 Hello and welcome. I'm Lynne Fries, producer of Global Political Economy, or GPE NewsDocs. Today's guest is John Bellamy Foster. He'll be talking about the financialization of the Earth as a new ecological regime, a regime where the rapid financialization of nature is promoting a great expropriation of the global commons and the dispossession of humanity on a scale that exceeds all previous human history, and which is accelerating the destruction of planetary ecosystems and of the Earth as a safe home for humanity, all in the name of saving nature by turning it into a market. Our guests, monthly review articles, The Defense of Nature, Resisting the Financialization of the Earth, and Nature as a Mode of Accumulation, Capitalism in the Financialization of the Earth, detail this argument. Joining us from Oregon, John Bellamy Foster is Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon, an editor of monthly review. He's written widely on political economy and is a major scholar on environmental issues. He's author of numerous books, including Marx's Ecology, Materialism and Nature, The Great Financial Crisis, Causes and Consequences, The Ecological Rift, Capitalism's War on the Earth. A forthcoming book, Capitalism in the Anthropocene, Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution, is coming soon from monthly review press. Welcome, John. Glad to be here. We'll be talking about your thoughts on how the financialization of nature is capitalism's most catastrophic regime to date, a new ecological regime. And I take it you think this is at the heart of what came out of the 2021 Climate Change Conference negotiations in Glasgow. Yeah, ironically, during COP26 in Glasgow, everybody was watching that to sort of see well with governments and the powers to be take action to protect the earth. And the main thing that came out of Glasgow was actually these plans for the financial takeover of the earth in the name of saving nature. And the entire conservation sector globally has now bought into these policies of financialization. This was really the main product of the Glasgow meetings all being done by capital with support of governments. But there is no public discussion anywhere of this. There is no country where this has been subjected to democratic processes or even conversations. There's no dialogue on this. Capital is just proceeding to buy up ecosystem services to create financial vehicles where they'll be able to control natural capital and to accumulate on the basis of it and to run natural services on this basis with the idea of accumulating wealth. Connect the dots from capital's need for a new asset class around 2009, around the peak of the great financial crisis, to the current trajectory of the financialization of nature as a new ecological regime. The world went through a global financial crisis in 2007 to 2010. And one of the problems in terms of financial instability obviously is that there are not enough underlying asset to support the financial expansion of the system, which is going on at extreme levels. So we're piling up debt in relation to the world economy, but the debt doesn't really have sufficient material foundations, revenue streams underlying it. So capital is searching for new revenue streams. And after the 2007 to 2010 financial crisis, they started looking increasingly at ecosystem services, what we could call nature and nature services as a material basis for financialization. So there's this very rapid, ongoing financialization of nature that is now occurring where natural services, ecosystem services are being turned into forms of exchange value that can be the basis of financialization, all in the name of saving the global environment. And there was a big change that occurred in the fall of 2021 between September and November in the context of the UN climate negotiations where three new initiatives were introduced or brought to the forefront. And one is the global financial network for net zero, which brings together all the big financial corporations, all the big banks and hedge funds and so on all came together combining let's say $130 trillion in assets. These are all the basically the Western banks and hedge funds. And they claimed that they were going to organize to financialize nature in order to produce a net zero carbon economy globally. And the month before the New York Stock Exchange together with the intrinsic exchange group introduced a new asset class on the New York Stock Exchange called natural capital assets that really had to do with this process of creating structured financial vehicles to create revenue streams from ecosystem services that could then be financialized and debt built upon them and so on, all in the name of again saving nature. And finally in the climate negotiations itself they basically agreed on a plan for a world carbon trading mechanism that had been introduced in the 2015 Paris agreement that all the details hadn't been worked out. So then this established at least the basis for a global carbon trading mechanism which would again financialize nature. And this has resulted in a huge expansion just in the last few months of attempts to financialize the earth to turn ecosystem services really basic ecosystem services like photosynthesis and production of oxygen from the environment and things like that into monetary assets exchange value that capital can own or at least maybe nation states will own and capital will essentially manage. And this can turn into financial assets essentially corporations would own what nature does not just owning land I mean the governments would still probably own the land but capital would own the services that nature provides and would manage it for enormous amounts of money that this is big accumulation as the intrinsic exchange groups said in their views if discounted over the century ecosystem services are worth four quadrillion or