view the documentary Banking Nature below, and then answer the question below. (There will also be a question on this in the next Quiz). We suggest you write 160-200 words for your forum post.

https://latrobe.kanopy.com/video/banking-nature

What particular approach in environmental anthropology do you think is best suited to examine the implications of monetising nature ?

Here is the Transcript of the Video:

Please read all of it then answer the discussion question form

– [Voiceover] What if economic and financial markets

00:27 could save the planet?

00:31 (birds chirping)

00:33 – We use nature because she’s valuable,

00:35 but we lose nature because she is free.

00:39 – If we invest money in protecting nature,

00:42 we’ll earn very, very high financial return.

00:46 – [Voiceover] Economists, bankers, investment funds,

00:48 and financiers are taking an interest

00:51 in the environmental crisis.

00:53 They say that they can protect

00:54 the planet their way, with money.

00:58 How much is the beach that you visit

00:59 every year actually worth?

01:01 How much for the forest that you love to walk in so much?

01:05 What is the value of a plant, a mammal, an insect?

01:09 Does this combination seem at all unnatural to you?

01:14 – Financialization equals the rape of the earth.

01:20 (monkeys chattering)

01:23 (snake hissing)

01:29 – [Voiceover] Endangered species and forests

01:31 are treated like financial products.

01:34 Can markets succeed where politics have so far failed?

01:38 But at what risk? At what price?

01:45 (crowd talking)

01:51 – Sometimes I describe the challenge that we have

01:54 as the economic invisibility of nature.

01:56 What I mean by that is that most of what nature

01:58 provides is not transacted in markets.

02:01 Whether it’s clean air or fresh water,

02:03 or whether it’s the pollination of bees for fruit trees.

02:06 When did a bee ever send you an invoice?

02:12 – [Voiceover] Billions of workers toiling away without

02:13 a break, in silence, and for no pay.

02:18 For millennia, no one recognized neither their

02:20 value nor all the work they do.

02:24 It took a tragedy for us to finally

02:26 recognize their economic value.

02:29 (buzzing)

02:34 – [Voiceover] In the US, a large part of the natural

02:37 wild bee population has died off.

02:39 The same thing is happening in Europe.

02:41 There are hundreds of people who

02:43 keep large numbers of bees.

02:46 They keep them in hives, and when

02:48 a farmer wants his field pollinated, he actually calls

02:52 one of these commercial pollination firms.

02:56 There’s a rate for hiring a million bees

02:58 for a week to pollinate your crops.

03:06 – [Voiceover] What if tomorrow they

03:08 were to disappear entirely?

03:10 What if we had to replace these bees

03:12 with humans, and therefore pay them?

03:16 – [Pavan] The pollination service of bees is economically

03:18 invisible, but the total value of that

03:21 was found to be something like 200 billion dollars.

03:24 That’s almost eight percent of the total

03:27 agricultural output on earth.

03:30 – [Voiceover] We look at these little creatures differently

03:32 now that we know that they’re worth

03:33 200 billion dollars, don’t we?

03:36 We immediately pay more attention to them.

03:39 All that wealth in a beehive,

03:42 and we humans never realized it.

03:49 But what if the solution was already here?

03:51 We just need to put a price on everything

03:53 that nature provides, pollination,

03:55 the pleasure of walking in a park, clean air.

03:59 – How much would it be worth?

04:01 Wow, that is a good question.

04:05 Hmm.

04:07 – How much would it be worth?

04:10 You can’t put a price on it.

04:11 – Can’t put a price on it. – You can’t.

04:12 You just can’t. It’s priceless.

04:14 – I want nature to be free.

04:16 Nature was there before we were, and we should learn

04:20 how to protect it, and that should not

04:22 have to do something with money.

04:24 – [Voiceover] But now, nature’s worth

04:27 is measured by its price.

04:34 Having plenty of clean air, water, and animal species

04:38 is of no interest to the markets.

04:40 They hate things that are abundant and free.

04:44 The equation is beginning to change.

04:46 – [Voiceover] Our economic system was created

04:48 in a very different era.

04:50 It was created hundreds of years ago when what was valuable,

04:53 what was scarce, were capital and labor.

04:58 So that’s what we put a value on.

05:00 All the natural resources, all the ecosystems,

05:03 all the clean air, clean water, there was too much of that,

05:07 so we didn’t put a value on it.

05:12 – [Voiceover] Nature is the El Dorado of the 21st century.

05:16 A new economic sector with promises

05:18 of huge returns for investors.

05:21 Banks, finance, corporations,

05:23 and states are attracted into it.

05:26 They all know that on a dead planet,

05:28 no one will do business anymore.

05:33 – [Ricardo] That’s fundamental economic theory.

05:36 Supply and demand, and effectively right now,

05:40 the price we’re putting on the environment

05:42 and on natural services is zero, effectively.

