“Making sense of claims advanced by climate-focused projects in the crypto space could be difficult: while many of them do sound well-intentioned and benign, they are also keen to invent new (and often bombastic) terms to describe practices for which older, already discredited terms do exist.”
one tends to overestimate the novelty of their solutions while downplaying the ambiguity surrounding their potential efficacy: we do know such models do not work.
the author: Bram Büscher, a prolific scholar of the political economy of conservation, who has published widely on how the mainstream neoliberal discourse around conservation mobilised market-based and technological solutions to boost its legitimacy. Bram’s work is full of provocative concepts like “fictitious conservation”
market-based-instruments aim to insert a market-logic into human relations with and governance of the rest of nature. Our interdependence with the rest of nature is then framed as a supply-demand relationship: ‘we’ depend on the ‘services’ that nature provides and hence we should pay for them so that they can be regenerated and conserved. But since we cannot pay nature directly, we actually pay other people to change their (land, environmental, or other) practices
sounds logical BUT market based mechanisms rarely work in practice because 1, extraction and pollution is more profitable than conservation in normal circumstances. 2, human-nature interactions are complex (you can’t simply retransplant ecosystems elsewhere). 3, “transactions” with nature happens at different times (you can’t immediately regrow a thriving forest ecosystem)
5 more critiques on why MBI conservation mechanisms do not work in the article
- namely, 1 that most MBIs end up being subsidies/non-market transactions, 2 the link between demand and supply are severed, 3 they’re political with imperfection, assumptions, and corruption, 4 all human actions must be measured, accounted for, and offset, 5, it encourages further ENV destruction by thinking the offset solves a problem.
natural capital' comes from the networks of conservationists and economists who try to marry capitalism and conservation. What the term signifies for us is that these networks have come full circle: the problem (capital) is now rendered indistinguishable from that which they want to save (nature). It is the ultimate contradiction of our time, and it is hard to overstate how foolish this is. But this is why understanding neoliberalism is so important: as Rob Fletcher argues in his forthcoming book, it has become a hegemonic ideological system that continues to ‘fail forward’ despite its massive flaws and contradictions.
what to do instead
humanity needs to learn how to interact with the rest of nature
"natural capital," "liquid nature," "fictious conservation."
- avoid this
- 'natural capital' comes from the networks of conservationists and economists who try to marry capitalism and conservation. What the term signifies for us is that these networks have come full circle: the problem (capital) is now rendered indistinguishable from that which they want to save (nature). It is the ultimate contradiction of our time, and it is hard to overstate how foolish this is. But this is why understanding neoliberalism is so important: as Rob Fletcher argues in his forthcoming book, it has become a hegemonic ideological system that continues to ‘fail forward’ despite its massive flaws and contradictions.
- The concept of 'liquid nature' was meant to designate the types of nature that natural capital ultimately conserves: floating, ephemeral, discursive natures that have little relation to actual material natures in actual places. It relates to the idea of market liquidity whereby more alienation is something positive: it allows for a quicker circulation of commodities to enable more profits and turn-over. In any ‘regular’ market (cars, phones, etc.), this is already a silly proposition that shows the meaninglessness of capitalism. Regarding nature, however, it becomes truly tragic: an ephemeral, liquid nature is a deeply alienated nature, which is precisely what ‘natural capital’ promotes.
- Not only does this not actually lead to any meaningful conservation ('fictitious conservation'), it leads to a deeper estrangement from the rest of nature. And how a deeper alienation from nature is supposed to help us live better with it, is beyond me
I do not see how web3 and blockchain can fit within this picture. This is not because I am ‘against’ technology, but because I believe that any ‘high’ technology should only be a subservient tool to support broader social, economic, political, and ecological processes of change. It must be put in its place: as completely secondary and subservient, rather than as the main entry-point and in the lead. Tech enthusiasts generally do not get this: for them the technology is central.
- how can we employ high technologies without their logics driving the change process?
- Funds should look for this. Change is required first.
“ClimateXcrypto initiatives are fictitious progress because all these initiatives use exceedingly complicated technologies, mired in acronym-ridden tech language to basically render even more complicated what was not working in the first place. They are, indeed, fictitious, in that A) they cannot guarantee a relevant equivalency between (human) impacts and (environmental) services other than in fantasy, and B) they are based on a broader fiction more generally.”
new technologies and growth can somehow get us out of the climate or biodiversity crises when it has been obvious for decades that they do not.
In my first book (Transforming the Frontier) I concluded that the way that neoliberal conservation deals with failure is to ratchet up promised future benefits to ever greater, even ridiculous proportions. In the book, I examined so-called ‘peace parks’ who, after the general failure of community-based conservation programs that tried to link community development to biodiversity conservation, subsequently promised the same and added peace, international collaboration, ecotourism profits, and a host of other ‘wins’.
This promise of decentralisation and the emergence of more participatory, grassroots-run structures has long been present in conservation circles, too. For example, it underpins Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM), an approach to natural resource management that once held the radical promise of democratisation.
- In two major studies of the ecosystem they found that, if the overall guiding framework remains firmly neoliberal (focused on economic growth, faith in capitalist market-mechanisms in all sectors, and allowing elite classes to continue to widen inequality) then decentralisation can never be a meaningful strategy.
where’s crypto’s magic bullet? he doesn’t see it
- If we look at crypto initiatives and decentralisation more generally, we see that this is a decentralisation based on the need to trust technology rather than people. Indeed, the whole idea behind blockchain is that you don’t have to trust other people because everybody can check the veracity of transactions on the distributed ledger, etc. I do not see how a technology that is explicitly built on not trusting other people – and that might reduce our trust in each other yet further – can be a fruitful way forward to living well together.