\n

Ecological Capital and the Environmental Proletariat<\/h2>\n

Beginning with The Poverty of Philosophy<\/i> in 1846, Marx\u2014who like other social and radical critics had at first referred to \u201cnatural capital\u201d in use-value terms, counterpoising this to exchange value and artificial human-made capital\u2014was to abandon this approach since it tended to naturalize capital itself. Instead, he drew a distinction between earth matter<\/i>, that is, material existence, and earth capital<\/i>; between natural-material conditions and processes and the capitalization of the earth. Nature, or earth matter, was eternal (in the sense of the first and second laws of thermodynamics), while earth capital was not.73<\/sup><\/a> The creation of earth capital, as a distinct social form, required the creation of private-property titles, and thus original expropriation of the land\/earth, transforming what was previously the commons into a realm of private commodity value.74<\/sup><\/a> Monopolization of the land gave rise to a system of rents, imposed by the landlords on society as a whole, paid out of the total surplus product.<\/p>\n

Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that \u201cnature is inexhaustibly significant,\u201d since as material beings, we must return to it again in every action we take. Historical materialists have traditionally referred to the \u201cindissoluble unity\u201d of humanity with the \u201cuniversal metabolism of nature.\u201d75<\/sup><\/a> Today, however, nature is alienated along with labor, forming the basis of the capitalist system of exploitation. The concept of natural capital as it is now employed today is nothing other than an attempt to extend this alienation to nature and humanity as a whole, monetizing ecosystem services so as to generate a new financial ecological regime: a social and historical relation in which the entire earth is for sale. For Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, capitalism cannot be said to exist unless it is \u201cnatural capitalism\u201d bringing the entirety of nature within its logic.76<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The playing out of the logic of the expropriation of the earth can be seen in the attempts of neoclassical environmental economist Edward Barbier to promote the idea that ecosystems, extending to the Earth System itself, are nothing but capital, conceived in exchange-value terms. All of existence is thus capital. \u201cIf ecosystems are\u2026considered capital assets,\u201d then they are by definition, he tells us, \u201cecological capital\u201d to be conceived in exchange-value terms. Ecological capital as a whole thus stands for the totality of the world\u2019s ecosystems, seen as constituting mere \u201cforms of capital.\u201d All ecological problems for Barbier have a single solution: \u201ccapitalizing on nature.\u201d77<\/sup><\/a> In this view, nature, the earth, the basis of all life and existence, presumably stretching to the universe itself, is capital, measured in money. This dwarfs even Price\u2019s notion of compound interest leading to wealth equal to \u201c150 millions of earths all solid gold,\u201d since Price was referring to a mathematical process of compound interest\u2014not to the notion that the earth itself and the universe was nothing but solid capital<\/i>.78<\/sup><\/a> Here, we see the capital fetish highlighted by Marx and Soddy in its most extreme form. Not only is capital seen as an innate power; it has now, in the fantasies of contemporary economists, effectively replaced matter itself, generating what Marx called a \u201ccosmic confusion.\u201d79<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The historical reality of capital as a system of social relations<\/i> is hidden behind this fetishized notion of natural capital as an innate power with a potential cash value, stemming from the earth itself, even replacing the earth\/nature\/matter as the most fundamental element of existence. The monetization and financialization of the earth\u2019s ecosystems, re-envisioned as \u201cecological capital\u201d without limit, is at the same time a Great Expropriation, leading to a wider environmental proletariat (and ecological peasantry).80<\/sup><\/a> The system of original expropriation, which was the basis of the creation of the industrial proletariat and the modern system of labor exploitation, has metamorphosed into a planetary juggernaut, a robbery system<\/i> encompassing the entire earth, leading to a more universal dispossession and destruction.81<\/sup><\/a> The result is the creation of a global environmental reserve army of the dispossessed<\/i>, the product of capital\u2019s drive to monopolize the biogeochemical processes of the planet, at the expense of humanity as a