05:46 But that’s going to have to change as the supply

05:48 of these natural resources continues to dwindle,

05:51 and the demand in the form of people continues to grow.

05:55 (elephant trumpeting)

05:58 – [Voiceover] Applying the law of supply and demand

06:00 to natural resources and species is something new.

06:04 Until now, almost no one had ever thought of putting

06:07 life itself into the economic machine.

06:34 (train whistle)

06:36 – [Voiceover] Since the Industrial Revolution,

06:38 the world’s population has increased sixfold,

06:42 water consumption risen by a factor of three,

06:46 the amount of carbon in the atmosphere has doubled,

06:50 the global temperature has increased,

06:54 and half the world’s rain forests have disappeared.

06:59 Our ecological footprint is escalating.

07:02 To satisfy our needs, we’re using

07:05 the resources of one and a half earths.

07:08 If we continue at this rate, by 2030 we’ll need two planets.

07:13 By 2050, two and a half.

07:17 – What happens if there are very much less trees?

07:22 If there’s not the clean water we need

07:24 where we need it, when we need it?

07:26 If there isn’t the clean air where

07:28 we want it and where we need it?

07:30 That becomes scarcer, that becomes more valuable.

07:33 We’re just going to start to put a price on it.

07:35 We’re going to start to put a price on the destruction

07:37 of it, and we believe there are opportunities

07:40 in that transition, to profit from that transition.

07:45 – [Voiceover] Besides, business has already started.

07:49 About a hundred miles east of Los Angeles, there’s a fly.

07:54 Probably the most expensive fly in the world.

08:12 – Through here. Here it comes.

08:15 Right here, flying right by us. That is one of them.

08:18 Here it is again. (buzzing)

08:19 See that up there?

08:22 A century ago, there may have been on the order

08:26 of around 40 square miles of habitat.

08:32 That is essentially the distribution of the sand dune,

08:36 and over the 20th century, 95 percent of the remaining

08:41 habitat has been destroyed or converted over to other uses.

08:47 (train bell)

08:49 Only a small fraction of that five percent supports

08:53 good populations of this rare insect,

08:57 this Delhi Sands flower-loving fly.

09:03 (buzzing)

09:05 – [Voiceover] Colton County underwent

09:07 huge economic development.

09:09 Business and industry gradually swallowed the sand dunes,

09:13 while the so-called Delhi Sand flower-loving fly

09:16 had the sad honor of becoming the first American

09:19 fly on the endangered species list.

09:22 To protect it, in 1993, the state froze

09:26 all commercial activity on its habitat.

09:29 Colton’s growth dropped to zero, all because of a bug.

09:34 – The citizens here want jobs.

09:37 The citizens want retail services.

09:40 They want more businesses to be here,

09:43 and right now, we’re prevented from bringing them into town.

09:47 – [Voiceover] So the fly found itself hated by the entire

09:49 population, but one man’s misfortune…

09:52 – [Voiceover] The fly is a rare species with rare property.

09:55 It makes a very good financial investment.

09:58 We can create as much value for both our stockholders

10:01 as well as create a biological opportunity

10:04 for conservation by turning that into a mitigation bank.

10:08 So our most recent sales have been $250,000 an acre.

10:15 – [Voiceover] A bank saw an opportunity here,

10:17 a mitigation bank.

10:19 It realized that it could make money

10:21 off these useless little sand flies.

10:23 It bought a part of the fly’s habitat,

10:26 and then it did nothing, leaving the insect

10:29 to live in peace while selling shares.

10:33 If a business wants to develop a project on the land where

10:35 the fly lives, it will find itself blocked by the state,

10:39 but by buying shares, the entrepreneur can offset

10:42 his impact by investing in the insect’s protection,

10:46 and secures his right to develop his business.

10:49 The bank has already made 20 million dollars.

10:53 – [Michael] The free market tends to find out

10:54 a good balance between adequate conservation,

10:56 shareholder value, and allowing development to go forward.

11:03 – [Voiceover] A bank making money by protecting a species.

11:07 That sounds like a win-win situation, right?

11:10 But for the inhabitants, the bank is still

11:12 a fly in the ointment.

11:15 – [Greg] The fly is winning the war.

11:19 With the flies in place, we’ve lost

11:21 millions and millions and millions of dollars,

11:23 years and years and years of time.

11:26 We can’t replace what we’ve lost.

11:30 It would be cheaper to pay people to go out

11:32 and kill the flies than to mitigate.

11:34 Joke, joke. But true, but true, but true.

11:41 (trolley bell)

11:46 – [Voiceover] In the United States, species protection

11:49 is in the hands of these new bankers.

11:52 Businesses, estate agents, road builders, anyone

11:56 whose activity endangers animals, has to pay these banks.

12:03 They protect more than a million acres of land.

12:10 They sell wetlands credits, cacti credits,

12:14 prairie dog credits, even lizards credits.

