A 67-year-old Dallas woman made national news in March when she climbed a tree and refused to come down, protesting electric delivery company Oncor’s plan to remove it. It wasn’t her first climb. (She carried a pellet gun the first time).
FROM NATURAL CAPITAL COALITION WEBSITE
The Moral Question
Some take the position that it’s immoral to ascribe any tangible value to the natural world. But when we buy almost any physical product we are, in a sense, commodifying Nature by signifying our willingness to pay a designated price in exchange for ownership of natural materials, organisms and their derivatives.
In this way, much of Nature is already commodified, and has been for thousands of years. A natural capital approach, far from abetting this neoliberal model, turns it on its head. While there are many prices for the products that are created from Nature and natural derivatives, the value of leaving the natural world intact is often far less understood – or worse, regarded as zero. Framing these resources as natural capital and working to illuminate their value is a way of recognising the value of leaving Nature intact.
Much of the debate comes down to language. In a bid to address some people’s unease with the term ‘ecosystem services’, in January 2018 30 global experts associated with the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) suggested a move away from the term, and towards ‘Nature’s Contributions to People’. They argued the latter was a more inclusive term that bypassed perceived failings of the ecosystem services framing.
IPBES chair Sir Robert Watson said, ‘Nature underpins every person’s wellbeing and ambitions – from health and happiness to prosperity and security. People need to better understand the full value of Nature to ensure its protection and sustainable use.’
Ultimately the message remains the same, irrespective of the language used: we fundamentally depend on Nature in a multitude of ways, and if Nature continues to be degraded, we will all suffer.
Going Mainstream
In March 2007, environment ministers from the G8+5 countries met in Potsdam, Germany to propose a proper analysis of the global economic benefit of biological diversity, the costs of the loss of biodiversity and the failure to take protective measures versus the costs of effective conservation. The result was the launch of a global TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) study, designed to make Nature’s values visible.
As well as getting to grips with the inherent value of our natural bounty, the goal of TEEB is to embed the values and benefits of biodiversity and ecosystem services into decision-making at all levels.
The TEEB for Business Coalition – now the Natural Capital Coalition – was launched in December 2012. Its purpose was to study and standardize natural capital approaches, and enable its valuation and reporting in business. The goal was to engage key stakeholders from business, government and civil society to join a leading-edge collaboration that would shape the future of business thinking and action on natural capital. TEEB for Business evolved into the Natural Capital Coalition in 2014; it had become clear that the entire system – not just business – needed to come together to tackle these issues and embed natural capital thinking in mainstream discourse.
Joining the Dots
Many organisations have a policy on water, another on energy, another on biodiversity, another on forests – the list goes on. Often the people working in these areas don’t talk to each another; in some cases they are actually in competition for budget allocation. A policy on one of these areas, without an understanding of how it connects with the others, means we’re often playing a four-dimensional game of tug of war, attempting to keep interconnected systems in balance without understanding the ways in which they work and connect.
The natural world and ecosystems are fundamentally symbiotic, so our approach to their conservation and restoration must be similarly interconnected if it is to succeed.
A systems approach allows businesses to understand fundamental interdependencies, tipping points and thresholds. If farmers deplete the local water table, the health of local vegetation may be affected; this could cause insect habitats and populations to decrease, affecting the pollination services necessary for the success of the farmers’ crops.
a.k.a. everything earth has like air, water, soil, potential for crops, etc.
The UK government wants to put a price on nature – but that will destroy it
GeorgeMonbiot
Tue 15 May 2018
Defining Earth’s resources as ‘natural capital’ is morally wrong, intellectually vacuous, and most of all counter-productive.
Never mind that the new environmental watchdog will have no teeth. Never mind that the government plans to remove protection from local wildlife sites. Never mind that its 25-year environment plan is all talk and no action. We don’t need rules any more. We have a pouch of magic powder we can sprinkle on any problem to make it disappear.
This powder is the monetary valuation of the natural world. Through the market, we can avoid conflict and hard choices, laws and policies, by replacing political decisions with economic calculations.
