The question of our times

As we emerge from the two weeks of COP16 in Cali, it seems appropriate to talk about biodiversity and natural capital.

Over the decades and centuries, we have seen great human progress across a variety of measures. Yet everything comes at a cost. The main cost of human progress has been depletion of our natural capital. From 1970 onwards, our use of natural capital has exceeded nature’s regenerative capacity. This has led to a 68% decline in biodiversity between 1970 and 2016. Add to that the impact of carbon emissions, and our impact on natural capital has been huge.

In broad terms, to achieve human progress for a massively increased human population (+102% between 1970 and 2016), we have liquidated and spent 70% of our natural capital in as little as 46 years.

So far, no news.

If biodiversity and its decline remain somewhat abstract concepts in some people’s minds, let’s look at stuff we see every day.

It wasn’t that long ago that a long car trip on highways had to be interrupted every so often so that one could wipe away all the bugs that had been flattened across our windscreens. Today, we almost never have to do that. The bugs are gone.

Recently Lidl, the supermarket, tried an experiment. It removed from its shelves all items that ultimately depended on pollinators for their existence. The result – an almost empty supermarket.

Again, no news in saying that our lives, livelihoods and continued prosperity depend on a solid foundation of natural capital.

And none of this has passed people by. In Cali we have the 16th COP focused on biodiversity. Next, month we will have the 29th COP focused on climate. Add to this the multiple organisations around the world setting their minds to try to find solutions to these issues – issues that are, perhaps, the main issues of our time.

Meeting after meeting after meeting. Yet progress is slow. Some would claim it is negligible. Why?

Because, despite the way that these issues are framed, despite the focus of activists, these are not ‘environmental’ questions. They are questions about the whole basis of our political economy.

Our prosperity has depended on a financialized political economy fundamentally based on natural extraction and dumping. We extract natural resources, ‘add value’ (or so we are taught in business schools) to those extracted resources through industrial production, and then dump our detritus back into nature. So far, we don’t know how to do it any other way.

Meeting after meeting, initiative after initiative have led us to tie ourselves in knots to try to extract a little bit less and dump a little bit less (we even have the cheek to calling that effort a move towards ‘sustainability’). But the fundamentals of a financialized political economy based on extraction and dumping haven’t changed.

Most initiatives that we see today, welcome and essential though they are, are locked into trying to find ‘solutions’ within the current paradigm of our political economy. But that paradigm can never yield sufficient solutions because it presumes – maybe even requires – the liquidation of natural capital as the base source of human prosperity. Calls for yet more to be done, faster; or that all it requires is more ‘political will’ are nothing but empty talk.

What we need is to start the difficult long-term task of reimagining the basis on which our political economy is based. Only then – and running alongside the many current important efforts to decrease our planetary impact – can we hope to return to a state where we can build up our natural capital faster than we consume it.

This is no mean task. It may not even be possible. But we will never know until we try. And nobody can seriously question the imperative to try.

One starting point is to stop labelling these issues as ‘environmental’ issues and putting them in their own box, separate from the rest of our political and economic concerns. This is a political economy question that is central to everything that we do.