four thousand trillion dollars all for the taking. We should also note these initiatives target the global south as you say basically because the global south is where financial gains from the expropriation of the earth and the name of management of natural capital and offsets are the greatest in your articles details ways this targeting is done for example the 2021 Glasgow Alliance for net zero initiative to clear up front that carbon mitigation financing to be made available for developing countries comes with strings attached so financing will depend on developing country willingness to fully open their economies to global capital and in the case of the agreed plan for carbon trading and in the designs to promote a world market and offsets the 100 billion dollars developed countries promise to direct to the global south is subject to debt leverage by multinational monopoly finance capital just to clarify what we're talking about here with the financialization of nature and accumulation of nature are you saying that in general that involves the creation of financial claims so titles over natural assets and ecosystems environmental services of various kinds that can then be traded and leveraged is that basically what you mean by the financialization and accumulation of nature finance is really based on the promotion of debt and from one perspective money itself is a debt but finance is based on the promotion of debt and that means leans on the future revenue streams from underlying asset what the debts represent or what the creditors get is revenue streams into the future so essentially it means you're selling whatever nature provides or revenue streams well into the future in a lot of these proposals it's selling off what nature would produce or the revenue it would generate if it's reduced to exchange value over the next century or two and it's it's very dangerous we look back to 2007 2010 the the great financial crisis the whole financial system was really in danger of collapsing and the structural changes that occurred at that time in this is related to economic stagnation are really still there the financialization the growth of the debt economy is in many ways at a much more extreme level than it was in 2007 and we're looking at other financial crises that could occur another conceivable great financial crisis this is because we we create these debt bubbles which expand the economy but eventually the bubble bursts and the consequences are there and our economies are growing slowly but there we're also expanding the debt bubble at the same time and so we're in this sort of stagnation financialization trap well then if you try to financialize the whole of nature and try to run ecosystem services under capitalist principles regulated by structural investment vehicles you're basically bringing nature into this financial bubble but it's absurd because the laws of nature we can talk about the laws of nature as the scientific world does meaning the biogeochemical processes of the earth system do not operate like capitalist markets and actually attempts to monetize nature and treat it as a financial asset as an economic asset a stream of income in which we can impose debts and this will create revenue according to the power of capital and at the same time save nature it's really a fairy tale I mean it's worse than a fairy tale it's a complete fetish of capital and nature John Maynard Keynes once said that we're in trouble when the underlying productive economy becomes a bubble on the financial system but we're now creating in a situation where the earth itself is going to be turned into a bubble on the financial system which itself is a speculative enterprise there's a famous statement by 19th century chartist Dunning in his book on the trade unions that Marx quotes in volume one of capital where Dunning says that capital will do such and such for 12% rate of return and it'll do even more it will transgress laws for say a 50% rate of return but for a 300% rate of return it will lie and destroy and it's willing to sell off humanity and the earth itself and he points to the slave trade and I think that's what we're in the situation the returns are so great that capital is really mesmerized by this notion that ecosystem services discounted and projected over this whole century are worth four quadrillion dollars and then they can go in and have a piece of this and the fact that this is so destructive is ignored and also what they're doing is taking ecosystem services not from the population of the earth as whole even but more immediately they're taking nature away from indigenous populations in Africa for example is claimed that 90% of the land is essentially untitled which capital can take over and reap the natural capital and ecosystem services reason for this is it's a legacy of colonialism so that after the colonial period in the post colonial period it was sort of recognized that indigenous communities had common rights to the land that they lived on throughout history but they didn't have any actual title leaders had sort of vague common rights while the governments were given like every government was seen as actually having the final right to all of the land in a country and what's happening is that the indigenous claims to the land are being kind of removed they are not treated as having the same basis as private property and so these lands can be expropriated in land grabs and a lot of this is now in order to gain hold of natural capital and ecosystem services and it's it's ripe for corruption my article starts out with a massive case of corruption over natural capital in Malaysia's Borneo state of Sabah so we're seeing struggles of indigenous people over this financialization of the earth as well. John, I'll quickly round off for viewers on points you just made about the struggle of indigenous peoples and the innate power of capital