Almost all official documents on environmental issues are now peppered with references to “natural capital” and to the Natural Capital Committee, the Laputian body the government has created to price the living world and develop a set of “national natural capital accounts”. The government admits that “at present we cannot robustly value everything we wish to in economic terms; wildlife being a particular challenge”. Hopefully, such gaps can soon be filled, so we’ll know exactly how much a primrose is worth.
The government argues that without a price, the living world is accorded no value, so irrational decisions are made. By costing nature, you ensure that it commands the investment and protection that other forms of capital attract. This thinking is based on a series of extraordinary misconceptions. Even the name reveals a confusion: natural capital is a contradiction in terms. Capital is properly understood as the human-made segment of wealth that is deployed in production to create further financial returns. Concepts such as natural capital, human capital or social capital can be used as metaphors or analogies, though even these are misleading. But the 25-year plan defines natural capital as “the air, water, soil and ecosystems that support all forms of life”. In other words, nature is capital. In reality, natural wealth and human-made capital are neither comparable nor interchangeable. If the soil is washed off the land, we cannot grow crops on a bed of derivatives.
A similar fallacy applies to price. Unless something is redeemable for money, a pound or dollar sign placed in front of it is senseless: price represents an expectation of payment, in accordance with market rates. In pricing a river, a landscape or an ecosystem, either you are lining it up for sale, in which case the exercise is sinister, or you are not, in which case it is meaningless.
Still more deluded is the expectation that we can defend the living world through the mindset that’s destroying it. The notions that nature exists to serve us; that its value consists of the instrumental benefits we can extract; that this value can be measured in cash terms; and that what can’t be measured does not matter, have proved lethal to the rest of life on Earth. The way we name things and think about them – in other words the mental frames we use – helps determine the way we treat them.
As the cognitive linguist George Lakoff points out, when you use the frames and language of your opponents, you don’t persuade them to adopt your point of view. Instead you adopt theirs, while strengthening their resistance to your objectives. Lakoff argues that the key to political success is to promote your own values, rather than appease the mindset you contest. The natural capital agenda reinforces the notion that nature has no value unless you can extract cash from it. Dieter Helm, who chairs the government’s preposterous committee, makes this point explicit: the idea that nature has intrinsic value, independent of what humans can take from it, he says, is “dangerous”. But this dangerous idea has been the motivating force of all successful environmental campaigns.
The commonest response to the case I’m making is that we can use both intrinsic and extrinsic arguments for protecting nature. The natural capital agenda, its defenders say, is “an additional weapon in the fight to protect the countryside”. But it does not add, it subtracts. As the philosopher Michael Sandel argues in What Money Can’t Buy, market values crowd out non-market values. Markets change the meaning of the things we discuss, replacing moral obligations with commercial relationships. This corrupts and degrades our intrinsic values and empties public life of moral argument.
It is also, his examples show, counterproductive: financial incentives undermine our motivation to act for the public good. “Altruism, generosity, solidarity and civic spirit are … like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise. One of the defects of the market-driven society is it lets these virtues languish.” So who will resist this parched, destructive mindset? Not, it seems, the big conservation groups. In this month’s BBC Wildlife magazine, Tony Juniper – who in other respects is an admirable defender of the living world – says he will use his new post as head of campaigns at WWF to promote the natural capital agenda.
Perhaps he is unaware that in 2014 WWF commissioned research to test this approach. It showed that when people were reminded of the intrinsic value of nature, they were more likely to defend the living planet and support WWF≈than when they were exposed to financial arguments. It also discovered that using both arguments together produced the same result as just the financial one: the natural capital agenda undermined people’s intrinsic motivation.
Has this been forgotten? Sometimes I wonder whether anything is learned in conservation, or whether the big NGOs are for ever destined to follow a circular track, endlessly repeating their mistakes. Rather than contributing to the alienation and disenchantment the commercial mindset fosters, they should help to enrich our relationship with the living world.
The natural capital agenda is the definitive expression of our disengagement from the living world. First we lose our wildlife and natural wonders. Then we lose our connections with what remains of life on Earth. Then we lose the words that described what we once knew. Then we call it capital and give it a price. This approach is morally wrong, intellectually vacuous, emotionally alienating and self-defeating.
