Читать книгу Environment and Society - Paul Robbins - Страница 55

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?