The belief that you can create healthy ecosystems by payments for environmental services or ecological compensation is akin to believing that you can buy love by visiting a prostitute.
For all these reasons and more, I left corporate sustainability 14 years ago. I was working with CEOs of Fortune 100 companies, and no one really cared or wanted to listen. Slowing down was never going to be an option, warnings were never heeded and the future wasn’t their problem. It was clear to me that a system was being built that would never yield the results we seek, your article, case in point.
I have cared for the Earth as my family for my entire life, I joined Greenpeace 40 years ago (when I was 5) because I thought maybe the protests would awaken people to their own hearts and they might ‘care’ about the preciousness of all life…I feel differently today, though it is still a matter of the heart to me, more spiritual than intellectual. My personal (deeply animistic) POV is that until humanity considers each tree, spider, and rock as kin, well, it’s all just futile obfuscation and avoidance exercises.
In the meantime, I’ll do the best I can, with what I have, to care, conserve, commune, and survive with grace, I hope.
This dogged insistence that markets should do things they are not good at is a typical late 20th century phenomenon we should drop once and for all.
Economist José Gabriel Palma believed that the idea was a self-defence from the oil-car-complex; it didn't like that its time as the cutting edge was over, and invented a trick to make any change impossible. Of course it had help from the finance markets that didn't want interference from political institutions either. See https://academic.oup.com/cje/article/33/4/829/1736365.
But we should see through that. We should acknowledge that all three mechanisms for transactions – markets, redistribution and gifts – are equally valuable, but that they are good at different things. And that regulating transactions where third parties are heavily influencing and influenced is something markets are particularly bad at.
“the love of money is the root of all evil” The current debt and interest based money system demands endless economic growth to be sustained. Part of what needs to happen is different type of money as a medium of exchange. Charles Eisenstein in his book Sacred Economics has explored this. Humanity has built a system of economics that yields social and biosphere degradation. What a conundrum it is to reverse and rebuild when besides death this system also provides the necessities of physical life. We are so enmeshed in this spider’s web. I once watched a documentary on ecovillages in Europe. The very clothes, building materials, technologies, tools in the villages were all products of the profit based death spewing global machine.
Gunnar, Thank you for writing, and for writing this piece in particular. After farming for 20 years, I began to walk away from markets altogether, and have now for more than 5 years offered all of the food I raise as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason. I am sustained financially by people who care about me, the animals and the land. It's been a remarkable experiment to see how people respond. I look forward to following your work. With thanks, Adam
For all these reasons and more, I left corporate sustainability 14 years ago. I was working with CEOs of Fortune 100 companies, and no one really cared or wanted to listen. Slowing down was never going to be an option, warnings were never heeded and the future wasn’t their problem. It was clear to me that a system was being built that would never yield the results we seek, your article, case in point.
I have cared for the Earth as my family for my entire life, I joined Greenpeace 40 years ago (when I was 5) because I thought maybe the protests would awaken people to their own hearts and they might ‘care’ about the preciousness of all life…I feel differently today, though it is still a matter of the heart to me, more spiritual than intellectual. My personal (deeply animistic) POV is that until humanity considers each tree, spider, and rock as kin, well, it’s all just futile obfuscation and avoidance exercises.
In the meantime, I’ll do the best I can, with what I have, to care, conserve, commune, and survive with grace, I hope.
Thank you for an excellent text! There should be no trading in the destruction of nature!
Aligned thinking with the likes of Jason Hickel, Tyson Yunkaporta, and Leen Gorissen. Recommend all three academics for those interested 🙏🏼
Resonate with moving beyond reductionism to transactions. Thank you!
This dogged insistence that markets should do things they are not good at is a typical late 20th century phenomenon we should drop once and for all.
Economist José Gabriel Palma believed that the idea was a self-defence from the oil-car-complex; it didn't like that its time as the cutting edge was over, and invented a trick to make any change impossible. Of course it had help from the finance markets that didn't want interference from political institutions either. See https://academic.oup.com/cje/article/33/4/829/1736365.
But we should see through that. We should acknowledge that all three mechanisms for transactions – markets, redistribution and gifts – are equally valuable, but that they are good at different things. And that regulating transactions where third parties are heavily influencing and influenced is something markets are particularly bad at.
“the love of money is the root of all evil” The current debt and interest based money system demands endless economic growth to be sustained. Part of what needs to happen is different type of money as a medium of exchange. Charles Eisenstein in his book Sacred Economics has explored this. Humanity has built a system of economics that yields social and biosphere degradation. What a conundrum it is to reverse and rebuild when besides death this system also provides the necessities of physical life. We are so enmeshed in this spider’s web. I once watched a documentary on ecovillages in Europe. The very clothes, building materials, technologies, tools in the villages were all products of the profit based death spewing global machine.
Gunnar, Thank you for writing, and for writing this piece in particular. After farming for 20 years, I began to walk away from markets altogether, and have now for more than 5 years offered all of the food I raise as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason. I am sustained financially by people who care about me, the animals and the land. It's been a remarkable experiment to see how people respond. I look forward to following your work. With thanks, Adam
They want to "go direct". Totalitär kontrol av allt med cbdc.
https://dhughes.substack.com/p/worlds/