12:26 Wildlands is the biggest mitigation

12:28 bank of the American west.

12:31 – Our annual revenues exceed 40 million dollars

12:34 a year in mitigation sales.

12:37 We mitigate for giant garter snake,

12:40 for salmon, steelhead, Delta smelt, splittail,

12:45 Swainson hawk, for burrowing owl, for desert tortoise,

12:50 elderberry longhorn beetle, tadpole shrimp, fairy shrimp.

12:57 Our customers are aware of the local

12:59 solutions that we can provide.

13:01 These customers will come and say,

13:03 “I’m building a shopping center and I’m affecting

13:05 “vernal pools, we’re affecting a burrowing owl,

13:09 “do you have something that can help me

13:11 “offset my requirements?”

13:13 So we take a look at our inventory, we provide

13:16 them a quotation for a solution, and then

13:19 we barter those credits to them.

13:22 It’s in a non-tangible transaction.

13:24 We give them a relief of their liability

13:27 as a certificate of goodwill.

13:32 – [Voiceover] But how do these banks choose to invest in

13:35 and protect one species rather than another?

13:40 And what happens to those endangered species

13:42 living in areas of the US where there’s nobody?

13:45 Where there’s no economic development,

13:47 and therefore, no one to buy credits?

13:51 – [Steve] Choosing between one endangered species

13:53 and another endangered species all depends on market demand.

13:59 Buying landscapes, protecting landscapes,

14:01 accumulating the landscapes, it’s a phenomenal opportunity

14:05 to be able to use a business model

14:09 to achieve sustainability of nature.

14:12 If we weren’t profitable, we wouldn’t have money

14:14 to re-invest in these future projects.

14:17 – [Voiceover] The laws of the market

14:18 applied to endangered species.

14:21 Surprising, right?

14:23 How can we let banks decide which species

14:26 are worth saving, and which one’s not?

14:30 Which ones deserve to live, and which are

14:32 to die on the order of profit?

14:38 (howling)

14:44 – [Voiceover] If you were to go on the

14:45 SpeciesBanking.com you would find

14:47 probably about 700 different banks.

14:51 It’s roughly between two and a half to three and a half,

14:56 four billion dollars a year that are in banking.

15:01 – [Voiceover] This market for endangered

15:02 species is developing.

15:05 Today, all these mitigation banks are listed.

15:08 You want to know which one protects the California

15:10 Gnatcatcher, the Tiger Salamander or the Swainson’s Hawk?

15:15 With one click, the endangered species appear

15:18 with the number of credits issued.

15:51 – Hi, I’m John.

15:54 I work for a company. A big company.

15:57 A company that still doesn’t realize it relies on nature,

16:00 which is why I’m organizing a meeting,

16:03 a big meeting, to discuss natural capital.

16:06 It’s a new idea to boost our business.

16:08 You’ve heard of financial capital, right?

16:10 So what is natural capital?

16:12 – Natural capital is capital which nature created, not us.

16:18 The climate system is natural capital.

16:20 The trees are the natural capital because they take

16:22 carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and produce oxygen.

16:25 Biodiversity is a form of natural capital.

16:30 – So let’s take a shoe.

16:32 This one’s a leather. Leather comes from cows.

16:34 To make a cow, you need grass and grain.

16:37 That’s a lot of land and a lot of water.

16:41 – [Voiceover] It provides the clean water that we need,

16:44 the healthy food that we need.

16:46 Nature, through things like forests,

16:49 provides us protection from storms or floods,

16:52 and that’s what I mean by “nature’s fortune.”

16:57 When we speak like academics, we call what

17:00 nature does for us “ecosystem services.”

17:04 – [Voiceover] So nature has become a real business.

17:07 It has its own capital, and can

17:09 offer its services to consumers.

17:12 Without rain in the Amazon rainforests, there would be

17:15 no agricultural economy in South America,

17:20 a service estimated to be worth 240 billion dollars.

17:26 – The total loss of value every year

17:29 was almost two to four trillion US dollars.

17:32 That is two to four million million US dollars.

17:36 That’s almost the same size as the loss that was suffered

17:39 in the financial meltdown in 2008,

17:42 which was about five trillion dollars.

17:44 So that gives you a sense of how big these losses are,

17:47 and yet, they are invisible, because we are not

17:49 accounting for the capital when it disappears.

17:51 When the forests disappear, when the wetland is closed,

17:54 we are not accounting for the losses

17:56 because we are not accounting for the income.

17:57 The assets are invisible. Same problem.

17:59 Economic invisibility of nature.

18:44 – [Geoffrey] There are certainly some people who feel uneasy

18:46 about putting a price on nature.

18:48 They feel that somehow nature is intrinsically invaluable,

18:53 that bringing the profit motive and associated greed

18:56 to bear on natural phenomena is somehow

18:59 just the wrong thing to be doing.

19:04 I think that’s short-sighted.

