Friday, September 26, 2014
The Co-opting of a Movement
by David B. Sutton, Ph.D.
Monetizing the environmental message fundamentally changes the motivation and systematically discounts the future and moral values.
Many years ago, I can remember being involved in strategic discussions with a group of environmental activists. One of the participants, proposed the tactic that has become the major approach of the environmental movement for the past three decades. “The economy is mindless,” he said, ” it’s like a dumb hungry dog, show it a bone and it will follow it.” “All we have to do is to show how there is money to be made by conserving this or that and the market will be drooling after us.” I didn’t like the idea from the start and have come to think that this approach is a real deterrent to searching for and finding lasting solutions.
It is calling on the wrong motivation. I believe that motivation does matter– why you do something matters as much or perhaps even more than what you do. But now all anybody cares about is motivating people to do this or that because there is money in it.
A dog chasing a bone can easily be diverted by a juicier morsel at any point along the way. Maybe hunger is the highest motivation for a dog, although I bet I can divert most with a bitch in heat. It seems, however, like the basest instinct imaginable to rely on in “higher” human beings. Our society deserves to be in the hands of something better than mad, hungry (or sex-driven) dogs.
What I have come to understand over the years is that my concern then was about who is ‘framing” the debate.
For the past decade or so, the cognitive linguist, George Lakoff has been writing about what he calls ‘frame analysis’ to explain why progressive parties keep losing elections they should win, and keep losing support even in the midst of a multiple crisis caused by their political opponents.
“These people are trying to do the right thing,” he says, “but they are completely failing to apply a frames analysis.” A frame is a mental structure through which you understand an issue. Instead of framing the issue with their own values and describing and projecting those values – which is the only thing in the medium- to long-term that ever works – they are abandoning them and adopting instead the values of the people that they are opposing. And, as Lakoff points out, “you can never win by adopting the values of your opponents.”
LOSING THE POWER OF OUR ARGUMENT
I have watched many of my well-meaning, well-educated colleagues fall into this trap over the past 30 years, moving from their scientifically irrefutable environmental positions to using a specious economic logic to re-package their message in greenbacks.
What the best and brightest in the movement were saying, so many years ago, was technically irrefutable then, as it is now. Yet the dominant view, the one that finances all the education and research programs, controls virtually all public information on the subject and thus the political power still dominates because it is not reason, scientific understanding, common sense that matters. What matters is where the money is, who controls the money, and what the money wants!
Consequently, most of my longtime environmental activists friends have opted to communicate in the dominant language–the language of financial gain. The physical logic– the truth as it can best be determined by science is no longer the gauge–it is what can make more money.
To me, the real power of the environmental message comes from the ability to see reality in the physical world. Being a gifted communicator and being able to frame this knowing in the superficial vernacular of the profit-minded isn’t the fundamental power of the argument. The fact that more people listen to the re-packaged message only goes to show that the wrong things matter more than the right ones. To me this should be a source of grave concern, not one of pride, for choosing the ‘right’ packaging.
In addition, in the long run this monetizing strategy of the “Natural Capitalists” just does not work. There are inherent flaws and fundamental weaknesses of a monetizing approach.
I will not spend much time here showing (although I certainly could) how much nonsense the attempts to monetize the environmental impacts and services of Nature are by comparing the incommensurable, systematically discounting future values and the “unbundling” of ecosystem functioning.
To expect that creating inevitably flawed numbers to swing the argument is worse than naïve in a world in which cost-benefit analyses are systematically rigged. The financial case for any new fossil fuel energy scheme falls apart completely if you attach almost any value to the rise in greenhouse gases they cause. But that is not done, those costs are just denied. Case closed.
The “unbundling” concept should be particularly alarming to anyone with any level of ecological understanding. According to these bean counters, if nature is to be captured and placed in the care of the financial sector and to extract any value from it, we are told that we need to “unbundle” ecosystem services so they can be individually traded.
That’s the only way in which it can work – Nature has to be unbundled. If there is one thing we know about ecosystems, and we know it more the more we discover about them, it’s that you cannot safely disaggregate their functions without destroying the whole thing. Ecosystems function as coherent holistic systems, in which the different elements depend upon each other. The moment you start to unbundle them and to trade them separately you create a formula for disaster.
This monetizing agenda is effectively pushing the natural world even further into the system that is eating it alive.
The real agenda is not to protect the natural world from the depredations of the economy. It is to harness the natural world to the economic growth that has been destroying it. All the things which have been so damaging to the living planet are now being sold to us as its salvation; fractionalization, commodification, economic growth, financialization. Now, we are told, these devastating processes will protect it.