whole.82<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The effects of this rift in the earth\u2019s metabolism, and in humanity\u2019s social metabolism with the earth, are to be seen everywhere, including in the most developed capitalist states, as witnessed by carbon markets and water privatization. Yet, the onslaught on nature\/natural capital today is principally directed at the Global South where the financial gains from the expropriation of the earth in the name of the management of natural capital and offsets are the greatest. And it is here too that an increasingly dispossessed environmental proletariat is most in evidence. Everywhere, the class struggle of production is converging with class-based environmental justice struggles over food, air, water, and the conditions of social and ecological reproduction.<\/p>\n

The global resistance of Indigenous communities, together with peasant subsistence producers, to increasing land grabs associated with the accelerating capitalization of nature is one of the most important developments of our time. In the case of the attempt of Hoch Standard and the Sabah government to seize the natural capital of Malaysia\u2019s Borneo forests, it is the Indigenous communities, threatened with expropriation and removal, who are at the forefront of the ecological and cultural resistance movement, defending the indissoluble unity with nature. This struggle is occurring on all three continents of the Global South, and in regions of the Global North, an indication of how close the ties are between neocolonialism and the natural capital juggernaut. In Kenya, for example, members of the Sengwer community\u2014who over the last decade and a half have faced forced mass evictions at gunpoint and the burning down and destruction of their villages by the Kenyan Forest Service in alignment with international capital\u2014are waging a struggle to defend the forest and water towers (rainfall in mountains and highlands that becomes water sources for lowland irrigation and human consumption).<\/p>\n

Many African states inherited a dual land system from the earlier colonial era, which has continued in the postcolonial period. In Zambia, for instance, 94 percent of the land, until early this century, was held on the basis of customary rights, while all land was also formally held by the state. Now, with corporate induced land grabs, frequently supported by governments, Indigenous and peasant communities are having their lands seized by large private, foreign-based interests. In Zambia, peasants have been fighting a battle against the financial expropriation of their land by Agrivision Africa, which has as one of its investors the World Bank\u2019s International Finance Corporation.83<\/sup><\/a> Some countries, such as Ghana and Botswana, have promoted laws that give customarily held lands the legal clout of private property.84<\/sup><\/a> But in most of sub-Saharan Africa, Indigenous land rights are tenuous in private property terms. Given growing scarcity of resources and the incessant drive for natural capital, Indigenous and smallholders are fighting to defend their lives, communities, and lands. In this context, the fact that such populations are generally the best stewards of the earth are frequently shunted aside by corporations in the drive for turning nature into gold.<\/p>\n

A key basis for resistance to natural-capital colonialism is agroecology, presented as a more rational ecological alternative. La Via Campesina initiated its Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform in 1999.85<\/sup><\/a> The Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil has also played a leading role in fighting against the capitalization of nature. In the words of Jo\u00e3o Pedro Stedile, the national coordinator of the MST, \u201cWhen you set up a car factory, you expect to obtain a 13% per year profit. When you take control of a natural resource and turn it into a product, like water, for example, you have profits of over 700%. That\u2019s what they are after.\u201d86<\/sup><\/a> India\u2019s massive farmers\u2019 movement in 2020\u201321 represented an enormous mobilization of small farmers against the growing agribusiness domination of Indian agriculture, and the attempts to turn the earth and food into capital.87<\/sup><\/a> In the United States, the massive 2020 solidarity\/George Floyd protests emanating largely from the working class and youth in support of a Black-led movement can be seen an indication of the level of resistance to racial capitalism only waiting to burst out as material conditions, particularly in urban built environments, polarize.<\/p>\n

