Money for nothing — a gripe against natural capital and ecosystem valuations

Environmental doomsday warnings have been around awhile now, and have been treated with alarm and apathy in equal parts. It is evident to all that it’s not just the times but the seasons too that are a changin’, and not in a good way. The terminologies are getting sterner — change becomes crisis, appeals become exhortations and battle cries — yet somehow, in a way, it is still all Greek to us, or atleast looks like it considering the inactivity despite all the holler.

Ironically, it isn’t much different from water systems, the demand for action from the civil society and the aloofness of the polity. No matter how much the river may gurgle or froth or flood downstream, the glacier remains immutable. A few cracks and groans here or there maybe, but quickly ridden over by another bout of fresh snow, or elections.

The travails of climate change and biodiversity loss, two of the most pressing issues, both inextricably intertwined, and in the present context being exacerbated by each other, yet kept in silos. One hoped the pandemic would bring the wall down, but the economic recovery packages brought us to back into the folds of incorrigibility.

We embark into the decade of ecosystem restoration this year, taking the baton from the decade on biodiversity, and one has to admit that the backlog is huge. WWF’s Living Planet Index (LPI), which tracks the abundance of almost 21,000 populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians around the world, shows an average 68% fall in monitored populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish between 1970 and 2016.

75 percent of Earth’s land areas are already substantially degraded, putting the wellbeing of 3.2 billion people at risk. But these are just numbers, one surmises, open to debate, and frequently being put under debate, considering that they make no dent in the way we function. It’s unfair to put the blame squarely on the administrators though, for even as individuals we are eons away from walking the talk.

But such findings do (thankfully) spook people, and people must be pacified. And therein comes one of the latest sets of policy prescriptions — natural ‘capital’, environmental ‘accounting’, ‘valuation’ of ecosystems and ecosystem services. Since we are so blatantly irresponsible and ungrateful in the way we use natural resources, assigning a monetary value to themwould make us dial down and become more austere in our ways.

And we go a step further and also assign such values to the diverse set of relationships between the animate and inanimate elements of the ecosystems, so tigers are a lot more than the worth of their skins and bones and teeth and testicles, a pangolin shines above it scales and elephants trumpet beyond their tusks. Except for the fact that it all, well, comes down to money.

It’s not as if this is completely irrational, and looking at the current state of affairs, it might be only way out in the short term. But let us take a step back first. In his seminal work The Philosophy of Money, German philosopher Georg Simmel argues that money is a ‘structuring agent’ that helps us in valuing almost every aspect of life.

By accepting a universally common metric, we could not only measure the time and effort in procuring things we needed for survival like food and clothes but also reconcile it with non-tangible aspects of life like relationships. Consider the compensations provided to families of people who die in natural disasters, in a way ’tis nothing but a (crude and seldom deemed satisfactory) monetary valuation of a human life.

But therein lies the rub. One, even if we have systems to evaluate ‘life’ itself in terms of money, it is not a metric completely palatable to human sensitivities. Even if someone sells you a goat, you pay for its fur and meat and other parts that you might use, but not it’s ‘life’, it’s the lack of life that you pay for, actually. And the person who takes that life away can more often than not be found bowing down in some corner, praying for the atonement of his sins.

Also, by trying to value nature in monetary terms, we are not trying to measure what ‘we’ make, but something that makes ‘us’. Can we measure the worth of gods by costing the number of temples built in their honour? This is a fallacy that unfortunately, economics cannot remedy, and requires a discipline that is more introspective and willing to put aside its hubris of being able to comprehend and measure everything from one lens.

Then there is the purpose of monetary valuations. We do it to sell things, don’t we, or maybe hold them as an asset so that they grow further in that value and be eventually traded somewhere in time? While in some instances viewing human life as a statistic or giving trees a monetary value has a valid reason, for example citing savings in healthcare costs by creating parks, there isn’t much merit in extending it too far.

Another counterpoint deriving from this thought is that valuation of nature and ecosystem services should not be misunderstood as commodification or privatization, since government stewardship can ensure that the intangible values of nature are protected for the greater common good. Point taken, but what about this train of privatization that eventually comes in a steamrolls over all such notions, for this model is already extant in developed economies and ’tis quite evident that the developing counterparts are following suit.

We must understand that it’s the psyche of both the decision makers and us as individuals that needs to change. Touting stopgap measures as revolutionary solutions will only expose our naivety. Transitioning into renewable energy will not save the world unless we substantially pare down our energy consumption. ‘Experiencing’ nature will never enlighten us if we keep thinking of ourselves extrinsic to its ways. The rhetoric must be one of repentance, and not of a saviour.

The way out? Let us acknowledge the pricelessness, the intrinsic and innate. Let us accept the fact that we are barely scratching the surface while trying to comprehend natural processes. Not try to transform or change, but take a step back and the time to understand. Endeavour to nurture devotion rather than figure out new directions. Research shows that it works, this approach.

In a nutshell, let compassion take precedence over cost-benefit analyses.