Buddhist economics | Ecological footprints of neoliberal capitalism
 |
Image credit: David Icke |
Carbon offsett(l)ers
… and a Buddhist critique of ecological violence
Devon G.
Peña | Colonias de San Pablo, CO | May 17, 2014
The concept of ecological
footprint was first proposed in 1996 by Rees and Wackernagel as a model to estimate the environmental impact of
anthropogenic (human) activity at different scales – from individual consumers
and specific corporations to the populations of entire cities and towns,
states, regions, nations, and even trading blocs within the global trade system. My dissatisfaction with the concept derives
from the fact that, like many initially subversive ecological ideas, it has been
largely neutralized and co-opted by so-called “sustainability” advocates and NGOs like the Center for Sustainable Economy, a
respectable and no doubt well-meaning organization that operates the most popular version of the footprint
estimate service.
 |
Image credit: CSE |
The CSE version – which goes by the tag myfootprint.org – is simple and asks that we each become
sustainability advocates by considering, “How much nature is required by our
lifestyles?” This is a reasonable question and the answer provided for your own
personal footprint is calculated based on an algorithm consisting of 27
variables that range from where you shop for food and if you buy organic to the
size of your home and miles of travel by various modes (car, train, bus,
airplane, etc.). The questions underlying the algorithm, it can be
argued, reflect a particularly white middle class and Eurocentric set of sensibilities.
This built-in bias is reinforced by the structure of the current neoliberal market for voluntary mitigation of given carbon or ecological footprints as illustrated in the annual report from Forest Trends, an organization that
tracks and evaluates the private investor market for carbon offsets. Forest
Trends notes that the market for what it calls “voluntary demand for carbon
offsetting” grew by 4 percent in 2012, when buyers committed more than $523
million (US dollars) to offset 101 million metric tons of greenhouse gas
emissions. The report
highlights two trends:
Private sector buyers flocked
to offsets earned by planting trees, saving tropical forests, or distributing
clean cookstoves in the developing world, according to this year’s State of the
Voluntary Carbon Markets report […] The
European private sector, including regulated energy utilities, was the market’s
biggest voluntary buyer – seeing demand grow 34% to 43.4 million tonnes of
offsets even in the face of significant challenges to Europe’s mandatory carbon
market […] Across the pond, United States-based corporations, ranging from The
Walt Disney Company to Chevrolet, offset more emissions than buyers in any
other single country at 28.7 million tonnes. A little over a third of offsets
purchased by US buyers (9.7 million tonnes) were obtained for future use in
California’s emerging cap-and-trade program.
I presume we can now call this the Disneyfication of environmental protection policy. But back to the ecological footprint model.
The CSE site offers links where individuals can “become
part of a movement” by starting or signing petitions on Change.org and perhaps
even investing in personal carbon offsets. This is neoliberal, qua privatized and individualized, one-stop and all-purpose environmental activism; for the right
fee. Assuaging guilty consciences? Does it matter that the principal users of
carbon-offsets services are members of the 1% or their higher echelon
lieutenants in transnational corporations; that and Hollywood celebrities? What
David R. Díaz calls SUV environmentalism is apparently being supplanted by a
carbon offsett(l)er lifestyle that does little to abate the march of environmental
violence.
Some critics rightly suggest the measure of
ecological footprints it is in the final instance a pointless function. From my
vantage point, there is a more serious political implication that has to do
with discursive politics, since the eco-footprint model is already being
deployed as an actual model with the effect of obscuring the continuing and
indeed expanding violence of unfettered (neoliberal) consumption. This happens
because the model promotes a ‘neo-regulation’[1]
framework that parodies sustainability by “filtering” out actual continuing environmental and
structural violence through the capitalist market via investments in so-called carbon
offsets, whose value as natural capital assets [sic] is determined by the fancy and often proprietary algorithms used for these investments – this is after all the same system that sucks value [sic] out of thin air through high-speed trading. The marvels of late finance capitalism with old sleight of hand at near light-speed!
 |
Carbon offsets certificate. Source: ecocarbonoffsets.com.au |
Is this not a convenient way to
avoid true accountability, given the continued reality of widespread
environmental violence carried out against other peoples’ places, usually as a direct result of the investment decisions and actions of the same group of 1-percenters who comprise
the market for the carbon offsett(l)er lifestyle?