In all of these struggles and numerous others, the goal is ultimately one of sustainable human development, necessarily coupled with resistance to capitalism, racism, colonialism, imperialism, and ecological devastation. Within this wider collective perspective, in agreement with natural science, human production is properly viewed as complementary<\/i> with natural-material systems and cannot be reduced to a universal system of commodity value\u2014based on the fallacious notion that all of existence is commensurate with and can be measured in terms of money. The goals governing the struggle for a viable future are necessarily those of substantive equality and ecological sustainability, together defining socialism in our time. Scientific and human development criteria are complementary elements in creating an integrated path to an ecological future. Behind this lies the recognition that an exploitative system that puts its faith in \u201cthe fetish character of capital\u201d at the expense of all human existence and life on the planet can only lead, if not checked, to ultimate catastrophe.<\/p>\n

As the Red Nation declared in The Red Deal<\/i>, it is the philosophy of money<\/i> that drives contemporary society and \u201cits primary method of relationality is destruction. There is another word for a money-driven system that expresses its existence through destruction: capitalism. Capitalism destroys life. It pollutes the rivers. It scars mountains. It starves moose, wolves, and salmon. It alienates our bonds with each other and with the Earth. Its very existence demands our disappearance.\u201d The only response to such a destructive system raised to a planetary level is a universal struggle for nature and humanity, demanding a peoples\u2019 sovereignty of the earth and of production. \u201cThe global ecological revolution still to come\u201d means \u201creturning to our humanity and our origins as good relatives\u201d of the earth. It means rationally regulating the metabolism of human society with the universal nature of which we are inextricably a part.88<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Notes<\/h2>\n
    \n
  1. \u21a9<\/a> John C. Cannon, \u201cIndigenous Leader Sues Over Borneo Natural Capital Deal,\u201d Mongabay<\/cite>, December 17, 2021; John C. Cannon, \u201cMalaysian Officials Dampen Prospects for Giant Secret Carbon Deal in Sabah,\u201d Mongabay<\/cite>, February 10, 2022; Chris Lang, \u201cSabah\u2019s Nature Conservation Agreement: A Two Million Hectare Carbon Deal Involving a Fake Director, an Inequitable Agreement, a History of Destructive Logging, Massive Corruption, a Series of Offshore Companies, and a Sprinkling of Neocolonial Racism,\u201d REDD-Monitor, December 5, 2021; \u201c\u2018Very Hush-Hush\u2019: Borneo\u2019s $80bn Carbon Deal Stokes Controversy,\u201d Al Jazeera<\/cite>, February 2, 2022; Jason Santos, \u201cNot Just US$1000: Hoch Standard Clarifies Involvement with Sabah NCA,\u201d The Vibes<\/cite>, February 6, 2022.<\/li>\n
  2. \u21a9<\/a> John C. Cannon, \u201cBornean Community Locked into 2 Million Hectare Deal They Don\u2019t Know About,\u201d Mongabay<\/cite>, November 9, 2021; Lang, \u201cSabah\u2019s Nature Conservation Agreement\u201d; \u201c\u2018Very Hush-Hush.\u2019\u201d<\/li>\n
  3. \u21a9<\/a> Chris Lang, \u201cWhistleblower on Sabah\u2019s Nature Conservation Agreement: \u2018An Obvious Con,\u2019\u201d REDD-Monitor, February 7, 2022; \u201c\u2018Very Hush-Hush.\u2019\u201d<\/li>\n
  4. \u21a9<\/a> Cannon, \u201cMalaysian Officials Dampen Prospects for Giant Secret Carbon Deal in Sabah\u201d; Lang, \u201cWhistleblower on Sabah\u2019s Nature Conservation Agreement.\u201d<\/li>\n
  5. \u21a9<\/a> As Herman Daly notes, \u201cthe term \u2018natural capital\u2019 was introduced in opposition to \u2018financial capital,\u2019 not as an extension of it, or advocacy for \u2018monetizing nature.\u2019\u201d Herman Daly, \u201cContribution to GTI Roundtable \u201cMonetizing Nature<\/a>,\u2019\u201d Great Transition Initiative, August 2014. For a historically based critique of the concept of natural capital<\/cite>, see John Bellamy Foster, \u201cNature as a Mode of Accumulation<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Review<\/cite> 73, no. 10 (March 2022): 1\u201324.<\/li>\n
  6. \u21a9<\/a> Jill Baker, \u201cMark Carney\u2019s Ambitious $130 Trillion Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net-Zero,\u201d Forbes<\/cite>, November 8, 2021.<\/li>\n
  7. \u21a9<\/a> Lang, \u201cWhistleblower on Sabah\u2019s Nature Conservation Agreement\u201d; Santos, \u201cNot Just US$1000.\u201d<\/li>\n
