Economics

Extractive activities valuation and alternatives (Part II)

The form of production is still being defined by the primary products that we export, some are mineral resources, others are oil or other primary resources, but there is no change in the raw materials-exporting modality of this extractivism, and neither is our submissive form of insertion in the international market being questioned.” - Alberto Acosta
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After and before large-scale mining

How should the costs of extractive activities be quantified?

Assigning a price tag to the environmental damage is much harder than simply estimating the cost of cleaning up any spills or refill the kilometer-wide craters that would result from extractive activities. Just to give you an idea of how unrealistic any remediation plans are, Ecuacorriente, the local branch of the Canadian mining giant, has pledged a laughable 2.5 million dollars per year to rehabilitate the Mirador project area in Ecuador. This is outrageous considering the track record of mining rehabilitation: not a single mine has been adequately rehabilitated, not even in Canada. Not that any amount of money and effort is capable of putting back together an ecosystem that took millions of years to evolve, or truly compensate for people’s lives once they have been destroyed, but even if companies are legally obliged to provide proper compensation for damages, they might still not comply. This is the case of Texaco, now owned by Chevron. In Feb 2011, the oil giant was found guilty of dumping billions of gallons of toxic water throughout an area the size of Rhode Island. Chevron is legally required to pay 18 billion USD in compensation for their negligence, which decimated five indigenous communities and caused an outbreak of cancer and other oil-related diseases, threatening thousands of lives and permanently polluting their water supply and surrounding ecosystems. However, Chervon has no intention of recognizing this debt to the Ecuadorian people.

What are some direct and indirect values of natural areas?

Table 1: Utilitarian Values of Biodiversity. From "Why is Biodiversity Important" (NCEP 2003)

Just because something doesn't have a price tag doesn't mean it has no value. Only a few (direct) values have been included in the human economy, and we have barely been capable of valuing anything which is not extracted from the enviromnent (Table 1). One way to begin to wrap our minds around the dilemma of valuing nature is through the tools of ecological economics. We can explore the value of healthy ecosystems by identifying the priceless ecosystem services they provide and imagining how much it would cost (if possible) to replace them. Although there are alternatives to extractivism, the monstrous scale and infrastructure supporting the fossil-fuel industry makes it difficult to envision an alternative. Nevertheless, the value of the services that these ecosystems provide to our lives and industries is no less real. These values can and should be included into the human economy. Rather than placing our bets on industries that are certain to reduce or eliminate these benefits altogether, we could develop infrastructure to quickly identify, quantify, and maximize their value, so as to include them in the human economy. This way all Ecuadorians, nay, Earthlings (and not just those who own these industries) can "profit" from them. Below are some of the most basic, and therefore economically important functions of natural areas.

Watershed maintenance The paramos (see map above) are high-altitude grasslands whose soils act like a sponge and filter of water rushing down from the Andean mountaintops. These areas are a reservoir for lower watershed areas. They provide a useful and constant flow of filtered, low-sediment water to all the cities, industries and ecosystems that depend on them. No man-made reservoir and water treatment plant could ever provide the volume and quality of water provided by the paramos and their rivers, much less for free.

Genetic reservoirs:86% of earth's species remain unknown. It has been estimated that there are between 250,000 and 300,000 species of flowering plants, of which only about 10% have ever been evaluated for their medicinal or agricultural potential. Rainforests in particular are known to have a higher chemical diversity (a side effect of being an evolutionarily highly competitive environment) than temperate forests, for example. The applications of what we have yet to discover from biodiversity are endless: agriculture, alternative fuels, medicines, alternative materials, as an inspiration for industrial, mechanical, architectural design, etc. As Paul Stamets said, considering that fungi have been found to be able to break down components from biological weapons, conserving forests should be a matter of national security.

Supporting food independence: The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that about 75% of the genetic diversity of agricultural crops has been lost in the last century due to the widespread abandonment of genetically diverse traditional crops in favour of genetically uniform modern crop varieties. In fact, three quarters of global food production is comprised by just 12 crops and five animal species. Genetic diversity is necessary for successfully adapting to changing conditions like pests, disease, and climate change. Healthy ecosystems are necessary to support pollinator and pest predator populations, as well as keep weeds in check. Without pollinators and pest predators, people have to pollinate crops by hand and use hazardous chemicals which are detrimental to the ecosystem as well as for both farmer and consumer. The costs keep adding up.

Human health: Besides the health benefits of food, water, and shelter, biodiversity is a safeguard for human health, as both our physical and psychological health depend on on it.  Medicinal components come from life (plants, fungi, microorganisms, and animals) and they need to be discovered before we can make a synthetic version. For example, roughly 119 pure chemical substances extracted from some 90 species of higher plants are used in pharmaceuticals around the world. Similarly, various mushroom species possess potent anti-microbial properties and antiviral activity against hepatitis B, herpes simplex, HIV, influenza, pox, and tobacco mosaic virus. Furthermore, some of todays most potent anticancerigenic medicines come from fungi. Studies have shown that our cognitive abilities are also greatly improved by exposure to nature and even that  exposure to nature helps speed up recovery times for patients

Pollination, integrated pest management, carbon sequestration, oxygen production, nutrient cycling, water cycling, and climate stabilization are but some of the invaluable environmental services provided by natural areas. But if the benefits of focusing our economic activities away from extractivism don't convince you, the costs business as usual with them surely will. As Bill McKibben points out in his fantastic Rolling Stone article, "We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We'd have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid [a temperature increase of about six degrees celsius]". After all, climatic instability is costly at every level, and creating an Earth unsuitable for human life is, to say the least, antieconomic. 

