Environment and Society. Paul Robbins
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their money,” and select and purchase green products, often at a premium. The success of organic foods, which are now very much in the mainstream of consumer culture, provides an example of consumers paying extra and creating incentives for more producers to change their methods and technologies.
Greenwashing The exaggerated or false marketing of a product, good, or service as environmentally friendly
Such approaches have drastic limitations. How does a consumer know, after all, the specific environmental impacts of products that carry handsome green labels? How do they know such products and companies have not been merely “greenwashed,” presented and advertised heavily as environmentally sound or benign with little substantive change in actual production practices, packaging, or disposal? Indeed, for many firms far more time and money are invested in green advertising than green practices (TerraChoice Environmental Marketing Inc. 2007).
Green Certification Programs to certify commodities for the purposes of assuring their ecological credentials, such as organically grown vegetables or sustainably harvested wood products
One way of confirming truth in green advertising is through the process of green certification, in which a third party monitors production of a range of products and provides a confirmatory “seal of approval” for products meeting specific standards. A number of governmental and nongovernmental green certification systems exist, including those for timber, organic foods, and energy-efficient appliances, among many others. As green certification systems continue to proliferate, however, their reliability and consistency become more questionable. Some certifications, for example, are established by companies themselves rather than third-party observers. Moreover, many countries have adopted their own standards. For example, the country of Malaysia has instituted its own independent certification for sustainable timber, which competes directly with international standards. This makes global trade in eco-friendly goods a confusing smorgasbord.
Beyond Market Failure: Gaps between Nature and Economy
Leaving aside problems in implementing market-based environmental policy, larger questions loom. Adopting an economic logic for nature presents more basic problems: it makes it difficult to maintain ecocentric values (see Chapter 5), because there is a mismatch in the behavior of money and ecosystems, and because basic economic inequity presents a barrier for reconciling markets and the environment in a socially just way.
Non-market Values
At bottom, the market response model can only be deemed to be operating successfully if success is measured in strictly economic terms. When sperm whale oil became scarce and was replaced with fossil fuels, as actually happened in the nineteenth century, the outcome for people was negligible or beneficial. New resources, propelled by the scarcity of old sources, were made available through the magic of the marketplace. But what is the lesson of this story for the sperm whale itself? Long before market responses “kicked in” to send humans in search of new oil sources, the sperm whale was driven to the brink of extinction, a result that was only forestalled by the creation of international bans on whaling in the twentieth century. Indeed, global green markets have proven slow to adjust to the decline of rainforests, the plunge in biodiversity, and the potential catastrophic implications of global warming, raising questions about the capacity of trade to capture the value of these things, at least within the urgent time frame in which they will need to be addressed.
The problem is therefore not simply that the market may fail on its own terms (and indeed it does by the admission of many of its most enthusiastic supporters), but that its success can only be judged in economic and therefore anthropocentric terms. If there are values that cannot be captured in a market, like the evolutionary, aesthetic, or moral “value” of a species, what difference does it make that its depletion eventually allows its substitution by something else? While economic valuation allows us to identify what people might be willing to pay for abstract and intangible goods and services (i.e. the presence of sperm whales somewhere on the planet), it does not necessarily point a way for them to be valued, in monetary terms.
Money and Nature
Beyond this, the valuing of ecological conditions through the market, and specifically in money terms, is fraught with other very basic problems. First, the history of capitalism has shown that markets are highly volatile, and given to bubbles and busts. This is not necessarily a bad thing for capital, which travels from crisis to crisis, moving from investments in forestry to plastics to biofuels. But these rapid fluctuations of money values of different natural objects, typically driven by speculation, may be out of step with both cycles of environmental systems and changes in social values. Without recourse to some other system of valuation, however, these eruptive metrics are the sole measure in a market. As geographer David Harvey describes, this becomes “a tautology in which achieved prices become the only indicators we have of the money value of assets whose independent values we are seeking to determine. Rapid shifts in market prices imply equally rapid shifts in asset values” (Harvey 1996, p. 152). But the crashes and crescendos of historical markets continuously show that market volatility may not reflect the social values they are understood to measure. Can we trust a turbulent commodity exchange market to reflect the slow and steady pace of changing environmental values?
A commodity approach to the environment also tends to stress the exchange of discrete and specific items or services. The complex ecosystem of a river is most effectively managed in a market through the discrete components that can be valued by differing parties. For example, the river in one condition or another may be able to provide wetlands or offer flood control, or to maximize trout habitat, or to facilitate transport or recreation. In theory, to the degree to which these services are mutually exclusive, a market can best adjudicate what is most desired and provide it from the river. In reality, however, these functions are connected and interdependent in many ways, precisely because the ecology of streams is complex. Discrete markets are “anti-ecological” in that many of the river’s unvalued parts may be valuable to other components, mutually produced, and interdependent. By separating the system into marketable services, these interrelations are severed, displaced, and divided. Can the functioning of whole ecosystems be assured in markets that capture only the value of discrete goods and services?
The Crisis of Equity: Turning Economic Injustice into Environmental Injustice?
Applying the logics of the market to the environment raises basic questions about equity and rights. This is because, to the degree that the environment is “marketized,” the ability of individuals and groups to participate in environmental action and remediation, or indeed even to have access to basic environmental services (e.g. clean air or wilderness), is limited by their available capital. This holds implications for democracy. By “democratic” here, and elsewhere in this book, we refer to people’s ability within a society to have an equal voice in political decision-making and outcomes. Market environmentalism is democratic, therefore, only to the degree that the financial resources available are equally distributed throughout the population.
Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. Turning decisions over nature into decisions within a market can be considered undemocratic because money is almost never evenly distributed within a polity. In the United States, an enormously wealthy country by global standards, the richest fifth of the population received 49% of the nation’s income in 1999, while the poorest fifth received less than 4%. In terms of overall wealth, in 1998 the top 5% of the population owned 60% of the country’s wealth. Globally, the statistics are more striking; the richest fifth of the world’s population earn 83% of all income and the richest 10% of adults control 85% of the world’s total assets. The specific concentration of wealth and income in the hands of corporate entities, rather than people, is also notable. So, too, is the unevenness over control of money and finances within households around the world, where women may be excluded from access to and control of money, even though their labor and effort provide household income. Given this reality, making politically