19:07 – [Voiceover] Certain others are indeed

19:08 not so short-sighted.

19:11 They have chosen their side, that of the

19:13 so-called economic efficiency.

19:17 The Ecosystem Marketplace is a non-profit company

19:20 which issues environmental economic reports.

19:23 It is growing with each passing year.

19:28 – [Michael Jenkins] And the idea was to create a

19:30 Bloomberg of environmental markets, where you had

19:33 literally all the transaction data

19:36 publicly, transparently, and credibly available.

19:39 Then that stimulates markets, so we created

19:43 what we call “The Matrix,” which really lays out

19:46 the 24 different kinds of market instruments.

19:52 – [Voiceover] The Matrix is the Bible of the markets

19:54 for ecosystem services, markets in biodiversity,

19:59 water, carbon, green tourism, genetic resources.

20:04 The Ecosystem Marketplace invented this matrix

20:08 to show the potential for growth in these new El Dorados.

20:11 For instance, 10 percent each year for biodiversity

20:15 markets, 55 percent for carbon.

20:22 – [Michael Jenkins] What we’re seeing that’s exciting

20:24 is that it’s starting to get uptake in other places.

20:28 China, Brazil, Mexico, Peru.

20:31 We’re starting to see some real interest in these kinds of,

20:35 an instrument for compensation around biodiversity laws.

20:41 – [Voiceover] This jungle in Borneo is worth

20:43 some 34 millions dollars.

20:46 The state conceded it to an investment fund

20:49 that set up the world’s largest mitigation bank.

20:53 It intends to make a profit by offering its credits

20:56 to customers, such as pension funds and insurance companies.

21:01 – [Voiceover] There’s not very much of that forest left

21:03 in Sabah, and there’s not very much left in good condition.

21:06 There’s maybe only about 80,000 hectares

21:09 of good lowland forest, they’re called

21:11 primary forests, that hasn’t been lodged.

21:14 So that’s what makes protecting this lowland forest

21:16 very important, and that’s where the main iconic

21:20 species actually live, in lowland forest.

21:23 It’s where the fruiting trees are,

21:25 so that’s where the orangutans are, the elephants.

21:34 – [Voiceover] Borneo is the third

21:36 largest island in the world.

21:38 Its forest is almost 150 million years old

21:41 and a century ago, it covered the entire island.

21:45 Today, two thirds of it have vanished.

21:53 – [Voiceover] Malua BioBank is a 34,000 hectare

21:56 forest reserve in Malaysian Borneo,

21:59 and what’s unique about this particular project

22:02 is that it seeks to take a commercial approach

22:05 rather than a charitable approach to conservation.

22:08 It’s trying to monetize the ecological value in the forest.

22:12 – [Voiceover] Palm oil plantations

22:14 have replaced the primary forest.

22:16 Today, the island is an ocean of monoculture.

22:20 The ecological catastrophe is complete.

22:23 At this rate, the last remaining organutans

22:25 will have disappeared by the end of the decade.

22:29 – [Darius] If Malua has converted their ecological value

22:33 to a monetary value, instead of being worth nothing,

22:36 and those banteng and orangutan being worth absolutely,

22:41 having no value, then the palm oil company next door

22:44 would have to pay that price in order to be able

22:47 to destroy it and develop it.

22:51 – [Voiceover] The Malua bank sells its jungle credits

22:53 to palm oil producers, and any other

22:55 food processing companies around the world

22:57 that use the oil in their products,

23:00 while forcing those who destroy primary forests

23:03 to pay for this destruction, save the great apes.

23:33 – [Voiceover] Pavan Sukhdev is the global

23:35 reference of natural capital.

23:37 He argues that there is nothing shady about putting

23:39 a price on nature, and it doesn’t mean that

23:41 it’s being turned into a commodity.

23:44 He simply hopes to make states more aware

23:46 of their ecological riches, and companies more responsible.

23:51 Pavan made his career at Deutsche Bank.

23:55 Can a banker change his own nature?

23:59 – I’m a banker.

24:01 I understand the difference between prices and values.

24:04 I also understand that nature has huge value,

24:07 which we have simply not learned how to appreciate.

24:13 – [Michael Jenkins] With a bank you look at both

24:15 the risk and the opportunity around these issues,

24:19 and I think all of them are recognizing that

24:22 natural resources are very important.

24:26 So the JPMorgan Chases, and the Merrill Lynches,

24:29 and Bank of America, all of these major banks,

24:33 they’re the institutions that invest in the businesses

24:36 that are doing the projects that are having

24:40 an effect on biodiversity, positive or negative.

24:43 They’re a very important piece of our coalition.

24:50 – [Voiceover] So that is who is behind

24:51 the Ecosystem Marketplace, who is interested

24:54 in these markets, in their potential,

24:57 and who sits on their boards and committees.

25:00 Some of the names that bring back a few memories.