first on the fairytale of the innate power of capital and so leans on the future production of the economy as ecological economist Herman Daley has put it to cite a few lines from your defensive nature article quote the capitalist growth economy while continuing to profit in the course of its creative destruction is ultimately faced with physical limits of an earth system which does not like compound interest increase exponentially real physical wealth emanating from nature and ultimately derived from solar energy is subject to the entropy law and cannot generate endless rapid growth as in the case of symbolic monetary debt the conflict between finance-based economic expansion and the ecological basis of society is thus inevitable in the context of struggles of indigenous peoples to cite the same article quote this struggle is occurring on all three continents of the global south and in regions of the global north an indication of how close the ties are between neocolonialism and the natural capital juggernaut and as you say in these articles the financialization of the earth is promoting a great expropriation of the global commons and the dispossession of humanity on an unprecedented scale give us now some big picture context and also historical context on your ecological critique of how financialization is also an expropriation well Karl Marx once said and this is a paraphrase but it's very close to what he said he says nobody owns the earth not even all the people on the planet own the earth we hold it in trust as good heads of the household for future generations for the entire chain of human generations you know in terms of humanity if anyone has a right to the earth to the planet it's all of us together or certainly we hold it in trust for the future to sell it off to private services is another matter altogether um Carl Polanyi the great economic anthropologist once said that converting nature into real estate was the most extreme convention of our ancestors but now we're going to step further it's not about ownership of land but it's the selling off and integration into the financial world of all that nature does all of its ecosystem services across the planet and parceled out and turned into debts and derivatives and revenue streams which will be owned by capital things that were previously considered the free gifts of nature will now be owned by financial interests and private financial interests that means a few will own ecosystem services and the rest of the population of the earth will be dispossessed speaking now in the context of a system of production explain more about the term expropriate so what exactly does that mean expropriate basically means taking without return we have to take from nature in our production and there's nothing wrong with the free appropriation of nature on behalf of humanity as a whole there is a problem when nature is treated as a free gift to capital as nothing but a means to capital accumulation and there's a problem when the appropriation of nature doesn't occur in a sustainable way that is there's no reciprocity there's no giving back in any way so that it becomes a form of robbery you're taking without replacing and that always results in destruction and our system basically does that now there are resources that are irreplaceable that that can be replaced permanently set out how we can use all resources sustainably and we have to conform to those rules or we're really destroying the ecological basis of our own existence ecologists talk about the tap and the sink the tap refers to what we extract from nature we also have the problem of the sink that is where do we dispose of the waste from production and carbon dioxide emissions are basically a waste from production which on a small scale wouldn't really be very important there I mean carbon dioxide is part of our own respiratory system but in on the scale in which missions are occurring today and concentrating carbon in the atmosphere we're producing climate change which is threatening civilization and and the very existence of humanity when we think about production we have to think about not only the tap that is the extraction we also have to think about the sink where the waste go and there are rules in terms of sustainability and we can live on the planet with these limitations but capitalism is not geared to anything like that it has one goal and that's the profit motive or the accumulation of capital or the increase in stockholders equity however you want to look at it that's what drives capital it really doesn't see anything else and in the process of growing even as our economy grows we're destroying the natural system around us which is the very basis of our existence you point out that in Marx's view it was necessary in any critique of capitalism to understand not only the enormous productive forces generated by capital but also the negative destructive side of capitalism's interaction with the environment and for this Marx placed an emphasis on natural science and this emphasis can be seen in his treatment of capitalist agriculture where Marx was the first major economist as you say to incorporate concepts like metabolism and the laws of thermodynamics into the analysis of production your argument being ecological thought has deep roots in the 19th century and the influence of Karl Marx talk about those deep roots of present-day ecological thinking in the beginning of the 19th century around 1815 i think the natural scientists working mainly in physiology started to develop analyses of cell metabolism and so this was very important in development of biology and physiology and Marx had a friend Roland Daniels who was a physician scientist most of the many of the scientists in those days came out of being physicians and Daniels wrote a book called the micro cosmos which had only one reader and that was Karl Marx it wasn't actually