Those of us who are motivated by love for the living planet should not hesitate to say so. Never underestimate the power of intrinsic values. They inspire every struggle for a better world.
DOT Mission, Organization and Authorities
Mission
The mission of the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) is to ensure our Nation has the
safest, most efficient and modern transportation system in the world, which improves the
quality of life for all American people and communities, from rural to urban, an
EXCERPT:
This plan seeks to unify and further professionalize emergency
management across the Nation and we invite the whole community
to join us in embracing these priorities. We must all work as one
through this strategy to help people before, during, and after disasters to achieve our vision of a more prepared and resilient Nation.
This plan reflects the ideas, suggestions, and perspectives that staff
and stakeholders have shared with me since my arrival at FEMA.
We used online forums like IdeaScale, in-person Discovery Change
Sessions with employees, and many day-to-day conversations with
disaster survivors and communities to gain a better understanding
of how we can turn great ideas into reality. We also reached out to
our state, local, tribal, and territorial partners, along with non-profit
organizations and the private s
EXCERPT:
Introduction: What the Nation Faces
Across the nation, we experience major threats nearly every year: hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, droughts,
and other serious disasters. For these events, the nation has well-established response processes where the
federal government serves as a backstop for the robust efforts of individuals, businesses, communities, and
states. Even as severe weather increases, the nation has steadily improved its ability to respond to growing
disasters and resulting outages—improving planning and coordination, hardening infrastructure, and
building strong mutual aid agreements.
The risk posed by a catastrophic power outage, however, is not simply a bigger, stronger storm. It is
something that could paralyze entire regions, with grave implications for the nation’s economic and social
well-being. The NIAC was tasked to examine the nation’s ability to withstand a catastrophic power outage
of a magnitude beyond modern experience, exceeding prior events in severity, scale, duration, and
consequence.
EXCERPT:
The electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) is a broad area of activity characterized by physically observable activities such as visible light and
lasers and unobservable phenomena such as microwaves and electromagnetic energy. EMS manifests through various frequencies and wavelengths
produced by natural sources like solar storms or artificially by hardware such
as radar or nuclear weapons. EMS impacts every domain of warfare.
On 20–22 August 2018, the Electromagnetic Defense Task Force (EDTF)
hosted an inaugural summit in the National Capital Region (NCR). The summit was designed to aid and encourage actions to recover footing where our
technological lead in EMS is being challenged. The summit was also designed
to address direct EMS threats to the United States and its allies. While some
issues have existed since the 1960s, the window of opportunity to mitigate
some electromagnetic threats is closing. Meanwhile, many existing threats
have gained prominence due to almost universal integration of silica-based
technologies into all aspects of modern technology and society
EXCERPT:
ROME RESEARCH LABS, New York – The Air Force Research Laboratory, in partnership with IBM, unveiled the world’s largest neuromorphic digital synaptic super computer July 19, dubbed Blue Raven, at AFRL’s Information Directorate Advanced Computing Applications Lab in Rome, New York.
Today, challenges exist in the mobile and autonomous realms due to the limiting factors of size, weight, and power, of computing devices – commonly referred to as SWaP. The experimental Blue Raven, with its end-to-end IBM TrueNorth ecosystem will aim to improve on the state-of-the-art by delivering the equivalent of 64 million neurons and 16 billion synapses of processing power while only consuming 40 watts – equivalent to a household light bulb.
Beyond the orders of magnitude improvement in efficiency, researchers believe that the brain inspired neural network approach to computing will be far more efficient for pattern recognition and integrated sensory processing than systems powered by conventional chips. AFRL is currently investigating applications for the technology.
EXCERPT:
The vision of a 5G network is usually that of an intricate wireless technology offering high data speeds and responsiveness on our mobile phones. Integral to the success of 5G technology is the extensive optic fibre cable (OFC) network that runs underground—5G’s characteristic higher data speeds and throughputs are greatly influenced by these heavy-duty networks that impact both the wireless side and wireline side of the infrastructure. In fact, 5G’s formidable network performance goals are heavily predicated on a massive availability of fibre connectivity, to cell sites and beyond.