25:11 – [Voiceover] When we look at the development

25:12 of biodiversity markets, we find some very

25:14 well known actors, banks in particular,

25:19 and what’s curious and scary at the same time

25:23 is that often times these are the very same banks

25:27 that were also very actively involved in the trading

25:33 that led to the last large financial crisis.

25:41 Banks, of course, don’t do that because they have,

25:46 at the heart, protection of nature.

25:50 They do that because they see a business in this.

25:54 They want to become the ones

25:56 who provide the trading platforms.

26:01 – [Voiceover] Bank of America Merrill Lynch was fined

26:03 a record 17 billion dollars by the American government

26:07 on charges linked to the subprime mortgage crisis.

26:11 JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the USA,

26:15 had to pay a 13 billion dollar fine for the same charges.

26:18 (wolf howling)

26:21 Citigroup, saved from bankruptcy by the same government,

26:24 paid hundreds of millions of dollars to escape

26:26 legal proceedings by disaffected clients.

26:30 (lion roaring)

26:32 We can even find companies set up by former employees

26:35 of Goldman Sachs, the same bank that made

26:38 billions in profit by speculating on the crisis.

26:47 Can leopards change their spots?

26:55 – [Michael Jenkins] For decades and decades, we have been

26:58 trying to save biodiversity and forests

27:04 and those things, out of the goodness of our heart,

27:06 out of the fact that we know that’s the right thing to do,

27:09 and we have failed, we have failed miserably.

27:13 I will challenge anybody in the

27:15 environmental movement about that.

27:19 – [Mark Tercek] You might even think they’re the bad guys.

27:22 Maybe they even have been the bad guys in the past,

27:25 but sometimes they were the bad guys because

27:27 they were making mistakes, they didn’t know better,

27:29 and see whether you can convert a bad guy,

27:33 or somebody who’s just not paying attention,

27:35 into being an ally, because if we can do that,

27:38 we can get so much more done.

27:40 – [Voiceover] That was the boss of one of the biggest

27:42 nature protection agencies in the US.

27:44 His remarks are somewhat surprising, aren’t they?

27:47 – [Mark Tercek] I had a really fortunate experience

27:50 when I worked at Goldman Sachs.

27:53 I had been a mainstream investment banker

27:55 for more than 20 years, and then my final position,

28:00 before I joined the Nature Conservancy,

28:01 was leading an environmental effort for the firm.

28:04 – [Voiceover] Ecologists and bankers, these are

28:06 the new faces of nature conservation.

28:09 With their economic weapon,

28:11 they have targeted the politicians.

28:13 Protecting the environment is an expensive business.

28:16 Certain areas of the planet are already contaminated.

28:20 Money has to be gotten from wherever it can be found.

28:25 – [Voiceover] When you finance biodiversity,

28:27 you can logically look to the public funds,

28:31 but at the end of the day,

28:34 many look at the public funds, and there are many

28:36 needs which you would need to address through

28:37 the public funds, so it is utmost important

28:40 that you use also private funding.

28:43 That’s why this innovative financing

28:46 mechanisms logic started to emerge.

28:51 – In Brussels, the lobbyist capital of the European Union,

28:55 you have between 15,000 and 50,000 lobbyists,

29:00 and most of them work for corporations.

29:07 The World Business Council for Sustainable Development

29:10 is a group of some 200 corporations,

29:12 many of them actually with very bad records on environmental

29:16 issues, like Rio Tinto, Shell, BP, etcetera,

29:21 and it was created in 92 with a goal

29:24 of influencing the original Rio summit.

29:36 – [Voiceover] I think we’re slowly but certainly moving

29:38 to a state where it will become

29:41 equal partners in a discussion.

29:44 Maybe I’m expressing a hope more than a reality today,

29:48 but it’s certainly a trend that I see happen.

29:51 Only if we get business and governments as equal partners

29:56 in this debate will we find the solutions,

29:59 and the scale to the solutions, that the world needs.

30:04 (jazz music)

30:07 – [Voiceover] The bet has paid off.

30:09 At the last Earth Summit, the United Nations

30:11 rolled out the red carpet for the private companies.

30:20 All these corporations met in a luxury hotel in Rio.

30:24 Oil, chemical, steel giants, themselves regularly

30:29 accused of practices harmful to the environment.

30:34 – It means we do have to, in good management sense,

30:38 explore risks and opportunities.

30:40 We have to understand our ecosystem.

30:44 – [Voiceover] Just to bring that alive a little bit,

30:46 this is the Nestle commitment to no deforestation.

30:49 I think we were the first major company

30:51 to make this kind of commitment.

30:56 – It was pretty clear to us the area that we really needed

30:59 to think about was biodiversity and ecosystem.

31:03 – [Voiceover] Dow Chemical was one of the manufactures

31:05 of Agent Orange, a herbicide used in the Vietnam War

31:08 that caused thousands of cancers and malformations.

