Thanks for your comments. I’m not sure I agree that putting a price on more and more will hasten us towards seeing the limitations of pricing. Nonetheless, it is a valid point you make that perhaps we cannot wait for a change in values before acting to head off the ecological disasters taking place in our world.

I believe it is an equally valid point to say that if we try to act on the consequences of our current values without changing those values then we will surely fail. Of course, the tension between these senses of urgency and futility defines many earnest late-night conversations between environmentalists about where realistic pragmatism lies:

If we wait for radical change we’re toast.
Without radical change we’re toast.

So where does this leave us? As toast? Or maybe simply living with this difficult tension within us as we work for change the best way we know how? Perhaps ‘being the change’ in an attempt to work on both levels at the same time?

At this point, I turn to Rilke:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.”

And yes, I must admit I was a philosopher long before I was ever a policy adviser (long before I ever did a Philosophy degree!), but if you’re after more technical detail perhaps take a look at this earlier post. I suppose the key ‘technical’ point here for me though is that both carbon and energy accounting must always remember that they are about quantities, not prices. Climate change and peak oil are fundamentally quantity problems, not price problems.

With regard to your observations in Brazil, this is something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to recently. The prompt was seeing a programme recently featuring a South American alligator farm, which takes its eggs from wild nests and keeps thousands of alligators in captivity. Although the farm takes a significant proportion of the eggs to be found in the wild, the programme argued that this was a great step forward for sustainability, as the legal alligator meat and handbags produced from such farms had destroyed the market for poachers, which had allowed alligator numbers to recover dramatically.

On the surface such arguments seem pragmatic and convincing, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was a deeper truth, especially when watching with empathy the mothers having their eggs stolen from them.

Again here I am living with questions, not answers, but what if we look at the role of humanity in this, rather than the role of the ‘goodies’ thwarting the ‘baddy’ poachers. First humanity hunts the alligators, then we imprison and use them in an attempt to stop ourselves from hunting them…

Perhaps if we begin to see the poachers (or the frontier farmers of your example) as part of ‘us’, rather than ‘them’, we start to see some deeper solutions. Why do some people poach, or destroy rainforest, when you or I do not? You would know better than me, but I strongly suspect it has something to do with economic necessity, rather than some deficit in understanding of Nature. And what causes that economic necessity? Our economic systems.

So rather than expanding those economic systems to include more and more of nature, I choose to work to reform the stories that those systems are built on, in the hope that we can learn to respect Nature for its own sake (and ours), rather than because it is the way to ‘make a living’.

Otherwise, I dread to think what those ex-poachers may be driven to next in order to feed their families, and what destruction the inhuman logic of the markets may will next.

My theory or my observation is this;
I lived in Brazil through most of the 90′s. I spent a lot of time in the Amazon, worked on the first project partnership between the Amazonian local government and Greenpeace and sat at the first meeting between the state Governor and Greenpeace where the guy was literally promising the earth. I’ve engaged in and observed many projects to preserve the forest and over all the years the first real glimmer of hope that i have seen is hundreds of frontier farmers who are now trampling over each other to preserve bits of the forest because they can get three time the price per hectar for trees in the ground compared to beef!!! and these are some of the biggest landowners of the region. This mirrored by Lula tallying up what this means in financial revenues for the country and so making unsuprisingly “bold” steps by pledging 80% reduction by 2020 in deforestation. Its not the political promise that gives me hope, it’s the fact that the funds are flowing in to motivate the landowners and money still talks and can move mountains or ever forests…

Lets transition to a world where:

“the only things, if you will, that remain sacred – are those things on which we simply and absolutely refuse to put a price”

but what about the mechanisms of the now? i thought you being involved with TEQ that you were going to offer some technical insight into the solutions rather than a philosophical piece. don’t get me wrong philosophy under pins it all but i think the transitional timeline is in reverse here?