published until the 1980s in Germany i think but Marx read it and Daniels had used the concept of metabolism in a broader ecological sense to look at the systemic relations between plants and animals and the earth so he was using metabolism as a systems ecology concept beginning to do that at the same time the concept of metabolism was also being used in the development of thermodynamics especially the first law of thermodynamics on the conservation of energy so metabolism was being used in that sense and justice von Liebig who was the leading german chemist and very influential agricultural chemist introduced the notion of metabolism in looking at the disruptions that were occurring in agriculture at the time as a result of industrialized agriculture at any rate in the 1850s really under the influence of Daniels Marx began to use the concept of metabolism as a systemic concept and he introduced the notion of social metabolism and he developed this analysis in his critique of political economy and in capital so he was the one who introduced the notion of social metabolism and social metabolism was really related to the labor and production process so that in in engaging in in the labor process and in production human beings were transforming their relation to the earth they were taking what nature provided and transforming it and in the production of course transforming themselves and society but Marx made this powerful social ecological connection unlike any other thinker in his time or maybe even in our own where the understanding of production with his whole class analysis and so on his whole social analysis was unified with ecological analysis through the concept of social metabolism and not only that he introduced a concept called the universal metabolism of nature Marx didn't talk just about nature he talked about natural processes in terms of metabolism and he talked about the universal metabolism of nature basically what we would call earth system processes today under capitalism he argued the social metabolism was alienated so we had a destructive relation to nature the social metabolism came in conflict with the universal metabolism of nature and in those cases what happened was a rift between human beings and nature Marx wrote of the irreparable rift in the interdependent social metabolism between humanity and nature and we call this the metabolic rift and his theory of ecological crisis which was very pronounced and connected to his whole critique of the social system is really defined by this analysis of the metabolic rift Marx's usage of metabolism actually influenced other thinkers in his time and afterwards for example the leading british natural scientist the leading british biologist really a zoologist eray Lancaster starman and huxley's protege was also a close friend of marx Lancaster was the leading developer of an ecological crisis analysis in the late 19th and early 20th century and this same ecological systems approach which was rooted in metabolism gave rise to the concept of ecosystem which is our our main ecological concept and that was developed by Lancaster's student the botanist Arthur tansley and working in in conjunction with systems theory developed by marx's mathematician hyman levy but building on this conception metabolism and this all goes forward from there so that we now speak of the earth system metabolism so marx's approach is completely integrated with science ecological science down to the present day operates with these same conceptions i'll have another stab at some of your essential argument on how financialization is also an expropriation and related to the rubbing of nature you refer to earlier so take us through the 19th century concept of rubbing the soil into the present whereas you write in the defense of nature article that quote the original expropriation has metamorphosed into a planetary juggernaut a robbery system encompassing the entire earth leading to a more universal dispossession and destruction and with respect to the original expropriation to cite the nature as motive accumulation article quote the expropriation of the commons its simplification division violent seizure and transformation into private property constituted the fundamental precondition for the historical origin of capitalism and what carl marx referred to is the original expropriation of the commons in england and in much of the world generated the concentrations of wealth and power that propelled the late 18th and early 19th centuries industrial revolution and as written in parenthesis this original expropriation often involved in various forms of slavery and forced labor so in a nutshell from the original expropriation to the great expropriation explain this reference to the robbery of nature in the book the robbery of nature that brett clark and i wrote together we connected the issue of the rift the metabolic rift to the issue of the robbery of nature going back to marx and his discussions in capital on elsewhere and to justice fun lee big and others we argued that the rift the metabolic rift or the rift in the metabolism between human beings and nature was a product of the robbery of nature not addressing the need for reciprocity and sustainability in the relation to nature so taking from nature and not giving back is a form of theft or robbery expropriation in fact so expropriation is a form of robbery stealing but not just nature it's some expropriation of human bodies in many cases we look at at slavery we look at the oppression of women problems of social reproduction and these kinds of issues the oppression of women slavery the super exploitation of people in the global south are all issues of robbery and the the seizure of course of the financialization of nature land grabs these are all forms of expropriation that then create the basis of private property capital accumulation and capitalism constantly