  8. \u21a9<\/a> \u201cThe Growing Case for Conservation Finance,\u201d Environmental Finance<\/cite>, April 6, 2017; World Rainforest Movement, \u201cGrowing Speculation: From the Appropriation and Commodification to the Financialization of Nature<\/a>,\u201d Monthly Bulletin<\/cite> 181, August 30, 2012; Philip Seufert, Roman Herre, Sofia Monsalva, and Shalmali Guttal, eds., Rogue Capitalism and the Financialization of Territories and Nature<\/cite><\/a> (Fian International, Transnational Institute, and Focus on the Global South, 2020). On the Great Financial Crisis, see John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009). On the failure of the 2009 climate negotiations in Copenhagen, see Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything<\/cite> (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 8\u201315.<\/li>\n
  9. \u21a9<\/a> Corporate Eco Forum and the Nature Conservancy, The New Business Imperative: Valuing Natural Capital<\/cite> (Corporate Eco Forum, the Nature Conservancy, 2012).<\/li>\n
  10. \u21a9<\/a> \u201cValuing Natural Capital: Accounting for the Benefits that Nature Provides,\u201d Conservation International, accessed February 16, 2022.<\/li>\n
  11. \u21a9<\/a> Sian Sullivan, \u201cNature Is Being Renamed \u2018Natural Capital\u2019\u2014But Is It Really the Planet That Will Profit?\u201d Conversation<\/cite>, September 13, 2016.<\/li>\n
  12. \u21a9<\/a> Robert Costanza et al., \u201cChanges in the Global Value of Ecosystem Services,\u201d Global Environmental Change<\/cite> 26 (2014): 152\u201358; Robert Costanza, Ida Kubiszewski, Natalie Stoekl, and Tom Kompas, \u201cPluralistic Discounting Recognizing Different Capital Contributions: An Example Estimating the Net Present Value of Global Ecosystem Services,\u201d Ecological Economics<\/cite> 183 (2021): 1\u20138.<\/li>\n
  13. \u21a9<\/a> World Rainforest Movement, \u201cGrowing Speculation.\u201d<\/li>\n
  14. \u21a9<\/a> Barney Dickson et al., Towards a Global Map of Natural Capital: Key Ecosystem Assets<\/cite> (Cambridge: UN Environment Programme, 2014), 30\u201331.<\/li>\n
  15. \u21a9<\/a> Dario Kenner, Who Should Value Nature? Sustainable Business Initiative\u2014Outside Insights<\/cite> (London: Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, 2014), 9, 12; Mark Bowman, \u201cLand Rights, Not Land Grabs, Can Help Africa Feed Itself,\u201d CNN, June 18, 2013.<\/li>\n
  16. \u21a9<\/a> African Forum on Green Economy, \u201cInvesting in Natural Capital for a Resilient Africa: 2020 Event Summary,\u201d Natural Capital Coalition, June 3, 2020.<\/li>\n
  17. \u21a9<\/a> Karl Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 516.<\/li>\n
  18. \u21a9<\/a> Richard Price, An Appeal to the Public on the Subject of the National Debt<\/cite> (London: T. Cadell, 1772), 18\u201319.<\/li>\n
  19. \u21a9<\/a> Karl Marx, Grundrisse<\/cite> (London: Penguin, 1973), 375, 842\u201343; Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 3, 516, 519\u201324; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works<\/cite> (New York: International Publishers, 1975), vol. 15, 512. It was Price\u2019s perspective, Marx argued, that led William Pitt the Younger, prime minister of Great Britain from 1804 to 1806, to establish his famous sinking fund to pay off the national debt, in which he \u201ctransformed Adam Smith\u2019s theory of accumulation into the enrichment of a nation by the accumulation of debts.\u201d Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 3, 521.<\/li>\n
  20. \u21a9<\/a> Karl Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 133.<\/li>\n
  21. \u21a9<\/a> Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 1, 126, 131\u201332; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence<\/cite> (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 180; Elmar Altvater, The Future of the Market<\/cite> (London: Verso, 1993), 189\u201390.<\/li>\n
  22. \u21a9<\/a> Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 37, 732\u201333.<\/li>\n
  23. \u21a9<\/a> On the metabolic rift, see John Bellamy Foster, Marx\u2019s Ecology<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 141\u201377; Kohei Saito, Karl Marx\u2019s Ecosocialism<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017); John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 12\u201334.<\/li>\n
  24. \u21a9<\/a> On Marx and thermodynamics, see John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, Marx and the Earth<\/cite> (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016), 137\u201364.<\/li>\n
  25. \u21a9<\/a> Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe<\/cite> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 7\u20139 (I.145\u2013220).<\/li>\n
  26. \u21a9<\/a> Capital<\/cite>, vol. 1, 133.<\/li>\n
  27. \u21a9<\/a> John Ryan-Collins, \u201cHow Land Disappeared from Economic Theory,\u201d Evonomics<\/cite>, April 4, 2017; Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process<\/cite> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 2\u20133. Georgescu-Roegen\u2019s notion that Marx too fell prey to the same fallacy confused Marx\u2019s depiction of the laws of motion of capital in his critique of political economy, with his wider critique<\/cite>, devoted to the limitations of those laws of motion.<\/li>\n