31:12 It is also linked through the purchase of Union Carbide

31:14 to the Bhopal catastrophe, where a factory exploded

31:17 in 84, releasing 40 tons of chemicals,

31:20 killing 10,000, and causing sickness to another 300,000.

31:27 – [Belen] The same companies that belong to this group,

31:30 in their real daily activities, in their lobby towards

31:32 government, are lobbying for exactly the opposite,

31:36 are lobbying for policies that benefit their commercial

31:41 interests, that don’t affect their activities,

31:44 that they don’t need to make any structural change,

31:46 that they can keep on having devastating impacts

31:50 on communities, on the environment.

31:54 – [Janez] We want to have this partnership

31:57 with the business sector, because without that partnership,

32:01 we have practically no real chance to succeed.

32:09 – [Voiceover] It only took 20 years for the banker,

32:13 the politician, and the businessman, a symbolic trinity,

32:19 to begin speaking in harmony about the environment.

32:25 – Post-war economic history has been a very exciting time,

32:28 because it’s seen the emergence of the multi-national

32:30 corporation, but part of that emergence, and part of that

32:34 success, has been through the deregulation

32:39 and the innovations in trade in capital markets.

32:42 – So, basically I do believe that I am not talking about

32:46 environmental interests here, and that I am talking

32:49 about new industrial policy needed.

32:53 It’s actually not about green growth,

32:57 it is about growth, full stop.

33:01 Thank you.

33:02 (clapping)

33:15 (lion roaring)

33:17 – [Voiceover] So are the politicians, bankers,

33:19 and corporations all in bed together?

33:23 Is there an international plot against nature?

33:28 And what if this alliance was the only

33:30 means of saving the planet?

33:36 We would like to believe in this brave new world.

33:43 Believe that the banks and the

33:45 business corporations have changed.

33:49 Is it a metamorphosis, or just greenwash?

33:56 – I’m an ambitious guy, as you may have noticed.

33:59 I think we can do this, change the rules of the game.

34:03 I’m really looking forward to the next 10 years because

34:05 it will completely transform the way we run our economies.

34:10 We will strike a balance between financial or economical

34:14 success, natural or environmental, and social success,

34:19 and if we can do that, then the vision that I’ve

34:21 said before, nine billion people, all living well

34:26 within the boundaries of the planet,

34:28 will become a reality, because that’s how,

34:30 with a measured way, our economy performs.

34:37 – [Voiceover] The promise of additional profits,

34:39 coupled with a desire to improve their image,

34:41 has certainly encouraged some businesses

34:43 to commit themselves to preserving the environment.

34:47 Vale is a mining giant, and a member of the

34:50 World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

34:53 The corporation operates in 38 different countries.

34:57 Its train is an institution in Brazil.

35:01 Over 500 miles, from the heart of the Amazon

35:03 to the Atlantic ocean, the company transports the people

35:08 (train horn)

35:12 and 100 million tons of iron ore every year.

35:18 Aware of its ecological impact, the company decided

35:21 to reforest certain areas of the Amazon.

35:26 It has already replanted over 100,000 acres of trees

35:30 with a further 400,000 acres in the pipeline.

35:44 (clapping)

35:47 – [Voiceover] And yet in 2012, Vale received the

35:49 Public Eye award, the prize for corporate irresponsibility.

35:54 – With these nominations, some of the worst

35:56 examples of corporate irresponsibility

35:58 in the last year have been identified.

36:01 What is needed is not just the recognition of what is wrong

36:04 with, say, their environmental and labor practices,

36:08 but systemic improvements.

36:10 I hope that these awards will raise consciousness

36:13 of some of the kinds of worst practices

36:16 that are going on in the world today.

36:19 (yelling)

36:20 – [Voiceover] What did Vale do to deserve such an award?

36:24 What did Vale do to trigger the creation

36:26 of an international victim’s organization

36:29 while spending more than a billion dollars

36:31 each year promoting sustainable development?

36:38 Along its railway track, there are, amongst other things,

36:42 five factories working 24 hours a day

36:44 transforming the ore into cast iron, in the process

36:48 spitting out foul-smelling and hazardous smoke,

36:52 and just below, there’s a village.

37:56 – [Voiceover] In the heart of the Amazon,

37:58 the multi-national operates the planet’s most important

38:00 iron ore mine, and even if Vale plants trees to offset

38:04 its impact, it also knows how to transform

38:07 its good deeds into profitable shares.

38:11 These investments allow it to be listed

38:13 on the Sustainable Development index of the stock exchange.

38:17 However, while claiming to replant the Amazonian forest,

38:21 Vale is only growing a single species of tree, eucalyptus.

39:03 – [Voiceover] In 30 years, all the land

39:05 with eucalyptus will become barren.

39:09 Until then, the financial markets will have

39:11 rewarded Vale for their green investment.

