The pricing of everything is another fraud of the neo-liberals, as George Monbiot makes clear in his transcribed article in The Ecological Citizen. Everyone interested is the survival of life on Earth ought to read this insightful piece. Here, Monbiot, as is often the case both sees and writes clearly and succinctly.
“This article – which is a lightly edited transcript of the 2014 Annual Lecture of the Shefeld Political Economy Research Institute – critiques concepts such as ‘natural capital’, ‘ecosystem services’, ‘green infrastructure’, ‘asset classes’ and the ‘ecosystem market’ that have been forged by applying the neoliberal ideology to biological conservation.
. . . the efforts to price the natural world which lie at the heart of the agenda are complete and utter gobbledygook. The reason why is that they are looking at values which are noncommensurable.
The government’s real agenda is not to protect the natural world from the depredations of the economy, it’s to harness the natural world in pursuit of the thing which has been destroying it – economic growth and everything that goes with it.
You can never win by adopting the values of your opponents, by trying to go across to meet them. You have to leave them where they are and then project your own values to people who might be persuaded to hear those values and might come over to your side.
Monbiot states the obvious about how to accomplish real change. “The three essential keys to all political change, which apply to protecting the environment as much as they apply to everything else, are, in this order: mobilization, mobilization, and mobilization. This is the only thing that ever works and everything else is a fudge and a substitute and an excuse for not doing what works.” The trouble is, is that this takes a lot of work, which most of us are not willing to do, and a real commitment and dedication, which most of us don’t have.
Leave a Reply