  28. \u21a9<\/a> Herman Daly, \u201cThe Circular Flow of Exchange Value and the Linear Throughput of Matter-Energy,\u201d Review of Social Economy<\/cite> 43, no. 3 (1985): 282.<\/li>\n
  29. \u21a9<\/a> \u201cFrederick Soddy Facts: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1921<\/a>,\u201d Nobel Prize, accessed February 28, 2022.<\/li>\n
  30. \u21a9<\/a> Soddy quoted in Herman Daly, Beyond Growth<\/cite> (Boston: Beacon, 1996), 174.<\/li>\n
  31. \u21a9<\/a> Linda Merricks, The World Made New: Frederick Soddy, Science, Politics, and Environment<\/cite> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 54\u201355.<\/li>\n
  32. \u21a9<\/a> Merricks, The World Made New<\/cite>, 53\u201354, 78, 86\u201388; Frederick Soddy, Cartesian Economics: The Bearing of Physical Science upon State Stewardship<\/cite> (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2012), 43; John W. Evans, President, H. Lyster Jameson, Member of the Executive, A.G. Church, Secretary, National Union of Scientific Workers, \u201cThe British Association,\u201d Nature<\/cite> 106, no. 2664 (November 18, 1920), 373; H. Lyster Jameson, An Outline of Psychology<\/cite> (N.C.L.C. Publishing Society, 1938); Stephen A. Craven, \u201cHenry Paul William Lyster Jameson, MA, DSc, PhD (1875\u20131922)\u2014a Polymath: Zoologist, Transvaal Educationist, Entrepreneur, Civil Servant and Marxist,\u201d Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa<\/cite> 67, no. 3 (2022): 127\u201334. (Note: Article is incorrectly dated 2012).<\/li>\n
  33. \u21a9<\/a> Merricks, The World Made New<\/cite>, 115<\/li>\n
  34. \u21a9<\/a> Soddy quoted in Daly, Beyond Growth<\/cite>, 177; John Ruskin, Unto This Last\/The Political Economy of Art\/Essays on Political Economy<\/cite> (New York: Dutton, 1968), 171, 185, 189\u201390, 216. For a treatment of Ruskin\u2019s ecological views, see John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 75\u201380.<\/li>\n
  35. \u21a9<\/a> Frederick Soddy, Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt<\/cite> (1933; repr. Ground Floor, Ireland, 2021), 88; John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Political Economy<\/cite> (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1920), 4, 6. On the Lauderdale Paradox, see Foster and Clark, The Robbery of Nature<\/cite>, 152\u201372.<\/li>\n
  36. \u21a9<\/a> Money is defined by Keynes as \u201cthat by delivery of which debt contracts and price contracts are discharged<\/cite>, and in the shape of which a store of general purchasing power is held<\/cite>.\u201d It \u201cderives its character from its relationship to the money of account\u201d brought \u201cinto existence along with debts, which are contracts for deferred payment.\u2026 Money proper in the full sense of the term can only exist in relation to a money of account.\u201d Money and debt are therefore inextricably connected, with debt increasingly playing the determining role. John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Money<\/cite>, in Collected Writings<\/cite>, vol. 5 (London: Macmillan, 1971), 3\u20134.<\/li>\n
  37. \u21a9<\/a> Soddy, Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt<\/cite>, 94.<\/li>\n
  38. \u21a9<\/a> Soddy, Cartesian Economics<\/cite>, 24, 34; Soddy, Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt<\/cite>, 117.<\/li>\n
  39. \u21a9<\/a> Soddy, Cartesian Economics<\/cite>, 12. Soddy\u2019s position on imperialism, though seemingly related to a left critique, was left undeveloped. In one sentence in Cartesian Economics<\/cite>, he identified finance and usury categorically with \u201cJews,\u201d reflecting a reactionary, anti-Semitic strain in his thought, though this was seldom in evidence. Soddy, Cartesian Economics, 31.<\/li>\n
  40. \u21a9<\/a> Soddy, Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt<\/cite>, 97, 121.<\/li>\n
  41. \u21a9<\/a> Frederick Soddy, The Role of Money<\/cite> (London: Routledge, 2003).<\/li>\n
  42. \u21a9<\/a> Soddy, Wealth, Virtual Wealth, and Debt<\/cite>, 58.<\/li>\n
  43. \u21a9<\/a> Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 1, 255; Karl Marx, A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy<\/cite> (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 143; Marx and Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 42, 543.<\/li>\n
  44. \u21a9<\/a> Henry Dunning Macleod, The Theory and Practice of Banking<\/cite> (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1866), 73, 91.<\/li>\n
  45. \u21a9<\/a> Macleod, The Theory and Practice of Banking<\/cite>, 19\u201320; Henry Dunning Macleod, The Theory of Credit<\/cite>, vol. 2, part 1 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894), 594.<\/li>\n