seeks to expropriate people resources land nature in order to expand its system so the robbery of nature is integral to the problem of the metabolic rift metabolic rift marx explained originally in terms of the soil crisis in england and elsewhere in the 19th century where industrial capitalist agriculture was intensively removing nutrients such as nitrogen phosphorus and potassium from the soil in the food and fiber that was being exported to the urban center with the concentrated industrial population and the nutrients which were being shipped in the food and fiber hundreds and maybe thousands of miles to the cities did not return to the soil again so they had to try and get bones from the Napoleonic battlefields and the catacombs of Europe to have natural fertilizer for the soil and and guano from Peru establishing the whole massive guano trade where they use Chinese labor basically expropriating their bodies and killing them off very rapidly in order to get the guano the bird droppings to fertilize soil in england which was being depleted by industrial agriculture and this kind of robbery of the soil is a model of how capitalism robs resources and land everywhere taking without putting back not following ecological principles ignoring permaculture building monocultures and basically destroying the earth so the robbery is the source of really the metabolic rift itself and that rift between human beings and nature is how we can understand ecological crisis it's all rooted in the system of production the capitalist system of production which has now been globalized and financialized and is really driving the world to the wall the capitalist system of production as we all know is based on commodity production for exchange value and endless capital accumulation so a treadmill of exchange profit and accumulation your monthly review articles clarify how the concept of natural capital originally arose as a defense against the capitalist system of production for exchange value briefly explain that and then the related concept of the lotterdale paradox you have to go back really to the 19th century and the the concept of natural capital was introduced by socialists and radicals in opposition to the expropriation of nature in their time the turning of nature into exchange value which in our terms was at a fairly crude level but land was being taken over and and turned into exchange value being turned into capital the concept of natural capital was opposed to the turning of all of nature in in in those days they were thinking simply of land and raw materials into cash and to exchange value into the cash nexus they argued that we had a natural capital stock that we had to protect and they saw it in use value terms that is natural material use value terms we had to protect this stock of nature they argued that if if nature which was the essential basis of human existence the material nature and the land and the resources and the forests and so on were brought into the system of exchange value under capital which they were seeing happening in their day and land turned into real estate markets and so on private real estate markets that this would destroy the basis of natural existence on which we depend you see figures like Ebenezer Jones and his famous book on on the land in england and figures like Carl Marx arguing for a conception of natural capital that's based on use value on not exchange value Marx later abandoned the notion of natural capital because he he thought that it led to the notion of the of the naturalization of capitalism and so he adopted a different vocabulary distinguishing between earth matter or nature and earth capital that is when capital takes over nature and turns it into exchange value and there's a notion known as the lauderdale paradox named after the earl of lauderdale in the early 19th century and he developed this notion that capitalism but he didn't use the term capitalism but it was implicit and the term didn't really didn't exist at that time he was talking about natural material use values constituting public wealth like the water the forests crops he argued that capitalism or the system of private exchange since it depended on exchange depended on scarcity that things only really had had value or could be marketed if they had a price and the price depended on scarcity so that water that was freely available and abundant did not have a price had no exchange value and the air had no exchange value because it was abundant freely available you could apply this to other aspects of nature and they were actually kind of free gifts and capitalism came in and one of the things that it it does in order to make an exchange value economy and profit off it that they want to make these resources scarce in one way you make them scarce is just by creating private ownership and private monopolies which then can restrict the access of others to the resources if their wells for water if somebody comes in and takes it over and it becomes a private monopoly they can charge money for water and so the private economy worked at destroying public wealth in various ways and systematically works at that in order to create private markets and Ebenezer Jones and land monopoly talked about what would happen if the air and the vicinity of London were turned into a private market he was writing in the early 19th century so this wasn't really the case but we can understand now and all of these thinkers argued that nature had to be seen as a natural material use value the basis of our existence and it could not be reduced to exchange value to the cash and excess of the market without destroying the basis of our existence and that was how the concept of natural capital erode the emphasis was on unnatural that this was a stock within nature and a permanent stock on which we depended so as you write in your nature's emotive accumulation article