Table 1 source: Laverty MF, Sterling EJ, Johnson EA, 2003. Why is Biodiversity Important? Network of Conservation Educators and Practitioners (NCEP). Center for Biodiversity and Conservation of the American Museum of Natural History. 

Occupy Wall St. - What DO we want? Turn to nature for inspiration

We don’t want higher standards of living. We want better standards of living. - Slavok Zizek at OWS Protest

The protests in New York City and around the world have given us a glimmer of hope that a new world is possible, but there is still a long road ahead. Tough questions must be raised and nobody knows where this awakening will take us. One thing is clear: the present economic system is unsustainable - financially, socially, and ecologically. Quoting McDonough and Braungart (Cradle to Cradle, 2002) as a starting point, if we set out to design the industrial revolution, retrospectively, with all of its negative side effects, our wishlist would read something like this:

Design a system of production that

  • puts billions of pounds of toxic material into the air, water, and soil each year
  • produces some materials so dangerous that they will require constant vigilance by future generations
  • results in gigantic amounts of waste
  • puts valuable materials in holes all over the planet where they can never be retrieved
  • requires thousands of complex regulations - not to keep people and natural systems safe, but rather to keep them from being poisoned too quickly
  • measures productivity by how few people are working
  • creates prosperity by digging up or cutting down natural resources and then burying them or burning them
  • erodes the diversity of species and cultural practices

So we know what we don't want, but what DO we want? In order to come up with truly desirable alternatives, we can't try to fix a system that is inherently flawed by design. Instead, we must go back to the drawing board. Biomimetism, or using natural systems as an inspiration for design, can be very helpful at this stage. The key is to realize human systems are NOT isolated entities (as traditional economics would lead you to believe with their closed loops of production & demand), but rather inextricably and productively engaged with them. This is the key difference between the growth of human economic systems and natural systems. 

Consider a community of ants. As part of their daily activities, they:

  • safely and effectively handle their own material wastes and those of other species
  • grow and harvest their own food while nurturing the ecosystem of which they are a part
  • construct houses, farms, dumps, cemeteries, living quarters, and food storage facilities from materials that can be truly recycled
  • create disinfectants and medicines that are healthy, safe, and biodegradable
  • maintain soil health for the entire planet

It may sound strange to take advice on our economic system from other species, or even from chemists and architects, but our mainstream economists have not provided any better suggestions. However, there are many economists who HAVE provided more economically, socially, end ecologically sound alternatives to our present system. Herman Daly and other proponents of ecological economics, for example, who use entropy ond physiscal laws to define what is truly "sustainable". 

With nature as an inspiration, Braungart and McDonough's biomimetic design assignment invite us to create the following:

  • buildings that, like trees, produce more energy than they consume and purify their own waste water
  • factories that produce effluents that are drinking water
  • products that, when their useful life is over, do not become useless waste but can be tossed onto the ground to decompose and become food for plants and animals and nutrients for soil; or, alternatively, that can return to industrial cycles to supply high quality raw materials for new products
  • billions, even trillions, of dollars' worth of materials accrued for humans and natural purposes each year
  • transportation that improves the quality of life while delivering goods and services
  • a world of abundance, not one of limits, pollution, and waste

This is by no means a comprehensive list of what we need, but rather a way to get our creative juices flowing at a time in human evolution when we desperately need to reinvent ourselves. Sounds like a better alternative to you too? Join the protests and have fun constructing a new world!

Biodiversity: The next environmental issue for business

Biodiversity loss is one of those excruciatingly pressing issues that most people ignore because its implications are hard to grasp with traditional linear thinking. Most people are not even aware we are living through the sixth mass extinction. Humans have already driven more species to extinction than the meteorite that wiped dinosaurs off the face of the planet. Its consequences are hard to encapsulate in bite-size pieces without undermining its intrinsic complexity; this is why it is a subject that has usually been shrouded in uncertainty, reduced to photos of charismatic megafauna, or simply ignored altogether.

A UN-backed report recently found that one in four business leaders thought the decline in biodiversity was a threat to their business growth and detrimental to profits.

“We are entering an era where the multi-trillion dollar losses of natural and nature-based resources are starting to shape markets and consumer concerns” – UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner.

This find was echoed in the latest McKinsey Global Survey results:

“…a majority of executives, 59 percent, see biodiversity as more of an opportunity than a risk for their companies. They identify a variety of potential opportunities, such as bolstering corporate reputations with environmentally conscious stakeholders by acting to preserve biodiversity and developing new products or ideas from renewable natural resources.” -McKinsey Quarterly

Running the risk of supporting greenwashing, any publicity is good publicity when it comes to raising awareness about our choices’ effects on the biosphere. However, the most successful businesses in the long run will be those that truly reinvent themselves to incorporate biodiversity conservation into their agenda. After all, considering mass extinctions are such a rare event in the history of the planet, it would seem logical that its prime time for business opportunities that address biodiversity, right?

“Respondents say consumers, followed by regulators, are the stakeholders with the most impact on the actions their companies take to address biodiversity.” – McKinsey Quarterly

I was especially pleased to see how the McKinsey Quarterly  emphasized that it is the consumer that has the most leverage to change the way we do business, above regulators even! You can change the way business is run with every dollar you spend simply through choice. Don’t sit wait for top-down solutions, because the ones on top are waiting for feedback from the bottom-up.