Allow me an example that is not unthinkable, given
the parameters and built-in assumptions used by the algorithm-modelors in the conventional approach to ecological footprint analysis. This example will illustrate how the model can lead to misleading
comparisons that obscure the extent of actual environmental and structural
violence distributed across different types of locales, most of which are more
vulnerable to risk and disparate harms than others as demonstrated by any environmental justice
analysis of the distribution of risk.
The working mom and the hedge fund
manager
Let’s take the example of a single mother holding
down three jobs to pay the bills and feed her family. She travels in a hand-me
down, quarter-century old gas-guzzling car because of lack of public transit in
her community – venture capitalists and realtors led the attack on efforts to
fund these transit equity projects and so she commutes more than 400 miles a
week to and from three different work sites. She earns minimum wage plus tips despite
completion of community college and solid skills and aptitude as a nursing
assistant, a job now considered delegated to volunteer status – you know,
neoliberal rationality and all that nonsense.
She shares a one-bedroom flat with her two teen-aged children
and a niece in a cramped apartment building built in the 1970s. It lacks
adequate insulation or heat. The bathroom faucets and toilets have leaks and the plumbing repeatedly clogs across the building. The water heater is also old and all electric, a model the
landlord refuses to replace despite making hundreds of millions from an NBA
sports franchise. In the winter, her heating bills soar during winter since she uses the inefficient built-in electric baseboards. She is trapped
in a utility rate regime in which investor state market regulators reward large
institutional consumers of energy with lower than market rates while punishing
the low-income workers for living in substandard housing developed and owned by
the postmodern slumlords who now seek to reward the next generation of such
regulators with cushy appointments and private sector jobs.
The family’s apartment is in the middle of a food junkyard and the mom, who does most
of the cooking, is often unable to prepare meals and instead brings leftovers
from one of her jobs at a fast food restaurant. She cannot afford to drive a
hybrid car or ‘telecommute’ let alone invest in the carbon-offset market; she
represents a good measure of the living and working conditions of a good half
chunk of the 99%.
Our comparison case is a billionaire hedge fund manager. She has three homes,
all of them LEEDS-certified and featuring the latest in
environmentally-sound housing, furnishing, and appliance technologies. She is married to a fellow Wall Street
investment consultant and they have two toddlers, who are currently cared for by a group of three
doting nanny-teachers they hired and house in whatever one of their three separate homes they happen to occupy at the moment.
The principal
residence is a 40th story 4,000 square-foot penthouse in downtown
Manhattan that doubles as her primary workplace – its is five times larger in
size compared to the single working Mom’s crowded apartment. The hedge fund
manager does not commute to work unless she feels like visiting assets on another
continent, in which case as she flies she also purchases carbon-offsets to consciously and willfully mitigate the impact of her travels on the planet. Using her wealth, she can
presume to have a net zero impact despite her jet-setting ways and investment values.
 |
Shell Corp. explains the offsets market. This of course fails to note that if you are a worker or resident living downwind or downstream from Company A, then you are out of luck and your experience of environmental violence will remain extant. Source: Shell.com |
Who is to be judged as having a larger footprint? The
nearly broke single working mom with outrageous food, utility, and transport
costs living in substandard housing and using energy-guzzling appliances? Or the globetrotting hedge fund manager with three eco-chic homes; who invests
heavily in mining, oil, and natural gas ventures but also put $2 million last year in
carbon off-sets and many millions more to live LEEDS-certified while sitting pretty? By the conventional algorithmic metrics it can be argued that the hedge fund manager has less of an impact. This is one reason the neoliberal ecological modernization paradigm, expressed here in the normalization of the lifestyles of the carbon-offsett(l)ers, is so problematic, especially from an environmental justice vantage point.
The hedge fund manager can invest in a company
responsible for the wanton destruction of Rarámuri forests in Mexico and then turn
around and purchase carbon offsets to protect a patch of the Amazon in Brazil. This reveals the heart of darkness that is systemic inequity and violence masquerading as sustainability.
 |
A popular option is to purchase carbon offsets for air travel. Image credit: eco-friendly-africa-travel.com |
Footprint cover-ups for sale =
distancing from violence
In a recent critique of the concept of ecological
footprint, the authors argue that the concept yields few real
public policy solutions (Blomvist et al 2013). I believe this actually depends on how one defines the problem the
policy seeks to address but this is not really my concern here. Certainly, as a matter of actually existing policy, the use of personal ecological footprint metrics to calculate the value of a liquid investment in the market for voluntary carbon offsets amounts to
the sale of what I will qualify as footprint
cover-ups. What is covered up? The continued violence against the
environment wrought of neoliberal capitalist investment decisions based on the “pricing”
of ecosystem assets as natural capital accounts. This violence is
I will, however, use this opportunity to argue that: When modified to account for the entire range of forms assumed by environmental
violence on the one hand and by an accounting also of the ecological services rendered by certain
human place-based cultures communities – the concept of ecological
footprint can lead to a profound shift in public policy and social movement implications; the latter of greater interest to
me. [For the rejoinder to Blomvist and his colleagues see Rees and Wackernagel 2013.]
