Friday, October 14, 2016

#288 / Unnatural Capital



My purpose today is to refer readers to an article that appeared on the Resilience website. Just click this link

The article, by Sian Sullivan, was originally published by The Conversation on September 13th. It is titled, "Nature is Being Renamed ‘Natural Capital’ – But is it Really the Planet that will Profit?"

Sullivan notes that "Nature" is now frequently being characterized as "Natural Capital." This is an attempt to reconfigure reality to suggest, linguistically, that "Nature" is a category within the human realm, whereas the truth of our situation is exactly the opposite: our civilization, and the "human world" that we create, is located within, and depends upon, the World of Nature, which we did not create, and which sustains our existence. 

Trying to make the Natural World a subset of economics is definitely not going to "profit" the Planet. It is also not going to profit human beings, because no matter what sort of linguistic tricks we might employ to pretend otherwise, the economic realities of the human world are that we depend on Nature. Nature does not depend upon us. 

If you think that words don't matter...

Read the article, and think again!



Image Credit:
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-09-14/nature-is-being-renamed-natural-capital-but-is-it-really-the-planet-that-will-profit

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