this concept of natural capital rooted in use value was to quote reintroduced into the economic discussion in the 1970s and 1980s beginning with Schumacher's Smallest Beautiful to highlight the liquidation of natural capital stock as a failure of the first order of the modern economic system this representing the view of ecological economics and you also explain in a thermodynamic based tradition ecological economists initially inspired by Nicholas George Q. Rogan's 1971 publication the entropy law and the economic process also embraced this notion of natural capital and what did it as you say to the notion of critical natural capital and conformity with what's known as the strong sustainability postulate an approach which established limits to growth and determined sustainability and biophysical so use value terms and critical to this were the three principles of sustainability introduced by Herman Daley that you referred to earlier the first principle was for renewable sources the second a non-renewable source and the third for a pollutant you go on to write in the same article that quote the basic elements of Nicholas George Q. Rogan's thermodynamic critique of neoclassical economics were accepted from the start by Marxist economists and viewed is consistent with Marxian tradition though lacking a social critique so talk now about the neoclassical response to all this and other approaches inspired by other prominent like-minded figures like Howard Odom for example in other words talk now about the neoclassical response to an ecological economics tradition in which the concept of natural capital was rooted in use value terms. Neoclassical economists worked on turning this into an exchange value concept in the beginning of this century neoclassical economics sort of took over ecological economics to a large extent which had been a dissident tradition and reduced the natural capital concept to a concept of exchange value and that is to measure be measured as capital in monetary terms to be monetized asset the notion of use value of nature as constituting use value really isn't present at all in neoclassical economics which doesn't use the concept of use value so basically there was this switch and part of the switch was associated with the calculations they made of ecosystem services and of natural wealth and once those calculations were made on largely bogus grounds because they were turning into hypothetical markets things that weren't markets at all once they put the price tag on it then capital started to see well how can we actually make these into markets that we can we can then capitalize on. Talk about how these calculations that put a price tag on nature were arrived at. If you look at how this happened there was actually a big debate about this in ecological economics but those who wanted to reduce nature to exchange value or at least to to calculate this one out and and the primary figure in this was Constanza who was also editor of ecological economics and in 1997 they came out with the first calculation of what the world ecosystem services were worth in monetary value. Now you have to understand that these are not actual markets so they did all sorts of fancy maneuvering to convert what nature does into markets so they they divided what nature does globally into 17 ecosystem services occurring all over the the planet and they came up with values for each of these ecosystem services based on methods like hedonic pricing which is basically a way of just attributing a value to nature based on comparisons with current practices so they use these kinds of techniques and they use what they call contingent valuation where they draw a hypothetical market and then survey consumers on what they're willing to pay they use these kinds of techniques to value some particular ecosystem and then they extrapolate the studies to that ecosystem globally and come up with values and they did this for like 17 different ecosystem services globally and that becomes then the the value of ecosystem services throughout the planet they ostensibly did this in order to to put a value on nature so that people would protect it but the moment this started to happen and it was predictable capital began to see that these ecosystem services could be turned into markets valued and turned it into markets and finance through debt and purchased and a basis for financial accumulation and the same group under Constance that came out with another estimate of the world ecosystem services which was even higher and you had all of these massive meetings corporations and the establishment of natural capital protocols and various ways of organizing and studying and and figuring out how to create markets out of these ecosystem services that emerged in which all of the the giant corporations were directly involved give us more of a picture of the ramifications of this switch in ecological economics in the 21st century nature is now treated as capital as exchange value as as a source of exchange value and if you look at the concept of natural capital that is seen in this new kind of neoclass the dominant economic perspective natural capital is used for the underlying natural asset which is now seen as ecological capital but all of the estimates and projections and all the financialization is based on the concept of ecosystem services which is seen as the revenue stream provided by nature when nature does things like photosynthesis it's providing a service supposedly to the world economy nature doesn't know it's doing that as you know we might say but in their theory that nature is providing an ecosystem service to the world economy which like any revenue stream can be capitalized on basically once they figure that there is a revenue stream here ecosystem services derived from the underlying asset of natural capital they can then take that that revenue stream and divide it by