There are many reasons why I find the concept of
ecological footprint limiting in the manner formulated by Rees and Wackernagal
and their followers. Two sets of problems are my focus here and both derive
from how proponents presume that (1) We can measure the impact of human
activity on the environment as if cultural differences did not exist or matter,
and (2) It thus ignores evidence that distinct human cultural communities can follow
norms of inhabitation that allow for our species to systematically contribute
to ecological integrity and the conservation of biodiversity. Since the
conventional concept ignores these two vital dimensions it cannot provide a full
accounting of the activities others are bent on following to externalize the
environmental costs of consumption (and fictive investments) unto other peoples and places and habitat.
 |
Medios de vida. Indigenous Amazonian farmers inhabit their ecosystem and nurture biodiversity. Photo credit: amazona-andina.org |
Humans can work as the keystone species of place and our
ecological footprint is sometimes evidence of the extension of the nurturing
values of co-evalness rather than some inevitably subtractive and extractive impact. Yet most of
world under the spell of neoliberal globalization is riddled with political projects and technological practices that reward the
destruction of other peoples’ home places in the name of development, and this mostly
occurs for the benefit of interests in some far-off locale, perhaps in the Manhattan or
London high-rise office of a global hedge fund manager who made billions in minerals and mines derivatives. This is the nature of the
contradictions of (mal)development – the only kind possible – under the
anti-Earth and anti-human (ir)rationality of neoliberal capitalist values.
One human impact is not pretty much the same as the next human impact as is often presumed
by the eco-footprint analysts. The
impact of a capitalist is different than the impact of an indigenous
smallholder agro-pastoralist. The simplistic view of the conventional framework obscures the fact that some
cultures – especially those grounded in respectful inhabitation of ancestral
home places – have a productive and creative effect on the environment and produce
actual ecosystem services; which is the exact opposite of the subtractive ecological footprint model.
So, why do so many scientists working within dominant
Euro-centric traditions – including those who are practitioners of more
holistic and subversive thinking like system ecologists – all of a sudden slip back
into such a nonsensical, unscientific, reductionist, and mechanistic view of
culture and its intricate relationship with political economic systems? Do they understand the decidedly unscientific
quality of a view of the nature of culture that reduces the wide diversity of
human organization into a neat separate category that defines an immutable binary
power relationship between culture and nature like some blank
abstract painting of a frozen antithesis, a negative dialectic in which humans can only have negative effects on the planet, and we become the collective source of the most terrifying hyper-object of climate change?
Perhaps it takes a Buddhist way of thinking to help
resolve the puzzling paradox facing those mostly-Westernized scientists who
misunderstand and misapply the culture concept and also get fuzzy and ideological when it comes to confronting the problematic of capitalism?
 |
Buddha rests under sacred tree. Image credit: gaophatngaynay.com |
Buddhist economics | Capitalist
violence is criminal
Writing in the journal Buddhist-Christian
Studies, Buddhist ethicist
and eco-activist Sulak Sivaraksa references being invited by the editors of the
journal to write on “economic aspects of social and environmental violence” and
to “approach…the subject from a Buddhist perspective.” Some might justifiably
consider such a request unanswerable but Sivaraksa keeps the response polite (of
course) and sets off to write a piece that will “keep the subject matter fairly
general and straightforward”. Before you
know it the Thai founder of eco-Buddhism offers a most startling and vital
observation
The present economic reality,
widely known as neoliberal capitalism, prizes the accumulation of profits over
human well-being and environmental sustainability. As such, it is criminal…” (2002:47; emphasis
added)
I am not surprised to learn that an important voice
like Sivaraksa grounds a critique of capitalism in Buddhist environmental
ethics and considers neoliberalism to be a state of systematic criminality. In
his book, The Wisdom of Sustainability,
he describes consumerism as a “demonic religion” and principal driver of the
climate crisis. In a previous interview with the on-line journal, Eco-Buddhism,
Sivaraksa offers this elaboration of his critique of consumerism:
From the Buddhist point of
view, the three root causes of suffering are greed, hatred and delusion.