39:14 Ultimately, the multi-national will make even more profit

39:17 by selling its trees for biofuel.

39:21 Disguising a monoculture into

39:23 a millennia-old Amazonian rainforest.

39:26 This is one of the great deceptions of the green economy,

39:30 a lie that consists in claiming

39:32 that markets can protect biodiversity.

39:35 – Biodiversity markets are not an entirely new invention.

39:41 There are other types of markets

39:44 with parts of nature that we can look to

39:47 to see how they function, and who wins and who loses

39:52 when those markets are put in place.

39:55 (crowd talking)

39:59 – [Voiceover] In December 97, a majority

40:01 of countries signed the Kyoto Protocol.

40:04 They accepted the risks brought by climate change,

40:07 and committed themselves to reduce

40:09 their greenhouse gas emissions.

40:13 They also put in place market mechanisms to encourage

40:16 businesses to offset their impact on the environment.

40:20 That’s why Western companies began investing in protecting

40:22 nature or planting forests in developing nations,

40:26 from small businesses to huge multi-nationals.

40:31 Uganda has attracted some of these carbon investments.

40:37 – [Voiceover] To get the volumes and the amounts

40:39 of carbon that you have, you need to measure the trees.

40:44 Like diameters, heights, and then you get those values

40:49 and feed them to the formula to get

40:51 the carbon quantities that we have.

40:57 – [Voiceover] These men work in a profession

40:59 that did not exist before the signing

41:00 of the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change.

41:07 They are carbon hunters.

41:10 – Height to is 20.6.

41:13 – [Voiceover] Each ton of CO2 stored

41:15 in the trees equals one carbon credit.

41:18 – 25 point zero.

41:20 – [Voiceover] Credits which a German company

41:22 offers to the international market.

42:18 – [Voiceover] In the past, this plantation land

42:21 was used often illegally by the villagers,

42:24 but in such a poor country, these people grew just enough

42:27 to eat or to sell at market, or to feed their cattle,

42:30 but everything changed with the arrival of Global Woods.

42:41 Vacancies for Forest Security Manager.

42:44 The jobs are to ensure that a forest plantation

42:46 stays free of damage caused by illegal grazing.

42:49 Abilities and qualifications, trained in policing

42:53 or army skills, including martial arts.

43:02 This is the main solution offered by international

43:05 politicians and the markets to protect the planet.

43:09 The developed nations pay to have trees planted,

43:12 rather than trying to change their ways.

43:17 But how should land be used?

43:19 To live on and grow food, or to replant trees?

43:23 In order to protect the forests in various locations

43:26 in Africa, the villagers have been expelled,

43:29 and their homes burned to the ground.

43:34 In Honduras, dozens of farmers have already died

43:37 protesting against these sorts of expulsions.

43:43 How can trees be worth more than people?

43:54 But for now, nothing can stop the charge

43:57 of the raging bull of Wall Street.

44:03 It has barely a second thought for who it tramples underfoot

44:06 when it finds new sectors in which to make money.

44:42 – They use speculation as if it were a bad word.

44:47 I don’t necessarily see speculation as always a bad thing.

44:51 Basically, what speculation is, is people taking risks,

44:56 and hopefully, the people who are taking the risks

44:59 can assume the risks if they don’t pan out.

45:03 Already we’ve seen millions of dollars being invested

45:06 in projects that protect forests, why?

45:10 Because people are hoping that they will be able

45:12 to make money selling carbon credits in the future.

45:15 They’re not making money now.

45:16 Most of them are not making money now. They’re speculating.

45:24 – [Geoffrey] During my lifetime, we’ve had plenty

45:25 of stock market crashes, so could these environmental

45:28 markets be liable to crashes of the same sort?

45:31 The answer is yes, in principle they could, and in fact,

45:33 we’ve actually lived through one of these recently.

45:36 – [Voiceover] Because the price of carbon

45:37 on the markets has collapsed, from around

45:40 30 dollars a ton to less than three.

45:43 How can we entrust our future to a market that sometimes

45:46 recognizes the value of nature, and sometimes doesn’t?

45:51 – The Bank of America Merrill Lynch and the World Bank

45:53 have announced a plan to offer World Bank green bonds…

45:59 – [Voiceover] Major banks and businesses have offered

46:01 “green bonds,” a monetary product

46:04 invented by the World Bank.

46:07 They have already issued tens of billions of dollars

46:10 worth of bonds in order, they say, to redirect

46:13 finance to serve the environment.

46:17 What is the guarantee that this so-called

46:19 green finance will benefit the planet?

46:28 – The likelihood that banks, traders,

46:35 will be developing the hardware and software

46:39 of this new market in a way that benefits them

46:43 rather than benefits nature will be the same

46:48 as was the case in the financial crisis, 2008, 2009.

46:55 These financial derivatives, financial products that were

46:59 being traded very rapidly, were not helping

47:02 house owners to safely finance their home.