  46. \u21a9<\/a> Soddy, Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt<\/cite>, 97\u2013100; Ansel Renner, Herman Daly, and Kozo Mayumi, \u201cThe Dual Nature of Money: Why Money Systems Matter for an Equitable Bioeconomy,\u201d Environmental Economics and Policy Studies<\/cite> (2021): 1\u201312; Kozo Mayumi, Sustainable Energy and Economics in an Aging Population<\/cite> (Springer, 2020), 118. There are three major theories on the question of whether banks can create money: (1) the credit creation theory of banking, (2) the fractional reserve theory of banking, and (3) the financial intermediation theory of banking. Macleod was the foremost nineteenth-century representative of the credit creation theory of banking by individual banks, or the endogenous theory of money later made famous in Joseph Schumpeter\u2019s The Theory of Economic Development<\/cite>. The later fractional reserve theory of banking suggested that banks created money not individually through provision of credit, but rather systematically, through the fractional reserve system. The financial intermediation theory of banking, dominant in neoclassical thought but challenged by heterodox thinkers, claims that banks are mere intermediaries like other financial institutions and do not create money, which is exogenous rather than endogenous. Richard A. Werner, \u201cCan Banks Individually Create Money Out of Nothing? The Theories and the Empirical Evidence,\u201d International Review of Financial Analysis<\/cite> 36 (2014): 1\u201319; The Theory of Economic Development<\/cite> (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1934), 97. See also Schumpeter, A History of Economic Analysis<\/cite> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 1115\u201316. For Soddy, there was no question as to the endogenous creation of money, which lay behind capitalism\u2019s financial excesses. Marx too challenged the orthodox quantity theory of money and suggested that credit money was created endogenously. See Costas Lapavitsas, Marxist Monetary Theory<\/cite> (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016). Keynes advanced the credit creation theory of money as early as 1924 in his Tract on Monetary Reform<\/cite>. See Werner, \u201cCan Banks Individually Create Money Out of Nothing?,\u201d 18.<\/li>\n
  47. \u21a9<\/a> Frederick Soddy, Money versus Man<\/cite> (London: Elkin Matthews and Marrot, 1931), 15; Daly, Beyond Growth<\/cite>, 187.<\/li>\n
  48. \u21a9<\/a> Frederick Soddy, foreword to The Frustration of Science<\/cite> (New York: W. W. Norton, 1935), 7\u20139.<\/li>\n
  49. \u21a9<\/a> Herman Daly, \u201cCapital, Debt, and Alchemy,\u201d Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, April 9, 2012.<\/li>\n
  50. \u21a9<\/a> On the financialization of nature as a response to the Great Financial Crisis and the search for real assets in nature as a basis for the further expansion of the debt economy, see Jenny Simon and Anne Tittor, \u201cThe Financialization of Food, Land, and Nature,\u201d Journal f\u00fcr Entwicklungspolitik<\/cite> 33, no. 2 (2014): 16\u201345; \u201cThe Growing Case for Conservation Finance,\u201d Environmental Finance<\/cite>, April 6, 2017.<\/li>\n
  51. \u21a9<\/a> See Foster, \u201cNature as a Mode of Accumulation,\u201d 2\u20137.<\/li>\n
  52. \u21a9<\/a> The notion that the natural environment, as the commons, in property terms, needs to be internalized within the capitalist economy has its modern expression in Garrett Hardin, \u201cThe Tragedy of the Commons,\u201d Science<\/cite> 162, no. 3859 (1968): 1243\u201348. For a critique, see Stefano Longo, Rebecca Clausen, and Brett Clark, The Tragedy of the Commodity: Oceans, Fisheries, and Aquaculture<\/cite> (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 27\u201338.<\/li>\n
  53. \u21a9<\/a> George Monbiot, \u201cPut a Price on Nature? We Must Stop This Neoliberal Road to Ruin,\u201d Guardian<\/cite>, July 24, 2014.<\/li>\n
  54. \u21a9<\/a> Robert Costanza et al., \u201cThe Value of the World\u2019s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital,\u201d Nature<\/cite> 387 (1997): 253\u201360.<\/li>\n
  55. \u21a9<\/a> This paragraph has been adapted from John Bellamy Foster, \u201cThe Ecological Tyranny of the Bottom Line,\u201d in Reclaiming the Environmental Debate<\/cite>, ed. Richard Hofrichter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 137\u201339. See also Michael Jacobs, \u201cThe Limits to Neoclassicism,\u201d in Social Theory and the Environment<\/cite>, ed. Michael Redclift and Ted Benton (New York: Routledge, 1994), 69; Barry Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet<\/cite> (New York: New Press, 1992), 64\u201366; Marilyn Waring, Counting for Nothing<\/cite> (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 216; National Wildlife<\/cite> (April\u2013May 1986), 12; Robert Costanza et al., \u201cTwenty Years of Ecosystem Services,\u201d Ecosystem Services<\/cite> 28 (2017): 55.<\/li>\n
