Another global biodiversity conference has come and gone. For all the effort made at giving nature a voice, in the end, the conversations still all come down to money. Yet money is not real while nature is.
After 15 biodiversity Conference of the Parties, or COPs, the starting point for negotiations remains the same: How can we be as kind as possible to nature, without giving up on growing our economies?
Herein lies the absurd paradox: We’re afraid to evolve beyond an economic system that is the cause of nature’s destruction. Instead, the world’s nations hold on tenaciously to the belief that somehow, if only we tweak things just so, the same system will lead to a different outcome: nature’s salvation.
We hear the same clarion call repeated from COP to COP by governments, private sectors, environmentalists, and academics alike: If only we could mobilize enough money, we’d be able to save nature and all her species.
We can restore and fix the damage done with an investment here or an investment there.
If we put the right price on nature, there would obviously be better outcomes.
This goes right to the heart of our relationship to nature at large; we don’t have one beyond how much money we can make.
Let’s start with the basics! Nature doesn’t need our money to be saved. That don’t impress her much. She needs humans to wake up and realize we are part of an interdependent web of relationships. Nature doesn’t need our money to restore or regenerate herself. She needs humans to realize that our inequitable, unfair, unjust, and unhinged overconsumption will hurt her for a while, until our self-destructive choices give her some new breathing room.
Let’s face it, the idea that humans can put a price tag on something we actually can’t live without is akin to throwing out good food because a hungry person doesn’t have money to avoid starvation. (Sigh!)
“Humanity is waging war on nature” is how UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently opened the COP15 Biodiversity Summit in Montreal.
Our weapon of mass destruction is our current economic system and its obsession with making more money.
We now risk winning a war we cannot afford to win.
Our relationship to the monetized world is so entrenched in every aspect of our lives, that very little room is left to relate to nature beyond its utility for us.
For most cultures throughout history, the relationship with nature was fundamentally different. Pantheons were dedicated to the spirits, voices, and magic of the natural world. Indigenous cultures, today, continue to express, and offer to share, a knowledge and experience of a more balanced and reciprocal relationship. Economies and societies have existed and can exist without the need to, as Robert J. Oppenheimer once said in reference to the atomic bomb, “become the destroyer of worlds.”
As long as “the modern world” is caught in an intoxicating loop of materialism, nature becomes a victim of our hubris, charged with providing for our short-lived pleasures and absorbing the wastes of our purposeless pursuits of monetary wealth.
Nature always wins this particular World Cup, even when we don’t let her participate.
“We have to change course and transform our relationship with the natural world,” continued the Secretary General. These are words that exemplify what is possible; that if we choose to, we can, paraphrasing U.S. President John F. Kennedy, stop asking what nature can do for us (and how much money we can extract), and instead ask what we can do for and with her.
Nature is not a toy to be displayed in a storefront to be bought and sold to keep growing a toxic economy that can only compute the worth of money.
We need to grow up our economic system in order to free ourselves to imagine, enjoy, and reciprocate what is truly priceless.
Nature is perpetually forgiving and resilient and thrives without money.
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