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R E S U R G E N C E K E Y NOTE S S A C R E D E C ONOMY VALUE BEYOND MEASURE As what we value shifts towards ecological healing, we need to change our economic system to reflect that, writes Charles Eisenstein Money is usually the enemy of sustainability. There is a lot of money to be made by extracting resources, clearing forests, depleting oceans, and emitting pollution. There is little to be made by greening deserts, restoring wetlands, protecting habitats, or avoiding pollution. That means that government policies – and our own good intentions – must fight the money power in order to maintain a liveable world that honours all life. Is this a necessary state of affairs? Does it reflect an eternal battle between altruism and selfishness, between spirit and matter, good and evil, God and Mammon? Some radical economists think it need not be this way. Money, after all, is a human creation, a social agreement reflecting a culture’s ‘story of value’. As our civilisation’s values change, this agreement can change as well. One way to change it would be to somehow make environmentally destructive activities very expensive, and restorative activities highly remunerative. The idea is that pollution, deforestation, and so forth are a form of stealing from society, from Nature, and from future generations. No one should be allowed to profit by externalising costs onto someone else. Green taxes and capand-trade schemes for pollution rights seek to internalise these costs and align the best business decisions with the best ecological decisions. On the restorative side, the concept of ‘valuing ecosystem services’ seeks to pay people to preserve land, plant forests, protect watersheds, and so on. In practice, these ideas have spawned mixed results. Carbon offsetting, for example, has led to massive planting of trees to offset CO2 emissions – but sometimes these plantings have been of ecologically disastrous monocrops. In Latin America, the monetisation of ecosystem services has sometimes cut off Indigenous people from their traditional subsistence activities. And other real and potential problems are now widely discussed in the literature: displacement of harmful activities onto non-protected areas or into the future, the difficulty and danger of compartmentalising ecosystem services (which devalues their synergies), the probability that monetising ecosystem services will only extend economic inequities into new realms, and so on. 32 Resurgence & Ecologist Januar y/Februar y 2013
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We Saw a Fox by Tiffany Lynch www.tiffanylynch.co.uk Tiffany Lynch’s work is on show at the Ghosts of Gone Birds exhibition, ONCA Gallery, Brighton www.onca.org.uk How then to deal with these problems? Clearly we cannot persist in upholding a system in which profit and ecology are opposed. Can we fix the concept of ecosystem services? One approach would be to take it even further. We’ve monetised carbon sequestration, but left out biodiversity. We’ve monetised watershed filtration ‘services’ but left out the displacement effects on neighbouring land. Maybe, some day, our accounting of ecosystem services will be complete, so that we can rely on financial motives to preserve and heal the biosphere. But I am not so optimistic. We can only measure what we can see, so anything outside our cultural blinders will escape our accounting. Moreover, we unwittingly import our invisible biases into our choice of what to measure and how to measure it. And these biases will tend to perpetuate the social systems that privilege and validate the people creating the metrics, and rebound to the financial interest of the institutions and systems that embed them. What is visible to us in the civilised world? Tonnes of CO 2 . Hectares of forest cover. Concentrations of ground-level ozone. Acidity of oceans. Numbers of species. In the service of these, measurable, things, we are willing to sacrifice what Issue 276 Resurgence & Ecologist 33

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We Saw a Fox by Tiffany Lynch www.tiffanylynch.co.uk

Tiffany Lynch’s work is on show at the Ghosts of Gone Birds exhibition, ONCA Gallery, Brighton www.onca.org.uk

How then to deal with these problems? Clearly we cannot persist in upholding a system in which profit and ecology are opposed. Can we fix the concept of ecosystem services? One approach would be to take it even further. We’ve monetised carbon sequestration, but left out biodiversity. We’ve monetised watershed filtration ‘services’ but left out the displacement effects on neighbouring land. Maybe, some day, our accounting of ecosystem services will be complete, so that we can rely on financial motives to preserve and heal the biosphere. But I am not so optimistic. We can only measure what we can see, so anything outside our cultural blinders will escape our accounting. Moreover, we unwittingly import our invisible biases into our choice of what to measure and how to measure it. And these biases will tend to perpetuate the social systems that privilege and validate the people creating the metrics, and rebound to the financial interest of the institutions and systems that embed them. What is visible to us in the civilised world? Tonnes of CO 2 . Hectares of forest cover. Concentrations of ground-level ozone. Acidity of oceans. Numbers of species. In the service of these, measurable, things, we are willing to sacrifice what

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