  56. \u21a9<\/a> Costanza et al., \u201cChanges in the Global Value of Ecosystem Services,\u201d 154.<\/li>\n
  57. \u21a9<\/a> Jonathan Hughes, \u201cThe Natural Capital Debt Bubble,\u201d Natural Capital Forum, June 1, 2015.<\/li>\n
  58. \u21a9<\/a> Guy Standing, Plunder of the Commons<\/cite> (London: Penguin, 2019), 121.<\/li>\n
  59. \u21a9<\/a> Monbiot, \u201cPut a Price on Nature?\u201d<\/li>\n
  60. \u21a9<\/a> Foster, Ecology Against Capitalism<\/cite>, 33.<\/li>\n
  61. \u21a9<\/a> See Business and Sustainable Development Commission, Unlocking Business Opportunities in Sustainable Land Use with Blended Finance<\/cite>, January 2018; Larry Lohmann, \u201cThe Problem Is Not \u2018Bad Baselines\u2019 but the Concept of Counterfactual Baselines Itself,\u201d REDD-Monitor, October 18, 2016.<\/li>\n
  62. \u21a9<\/a> Winston Choi-Schagrin, \u201cWildfires Are Ravaging Forests Set Aside to Soak Up Greenhouse Gases,\u201d New York Times<\/cite>, August 24, 2021.<\/li>\n
  63. \u21a9<\/a> Duke et al., Opportunities for UK Business that Value and\/or Protect Nature\u2019s Services<\/cite>, attachment 1 to final report to the Ecosystem Markets Task Force and Valuing Nature Network (London: GHK, 2012), 32.<\/li>\n
  64. \u21a9<\/a> Monbiot, \u201cPut a Price on Nature?\u201d<\/li>\n
  65. \u21a9<\/a> Silvia Favasuli and Vandana Sebastian, \u201cVoluntary Carbon Markets: How They Work, How They\u2019re Priced and Who\u2019s Involved?<\/a>,\u201d S&P Global, June 10, 2021.<\/li>\n
  66. \u21a9<\/a> Amrei von Hasse and Jan Cassin, Theory and Practice of \u201cStacking\u201d and \u201cBundling\u201d Ecosystem Goods and Services<\/a><\/cite>, Business and Biodiversity Offsets Programme (Washington DC: Forest Trends, 2018), 5.<\/li>\n
  67. \u21a9<\/a> Credit Suisse, Levering Ecosystems<\/cite> (Z\u00fcrich: Credit Suisse, 2016).<\/li>\n
  68. \u21a9<\/a> \u201cThe Growing Case for Conservation Finance.\u201d<\/li>\n
  69. \u21a9<\/a> Peter Burgess, \u201cBuilding a Platform and Economic Model to Actualize the Value of Natural Capital to Incentivize Preservation and Conservation over Exploitation of Aboriginal Cultural [sic<\/cite>] Their Nature Capital Assets and the Nature Capital Assets of the State of Western Australia, Northern Territory, and Sabah Malaysia\u201d (briefing paper, Nature-Capital-Paper 180921, Tierra Australia, February 2022, REDD-Monitor).<\/li>\n
  70. \u21a9<\/a> Julien Gonzalez-Redin, J. Gareth Polhill, Terence P. Dawson, Rosemary Hill, and Iain J. Gordon, \u201cIt\u2019s Not the \u2018What,\u2019 but the \u2018How\u2019: Exploring the Role of Debt in Natural Resource (Un)Sustainability,\u201d Plos One<\/cite> 13, no. 7 (2018): 1\u201319.<\/li>\n
  71. \u21a9<\/a> John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Money, Interest, and Employment<\/cite> (London: Macmillan, 1973), 159.<\/li>\n
  72. \u21a9<\/a> Herman Daly, \u201cThe Return of the Lauderdale Paradox,\u201d Ecological Economics<\/cite> 25 (1988): 21\u201323.<\/li>\n
  73. \u21a9<\/a> Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy<\/cite> (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 164; Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 3, 755\u201356.<\/li>\n
  74. \u21a9<\/a> Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 3, 910\u201311. On the establishing of titles as the key to \u201cunlocking natural capital assets,\u201d see Jake Rostron, \u201cCapitalising on Nature: The Legal Practicalities of Unlocking Natural Capital Assets,\u201d Michelmores, November 10, 2018.<\/li>\n
  75. \u21a9<\/a> Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays<\/cite> (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1899), 243; Georg Luk\u00e1cs, The Ontology of Social Being: Marx<\/cite> (London: Merlin, 1978), 10; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works<\/cite>, vol. 30 (New York: International Publishers, 195), 62\u201363.<\/li>\n
  76. \u21a9<\/a> Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism<\/cite> (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1999).<\/li>\n
  77. \u21a9<\/a> Edward B. Barbier, \u201cNatural Capital,\u201d in Nature in the Balance: The Economics of Biodiversity<\/cite>, ed. Dieter Helm and Cameron Hepburn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014),153\u201376; Barbier, Nature and Wealth<\/cite> (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 12, 85\u201387, 98; Barbier, Capitalizing on Nature<\/cite> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).<\/li>\n