47:07 No, they were developed and used

47:11 to increase the profits that banks could make.

47:15 – [Voiceover] This is where the financial crisis started.

47:18 The banks played on the dream of owning your own home.

47:22 In the USA, they used the promise of this illusion

47:25 to lure modest households with precarious finances.

47:29 Once the families were no longer able to repay their loans,

47:33 the house of cards collapsed, leading to the subprime crisis

47:37 that made millions of Americans homeless.

47:40 The world tipped into a social crisis.

47:44 – [Voiceover] Well, we’ve seen the consequences

47:46 of financialization, we’ve seen the collapse of Wall Street.

47:50 We are witnessing around the world,

47:52 this hungry money, which is only looking at how

47:56 to make the next profit, devastating economies,

47:59 devastating ecosystems, devastating the planet.

48:04 For them to say that the reason the planet

48:09 is being destroyed is because there wasn’t a price,

48:11 all we have to do is a map.

48:14 Wherever there was a price, the minerals

48:17 have been mined, the earth has been raped.

48:21 Where there was reverence and respect,

48:24 nature stands in high integrity.

48:26 The evidence is very, very clear.

48:29 Price has led to degradation and destruction.

48:31 Pricing and financialization is a disease

48:35 that we have to overcome.

48:37 It’s like a cancer on this planet and in the human mind.

48:49 – [Voiceover] But what is the connection between

48:50 junk bonds, speculators, and houses,

48:53 and forests, insects, and orangutans?

48:58 In the past, when people wanted to buy a property,

49:00 they went to their bank to ask for a loan.

49:03 The bank would assess their ability to repay the loan.

49:06 The financial crisis made everyone realize

49:09 that loans were no longer just the domain of banks.

49:13 In fact, household debts are transformed into securities,

49:17 bought by investors, then split up and mixed in

49:19 with other debts to create derivatives more or less risky,

49:23 therefore more or less profitable,

49:25 and finally put onto financial markets.

49:28 One day, too many homeowners were unable

49:31 to continue paying back their debts,

49:33 triggering a flood of bankruptcies.

49:36 The world then discovered that some investors had speculated

49:39 on the inability of homeowners to repay their loans.

49:44 – It’s not that big a stretch of an imagination

49:48 to use the same logic of dividing up

49:54 the biodiversity credits, and dividing up

49:57 biodiversity, in a sense, and saying,

50:00 “You can now speculate on

50:06 “the future date of extinction of that species.”

50:10 (crowd talking loudly)

51:26 (dog whining)

51:30 – Yes, securitizations are sometimes bad,

51:32 and they led to the financial debacle.

51:34 Those were bad securitizations,

51:35 but securitizations also can be very, very good.

51:38 That doesn’t mean there should be no securitizations.

51:39 That means we must work harder, but just because

51:42 there’s a chance of something going wrong,

51:44 or just because there’s a chance that someone

51:45 might not like it, should we stop and not do it?

51:48 I think that would be a foolhardy mistake.

51:51 (birds chirping)

51:54 – [Voiceover] But if things were to go wrong,

51:56 what would the consequences be this time around?

51:59 Is there a level of acceptable risk?

52:03 Investment funds are already proposing species portfolios.

52:08 You could choose 50 orangutan, 30 fly, or 40 locust credits.

52:14 The Amazon rainforest is already listed

52:17 on the world’s first green stock exchange.

52:21 – [Jutta] Some people will say, “Well, but this is

52:24 “all conspiracy, this is not going to happen.

52:26 “This is not the purpose of nature accounting.

52:29 “We don’t want that.”

52:31 But how will they prevent this kind of development?

52:34 Once the methodologies are there to start speculating,

52:39 to start trading biodiversity?

52:43 You provide the instruments, and the use of those

52:47 instruments will be out of your hands.

52:52 – [Voiceover] At stake is our future on the planet.

52:55 Can we really mortgage that out,

52:57 and place it on the financial markets?

53:01 Lots of banks have committed to protecting species

53:04 for just 50 years, just enough time to make a profit,

53:08 yet just a speck of dust as far as the earth is concerned.

53:38 – [Vandana] We need to learn to get out

53:40 of the valuation on the market, which is only price,

53:43 where everything has a price and nothing has value,

53:46 to everything of nature having value,

53:48 and not being measured in price,

53:50 and finding other ways for humanity,

53:52 as humanity, for most of its history, has done.

53:56 It has not related to nature’s values through price.

54:04 – [Voiceover] The world of finance toyed with

54:06 the homes and households of America,

54:08 sparking a crisis around the world.

54:11 Only a handful of experts foresaw the danger

54:14 of the mechanisms we engendered.

54:16 Now we all know.

54:18 The same recipes are applied,

54:20 but this time their toy is nature.

54:23 Is it a good idea to leave the planet in their hands?

54:30 (dramatic music)