What we are talking about is giving the natural world to the financial world, to look after. What could possibly go wrong? Here we have a sector whose wealth is built on the creation of debt. That’s how it works, on stacking up future liabilities. Shafting the future in order to serve the present: that is the model. And then that debt is sliced up into collateralised debt obligations and all the other marvellous devices that worked so well last time round.
This is pure insanity.
How did we come to this? How is it that to almost everybody what makes more economic sense is more valid that what makes scientific (I would say ecological) sense? How is it that we have come to the point that an essentially fictional economic worldview has more validity than an ecological one ? One of the ways is that well-meaning, even brilliant, spokesmen for truth cave-in to using the language of the opponent to convince them. And as Lakoff has warned, as soon as we accept their criteria for communicating value, we have lost the battle.
ADOPTING A CORPORATE BANNER
Initially the newly packaged argument is very compelling because we do not have to question the primacy of economic value, we can have our cake and eat it too— it is all one.
These “Natural Capitalists,” as they call themselves, are on a grand parade…. marching to the drum beat, “we can have it all, dum de dum, we can have it all, dum de dum.” Economics and Environment joined for the higher good under the banner of “Natural Capitalism.” It is just the latest in a series of attempts to reconcile two worldviews that are inherently irreconcilable.
They proceed as if the corporate control of our lives is a given. It’s the way things are, so we must live with it. I disagree! While their power and control has been unfortunately made legal. There is no reason for it but that we gave the power to them and still permit it. We can thank decades of collective lunacy for that. It all began with those clueless souls who first thought of giving personhood status to a corporate entity — what on earth were they thinking? This has been followed by a series of actions removing ‘these right-bearing entities’ from virtually any responsibility for what they do. These large powerful interests have diligently worked for decades to limit or totally remove liability for the impact of their profit making activities.
And now that’s “the given” that we must live with. I don’t think so! We aren’t going to live with this given; it is going to kill us. We need to wake up and soon.
SUCCESS STORIES
These new economic arguments do not miss the chance to mention real success stories that they attribute to the conversion to “Natural Capitalism,” such as Interface Carpet in Georgia. We all use them because it is really nice to have real examples. However, it is a bit disingenuous to represent them as triumphs of a new economic logic.
I have personally met and talked with Ray Anderson of Interface Carpet as well as Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia and know that the amazing things they have done with their companies began with an act of will on their part to do the right thing— not as a financial calculation. In fact, they both told me they weren’t even sure that it wouldn’t cost them.
The fact that the Natural Capitalist are right, in these examples– that
these companies saved money over the long run and received competitive advantage for doing the right thing is nice. It is good to see people rewarded for doing the right thing– and these examples add to the empirical database of best practice. But we need to acknowledge that these and most other true movements toward Natural Capitalism were taken because of a fundamental value shift– an ideological shift away from the frame of the status quo, — not because of any new bottom-line calculation.
FINE-TUNING VS. RE-TOOLING
The new Natural Capitalists are quick to point out that it will “take a few changes” to fix the current system. Some minor little changes like properly valuing “human capital” (people, intelligence, culture) and “natural capital” (resources, living systems and ecosystem services). A few minor changes, indeed!
You can sugar-coat it anyway you want, but under capitalism (old time capitalism, where capital means—money and financing) money dominates over the interests of labor, land and resources.
This is the rub, converting from short-term to long-term accounting and including natural capital and human resources, which are now almost completely avoided, aren’t minor alternations of the economic machine. It will require a major ideological shift– MAJOR changes in our dysfunctional economic frame and it is politically naive and socially irresponsible to think otherwise.
This is what these reconcilers fail to appreciate. There are irreconcilable ideological differences between the system we have and the system they want. This isn’t merely a matter of minor fine-tuning. It requires a major re-tooling. The engine needs to be fundamentally changed and the engine’s owner isn’t on board for the changes.
This isn’t about house-training a naughty pup, it’s about finally putting a most destructive craven mongrel out to pasture.
It is time for us to take control of the discussion, to expound our own values and reframe the issue around them, to stop reinforcing the frame of the opponent. Costing nature tells us that it possesses no inherent value; that it is worthy of protection only when it performs services for us; that it is replaceable. Showing the opposition that they might profit doesn’t change their mind it only reinforces what they care about above all else. You demoralize and alienate those who love the natural world while reinforcing the values of those who don’t.
Whole new economic engines need to be created that produce agreed upon ends with the most efficient means at the lowest cost, using as little natural capital as possible. If these changes were to be made it would hardly be capitalism any longer and you can be sure not acceptable to the frame of corporate capitalism as we know it.