  78. \u21a9<\/a> Barbier\u2019s term, ecological capital<\/cite>, which he then identifies with the world\u2019s ecosystems, is related to the view of Costanza and his associates who have defined natural capital<\/cite> as meaning ecosystems, insofar as they underly ecosystem services to the economy. Costanza et al., \u201cTwenty Years of Ecosystem Services,\u201d 3. Yet, in referring specifically to ecological capital<\/cite>, Barbier goes even further, encompassing under this category every aspect of the earth\u2019s ecosystems. Although allowing for the existence of various sub-forms of capital, such as human capital<\/cite>, reproducible capital<\/cite>, and natural capital<\/cite>, his concept of ecological capital<\/cite> appears to embrace the Earth System as a whole, such that the planet itself becomes nothing but capital. Barbier, Nature and Wealth<\/cite>, 9\u201313. In Marx\u2019s terms, this amounts to the alchemy of the subsumption of \u201cearth matter\u201d by \u201cearth capital.\u201d Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 3, 756.<\/li>\n
  79. \u21a9<\/a> Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 3, 522.<\/li>\n
  80. \u21a9<\/a> The environmental proletariat, in this sense, is not to be identified primarily with the industrial proletariat, but rather with Marx\u2019s conception that the proletariat stands for the dispossessed in general, the \u201cfocal point of all inhuman conditions\u201d and thus embodies within itself the irrepressible struggles for humanity. See Paul M. Sweezy, Modern Capitalism and Other Essays<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 148\u201349; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family<\/cite> (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956), 52.<\/li>\n
  81. \u21a9<\/a> Foster and Clark, The Robbery of Nature<\/cite>, 46.<\/li>\n
  82. \u21a9<\/a> John Bellamy Foster, Capitalism in the Anthropocene<\/a><\/cite> (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022), 483\u201392.<\/li>\n
  83. \u21a9<\/a> Roman Herre, Fast Track Agribusiness Expansion, Land Grabs and the Role of European Private and Public Financing in Zambia<\/cite><\/a> (Hands off the Land Alliance, 2013), 7; Suefert et al., Rogue Capitalism<\/cite>, 25.<\/li>\n
  84. \u21a9<\/a> Bowman, \u201cLand Rights, Not Land Grabs, Can Help Africa Feed Itself,\u201d CNN, June 18, 2013.<\/li>\n
  85. \u21a9<\/a> See \u201cGlobal Campaign for Global Reform<\/a>,\u201d La Via Campesina, accessed February 28, 2022, viacampesina.org.<\/li>\n
  86. \u21a9<\/a> Brasil de Fato, \u201cBrazil\u2019s Natural Resources Are a Target for a Capitalism in Crisis,\u201d Peoples Dispatch<\/cite>, June 10, 2019.<\/li>\n
  87. \u21a9<\/a> Mayank Aggarwal and S. Gopikrishina Warrier, \u201cEnvironmental Issues in Agriculture a Silent Reason Behind Farmers\u2019 Protests,\u201d Mongabay<\/cite>, December 8, 2020.<\/li>\n
  88. \u21a9<\/a> The Red Nation, The Red Deal<\/cite> (Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2021), 141\u201347; Marx, Capital<\/cite>, vol. 3, 949.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    ________________________________________________<\/p>\n

    2022<\/a>, Volume 73, Issue 11 (April 2022)<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a> John Bellamy Foster is a North American professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of the <\/em>Monthly Review. He writes about political economy of capitalism and economic crisis, ecology and ecological crisis, and Marxist theory.<\/em><\/p>\n

    Go to Original – monthlyreview.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    1 Apr 2022 – The rapid financialization of nature that is promoting a Great Expropriation of the global commons and the dispossession of humanity on an unprecedented scale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":175112,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[241],"tags":[1023,2101,232,2716,550,519,555,401,562,2231,2229,626,1289,610,1624,2059,2198,2060,2718,70,1557,1700],"class_list":["post-209677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-paper-of-the-week","tag-banksters","tag-blackrock","tag-capitalism","tag-cop26","tag-corruption","tag-ecology","tag-elites","tag-environment","tag-finance","tag-fiscal-paradises","tag-great-reset","tag-greed","tag-imf","tag-inequality","tag-mafia","tag-organized-crime","tag-post-capitalism","tag-profits","tag-pyramid-schemes","tag-usa","tag-wall-street","tag-world-bank"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209677"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":284627,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209677\/revisions\/284627"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/175112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}