Marketing the planet: The financialization of nature

By Helena Paul, Radical Ecological Democracy

How did we reach this precarious point in our collective existence, and more importantly, can we craft a clear and secure path out of this mess?

Páramos at Risk: The Interconnected Threats to a Biodiversity Hotspot

By Daniel Henryk Rasolt, The Revelator

Páramos, experts say, may also serve as a sort of buffer against climate-change-induced recession of tropical mountain glaciers and extended droughts — if we can protect them.

Earth’s Real Treasure

By Tom Murphy, Do the Math

Which do you think is more valuable: the web of living animals on this planet, or all the gold accessible in the ground? If given a choice to eliminate one and preserve the other, which would you choose?

The value of biodiversity

By Andrew Curry, the next wave

It came as a bit of a shock to open a government news release that reads more like an editorial in the Ecologist, but I think it’s an indication of the speed at which the landscape is changing here.

What Is a Migrant Worth?

By Elsie Roderiques, Common Dreams

The root cause of our social and environmental challenges is neoliberalism and the fetish of the market, which values profit over people and sees nature simply as a commodity.

Our Modern Obsession with Financializing Nature

By David Bollier, David Bollier blog

Language is surely one of the greatest political weapons ever invented because it invisibly defines the world in narrow ways and can impair our capacity to see and think clearly. This is one of the takeaways I had after looking through Sian Sullivan’s new website, “The Natural Capital Myth and Other Stories,” which collects twelve years of her writing (2008 to present) on this theme.

Notes on the “Financialisation of Nature and Carbon Markets”

By Brian Davey, Feasta

What is needed is an approach called commoning – the idea that we all share responsibility. We are all are entitled to share natural resources– but only so far as use is made at a sustainable scale.

The Future of UK Farming: Measuring and Valuing Sustainability

By Sustainable Food Trust Staff, Sustainable Food Trust

At The Future of UK Farming conference this April, The Sustainable Food Trust’s Patrick Holden chaired a session on “Measuring and Valuing Sustainability”. The panel discussed how to transform the economic environment for sustainable food production by empowering farmers to deliver measurable public goods.

Up in Smoke

By Eric Holthaus, Grist

The declining health of trees globally is starting to have profound effects on Earth’s carbon cycle. The rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide has been picking up speed over the past few years, even though human CO2 emissions have flattened. The net effect: Climate change is starting to accelerate.

I Bet You Don’t Know These 8 Amazing Things about Trees

By Tegan Tallulah, The Climate Lemon

It’s safe to say that life  would not be the same without trees. In fact, all human civilisation is dependent upon them. Not only as a source of valuable resources, but also for the ecological benefits they provide – called ecosystem services. We all know trees are awesome, but most people don’t quite understand all the important things they do.

Why True Cost Accounting is Not a Good Concept for Markets and Public Policy

By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth

Farming is the most significant human management system of the planet; the future of humans on the planet largely rests upon how we manage our farmscapes. If we accept this then it has profound implica­tions for agricultural policy for it means that ‘managing the planet’ is almost as an important task of the farming system as supplying food.

Nature is Being Renamed ‘Natural Capital’ – But is it Really the Planet that will Profit?

By Sian Sullivan, The Conversation

But what is “natural capital”? And why use it to refer to “nature”?