World Bank calls on countries to take urgent steps to protect 'natural capital'

[cprise]

33. policy

"I don't understand what you mean..."

I mean that the discourse over environmental issues will further lose any dimension it lacks, reducing more and more arguments into dollars and pushing out the science and peoples' willingness to familiarize with it. You can't reduce/convert the interplay of BTUs, precipitation, cloud cover, CO2-equivalents, albedo, biodiversity, thermodynamic efficiency, biomass, etc, etc... all down to a one-dimensional unit of currency (which itself is not scientific) and expect to make progress.

Its bad enough that politics has stuck its nose into ecology -- having Finance involved (they will insist on "partnerships" with lots of tantalizing PR) will just create a whole new generation of ecologists who are at best sponsored shills. This has already happened in the fields of "political science" and economics.

Have a look here:

These people were given the keys to the political culture, the power to define its terms and values, and look what happened. They need to be knocked off their pedestal and the pedestal recycled as fertilizer -- not given the power to co-opt or absorb more aspects of our culture and institutions. But monetizing the environment gives them exactly that; where greenwashing may work on some environmentalists and the public, this gives them some ability to plaster over the science as well.

My only big ideas for a mid-term solution is to foster a generalized suspicion in the direction of wealth and power (not just here on DU), and in so doing neutralize their ability to keep concocting circuses and shell games. With that, I think supporting a movement like Occupy is the necessary first step, attempting to put on the brakes just long enough to discredit the plutocracy and create an opening for structural change.