Folk don't value things that don't have a value to them

A little bit of basic human nature here. We - or perhaps the greener type of environmentalists - can squeak all we like that the rainforests are unpriceable, beyond mere monetary value, priceless in fact. That it’s not in fact us either living in them, chopping them down or not doing so means that our evaluations of their worth are meaningless.

It’s whatever value is ascribed to them by those interacting with them that matters. And if, just as an example, you are trying to live on $600 a year’s worth of consumption - about right for much of central Africa - then clearing that next acre of forest for a few crops of maize looks worth doing, whatever the effects upon water levels in New York harbour next century.

To stop the clearance, to preserve that priceless forest, it’s necessary for that acre to be worth more as forest than maize. And worth it to the individual standing there about to make that decision to slash and burn or not. On the entirely logical grounds that the slash and burn decision is being made by that individual thus it’s the incentives faced by that individual that determine which way the decision goes.

The president passed tough pro-environment legislation, jailed ivory smugglers, kicked out illegal loggers but, crucially, also allowed businesses land for sustainable activities, including palm oil production and legal logging as long as processing was done in the country. This attracted criticism from the purists who want no interference with nature.

“To save the forest, you have to be able to exploit the forest,” White, now 57, said. “We have to encourage the private sector, only by giving the forest value will people then ‘value’ it. It is all about management.”

Yes, obviously.

This idea that we need to value, in monetary terms, the environment around us is not some excresence of late stage capitalism nor an irruption of neoliberalism. It’s a simple observation of human nature. The money is just the method of counting, the underlying point is that people will do what benefits them, in their view. So, to preserve that environment it needs to be worth more to those there, at that time and place, than not.

Forests will be preserved where they’re worth more to the local peasantry than a few years of runty corn. Which means that late stage capitalism, all that irrupting neoliberalism, of course. For that’s the way that forests to gawp at are worth more - because everyone’s off doing indoor work, no heavy lifting - than a subsistence diet for a family.

It’s not because capitalism that we put a money value on the environment, it’s that putting that value upon it provides the justification for the economic development which capitalism - uniquely - brings about.