the discount rate and multiply it by a hundred percent to get a expected stream of revenue a way into the future say into a century in the future and then they can impose a debt on the basis of that revenue stream and financialize nature and make huge profits talk more specifically on how natural capital defined in exchange value terms came to stand for and represent the view of ecological economics if you look at ecological economics the journal which was associated with the international association for ecological economics they actually had a battle between Howard Odum one of the chief developers of systems ecology in the world and Robert Constanza over whether the journal was going to go the route of seeing nature as exchange value whether ecological economic was going to have a deep conception of ecology based on use value and Howard Odum and the other scientists that he was associated with that have been part of the founding of ecological economics the journal were basically thrown out and that's sort of the beginning of ecological economic becoming something different captured by or recaptured by neoclassical economics and you have people like Robert Solo the most prestigious neoclassical growth theorist said that if natural resources could be substituted for then effectively they don't matter and can be left out altogether and that actually is what was done with the neoclassical production function labor and capital are the only factors of production in nature land is excluded altogether the whole notion of use value in nature is excluded altogether everything absolutely everything is reduced to exchange value and then that provided the kind of theoretical basis for weak substitutability which is the notion that nature doesn't really matter that markets can substitute for natural resources and whatever nature does and that connected up with the development of the estimates by concerns and others of a world ecosystem services and pretty soon we have these notions of the financialization of the earth not simply in academic sense now transferred from the academic world into the world of capital where corporations and governments begin to put into plans the policies calculations methods structures for actually turning ecosystem services everywhere into the on the planet into economic markets which capital can finance and accumulate on the basis of so we've been talking about the argument you put forward that this financialization of the earth as a new ecological regime is accelerating the destruction of planetary ecosystems and of the earth as a safe home for humanity talk for a moment about how even before this new ecological regime you warned of an accelerating pace of devastation compared to earlier periods of capitalism among examples of this you write about how Darwin and his time had been struck by how European colonization turned the ecology of the island of st Helena into a desert in just three centuries the island of st Helena having been made famous by the void of the beagle yet in the current stage of capitalism the biogeochemical processes of the entire earth system were altered in just two generations i wrote about this in my book the vulnerable planet in 1994 where i was explaining how we were crossing the thresholds of the biogeochemical processes of the planet and threatening the whole earth system but what struck me and what i wrote about then is the speed with which it's occurring the speed with in terms of climate change we've seen massive geological changes in the history of the earth but we haven't seen anything that occurs with this speed this is one of the reasons why we can point to the anthropogenic causes and the anthropogenic rift in the earth system which is how we define the coming of the anthropocene epic in earth system history and it's really the speed of the change and the scientific reports although they've you know the ipcc they've tried to keep up with this but all of their reports i think all the way along have underestimated the speed of with which we are transforming nature and this is under the pressure of a system of capital accumulation geared to exponential growth at this point we generate vast vast amounts of economic and ecological waste things that people neither need nor really want and we have a marketing system a massive multi-trillion dollar marketing system geared to getting people to buy more and more and our system is geared to the fastest growth possible and in order to accomplish that even in periods of economic expansion we draw more and more on extracting from natural systems and this is a high energy intensive system it doesn't take care of people's needs the wealth created is not going to the populations and in the domino ideology they don't even talk about trickle down anymore which they talked about in my youth because everyone knows that that's false so we are creating a system that doesn't benefit the human population economically while we're actually destroying the entire earth and the motor of this is a capital accumulation process that is now highly financialized and globalized and has become the enemy of humanity and the planet we put profits before people in the planet in all cases in the society you can't solve things that way the capital wants to say well technology will solve the problem because they don't want social transformation they want to say well we can we can do it with technology and the population falls for that because they have cell phones in their pockets and they think oh technology is absolutely wonderful but no matter how wonderful cell phones are that communication technology and other technologies we have do not allow us to transcend the laws of physics and we're right up against that today and it spells an unimaginable crisis really for the population of the earth the anthropocene epic you refer to is of course a reference to geological time to