Consumerism promotes greed. Greed now
dominates global society, through advertising in the media and because
transnational corporations are in control. It is linked with hatred and
violence. Violence is on the whole controlled by politicians, but more
politicians are now under the control of transnational corporations. So greed
is now in control of hatred.
But the more recent article in B-CS reveals a more radical moment of direct reference to neoliberal
capitalism as criminality. This Buddhist indictment is formulated precisely
because the market is imposed as a totalitarian form of ‘infinite’ economic
determinism since all matters are affairs of economic calculus and are inherently
assumed to weigh-in more compared to all other considerations like environmental
harm or public health impact.
The radical behavioral economics of private
investment (and disinvestment decisions) determines environmental protection –
its absence or presence as a function of dances with prices. Thus, the demonic
[sic] force of destructiveness is seen as the environmental violence neoliberal
capitalism depends on to exploit everything as a commodity while simultaneously
insisting on the fullest possible discounting of the cost of so-called negative
externalities.
But as we have seen, especially in physics (thermodynamics),
there is no free lunch and the transformation of energy will always produce a
different state of being that often comes in the form of heat and therefore
climate change. Then: The entropic principle is well established as the source
of the second contradiction of capitalism. Scientists need to become aware of
this relationship.
One of the fundamental errors of the concept of ecological footprint is that
it presents the problem of environmental violence chiefly in terms of the
consumer and as a question of lifestyle. This is not a simple matter of
lifestyle and consumer choice, which is an ideological construct with little effect on
the structures and relations of capitalist production – witness the current
example of widespread consumer rejection of GMOs and the governmental and
corporate insistence on continuation of that path. This is not about lifestyle
but it is about the tens of millions of right
livelihoods destroyed by the exportation of a neoliberal capitalist
consumer lifestyle that equates gluttony with freedom. Ecological footprint
analysts are completely incapable of dealing with such a basic fact.
In the end, the problem with measuring ecological
footprints has less to do with a lack of policy implications – e.g., reducing
consumption is a good policy idea – than with its inability to become part of a
more community-grounded (collective) social movement activity than an
atomistic, individualistic consumer lifestyle choice. It is a matter of systemic
political economic structures – the arrangement of social classes associated
with vast inequalities that must be addressed and it turns out that capitalism
is incapable of accomplishing such a selfless goal.
 |
Buddhist wheel of life. Credit: a-good-dying.com |
Carbon Offsett(l)ers
I have used the term carbon offsett(l)ers to indicate
how the 1 percenters privileged enough to invest in the market for voluntary carbon
offsets are really following the logic of the champions of old-fashioned settler
colonialism. Like the colonial settler, the carbon offset investor is voluntarily
engaging in the establishment of a new economic frontier [sic] and seeks to
participate in the external administration of other peoples’ environments – in
the most obvious case, the home lands of the indigenous inhabitants of tropical
rain forests that are a favored object of a market that seeks to ‘price’
ecological sustainability by taking away here and giving back there.
The problem is many of these indigenous inhabitants
are being removed to make room for the protected areas required to set aside
the carbon-sinking capacity of the Earth’s forests. The colonialist seeks to
redefine the native’s home. The carbon offsett(l)er does the same, all the
while preserving the structure of power and privilege they enjoy as part of
their status as globetrotting investors and speculators.
[1] Most theorists of neoliberalism propose that a major
feature of this phase of capitalism is the dismantling of the regulatory state.
De-regulation raises numerous questions about the nature of the exercise of
political power in society but more recent critics note that the transition is
not so much to a system of de-regulation as much as it is about the rise of a
new privatized system (enclosure) characterized as neo-regulation in which the corporations themselves are in charge
of the regulatory regime. A perfect illustration of this is the control of GMO
biosafety research. All the empirical power structure analysis of interlocking
directorships strongly suggests that corporations like Monsanto –working
closely with and within (as
appointees to) the FDA and USDA – control the process of risk assessment at the
heart of this neo-regulatory regime. The legitimation and planning functions of
this regime as a technology of ‘governmentality’ is not well understood and is
indicative of the need to tie the analysis of neo-regulation to an applied
theory of the state and the constitution of different forms of state power (cf.
Kalyvas 2002). More recently, Pechlaner and Otero 2010 offer a good illustration of neo-regulation in the
context of an analysis of the North American ‘neoliberal food regime’.
Comments
Post a Comment