Earthpocalypse Isn’t a ‘Marginal’ Cost (Despite What Economists Say)

A couple observations from ‘El Planeta, Nuestro Cuerpo’

In their 2003 book The Planet, Our Body: Ecology, Environmentalism and the Crisis of Modernity (in Spanish), Martí Boada y Víctor M. Toledo note a specific discussion of environmental crisis. This conversation was happening in Ibero-America (i.e., by Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking people in Latin America), and it was particularly “intelectualizada y retoricista” (intellectualized and rhetorical). They share an example of a debate that took place in the publication Tierramérica. It had “a central objective: defending life” (“un objetivo central: la defensa de la vida”), and it basically concerned the greenwashing of economics (“dotar a la economía de un rostro ambiental y … reducir los valores ambientales a la medida de los designios del mercado”).

There Aren’t ‘Better’ Ways to Buy and Sell Nature

In 1970, people said economic growth itself was wrecking nature. In 2003 (when this book was written), some people were trying to defend economic growth by arguing that natural resources hadn’t yet been sufficiently privatized and their dollar values weren’t fully known. In this worldview, environmental and social needs can be regulated by market forces.