cite the flyer from your forthcoming book the anthropocene epic quote marks a changed reality in which human activities are now the main geological force impacting the earth as a whole generating at the same time an existential crisis for the world's population talk more about the issue of the capitalist argument that technology can save humanity from ecological ruin so things like geoengineering well it's not just geoengineering but things like carbon sequestration methods and direct air capture but it's interesting in the sixth assessment report ar6 of the ipcc the mitigation part of the report part three by working group three was published in april of this year but the actual scientific consensus report the report as written by the scientists themselves was completed in august 2021 and governments in the ipcc process have the right to come in and rewrite the scientific report the summary of for policymakers and they rewrote the science report entirely practically every line in the scientific consensus report was was censored by governments and in some places turned into the direct opposite and we know this because scientific rebellion in august 2021 leaked the scientific consensus report on mitigation which we posted on the month review website so you can compare what the scientists decided to the published summary for policymakers from governments and we find that in the scientific consensus report they said these technologies are not available won't work cannot play a major role in keeping this below 1.5 degrees celsius or even below two degrees celsius and they said other things like coal fired plants had to be eliminated globally this decade and what we need is basically low energy solutions which can prove society some conditions as that report said prove the conditions of everybody on earth but also using less energy in the process back in 2019 in writing on how capitalism had failed in asking what's next you argued that to quote once sustainable human development rooted not in exchange value but in use values and genuine human needs comes to define historical advance the future which now seems closed will open up in a myriad ways allowing for entirely new more qualitative and collective forms of development and so what's coming across loud and clear in all this is how the way you see it the underlying structure of capital accumulation itself is what's standing in the way of real solutions to the ecological crisis the irony is that capitalism has created this ecological crisis and is is generating it and the answer of of capital and this is typical of the system is that we just need a more intensive a more extreme form of capital accumulation the answer to the ecological crisis created by capital is to turn all of of the world ecology into capital to make the entirety of nature conform to economic laws essentially and the economists and the and the capitalists say well this is the answer the reason why that sells despite the illogical nature of it is that for capital that's always the answer if there is a crisis the crisis is because there's too little capital not too much the from capital standpoint the answer to every crisis let's say an economic crisis is to redistribute income from the port of the rich that is increase the power of capital if there's a problem an ecological crisis the answer is to increase the power of capital markets and expanded into nature paul hawken and others with him in his book natural capitalism argues we don't really have capitalism until all of nature is part of of capital is part of capitalism but that's that's absurd we live within a planet capitalism exists within the planet human society exists within the planet human beings live within the planet we can't turn the entire planet earth into some kind of attribute of the capitalist market system without destroying the world but that's exactly what we're doing that's solution to the ecological crisis that they're advocating doesn't involve taking energy efficiency and turning it into conservation like you see in cuba they take energy efficiency and turn it into a greater expansion of the economic system and that doesn't help that's what we call the jevons paradox that the more efficient we are in the use of resources the more resources we use because the object is not to conserve but it's to expand the economy and the accumulation of capital well in such a system you're headed towards destruction now the destruction is very close upon us we're very close now to the 1.5 degrees increase in global average temperature in the latest ipcc report a or six the physical science basis they in their most optimistic scenario we will hit 1.5 degrees celsius in 2040 that would require a kind of revolutionary scale social transformation to accomplish more likely we're going to hit 1.5 degrees celsius in this decade in just a few years we're headed over the edge of the cliff in terms of the tipping point for the climate where we will reach irreversible climate change and even in the most optimistic scenario we're facing major catastrophes in the next few decades but if we don't take the action that prevents irreversible change we will be threatening civilization itself in the broadest sense and the human species and billions of people on earth we have to have a different method 60 years we've known about climate change accelerated and climate change or accelerated global warming and all we've done is promote capitalist solutions that have gotten us closer to the edge of the cliff and we're now on a runaway train it's time to to pull the emergency break there's a lot more behind this and a lot more to come and your forthcoming book on capitalism and the anthropocene ecological ruin or ecological revolution but for today we're going to have to leave it there john belamy foster thank you thank you and from gpe news docs in geneva switzerland thank you for joining us