Saving Nature, for a Price: The Carbon Credits Conundrum

The natural tension between land conservation and capitalization is the central paradox in any carbon credits program. How did we get here?

Our Relationship with Land is… Well, It’s complicated

“Buy land, they're not making it anymore.” - Mark Twain

“Mother Earth is not a resource, she is an heirloom” - David Ipina, Yurok Tribe

In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass,” there is a section that sums up some of our modern relationships with land. They are:

1) LAND AS CAPITAL: land as a means to make money

2) LAND AS PROPERTY: land as a mine of resources for us to do whatever we want

3) LAND AS MACHINE: with humans as the drivers, land (and its plants) as a resource to be engineered in some way, including restoration

The point she makes is that these singular, Western approaches to land miss the point of being in right relationship with land, where we as humans are a skillful part of the ecosystem who understand that we belong to the land - and not the other way around.

In contrast, the Indigenous gift economy discussed in her book might be summed up as:

4) LAND AS A GIFT: land gives to us, and we give back to the land

With principles - and outcomes - of reciprocity, gratitude, and abundance, the gift economy mindset is in stark contrast with those first three. Our modern dependence on commoditizing land to serve our financial wants - irregardless of the big picture or long-term impact - is what’s brought us to our 1.5 degrees of climate warming, with no signs of slowing down.

So what now?

INdulgences & Externalities

Carbon credits are, like any cash offering, a crass solution to solve a relationship problem - in this case, our human relationship with the land. On the impact scale, they sit somewhere between the Catholic Indulgences of the Middle Ages and EPA fines - which is to say that they’re not preventing companies from ecologically harmful business practices, they’re just putting a price tag on the “externalities.” This concept is an economic one that simply means that the cost (or benefit) that’s caused by one party is incurred by another.

Capitalism as a system is underpinned by externalities, and nowhere is this more evident than in the impact of business on the environment. Carbon emissions, methane emissions, toxic chemical dumps, farmers spraying Agent Orange… the list goes on. How and why it’s legal for people to poison the world we live in is a meaty topic on its own, though the short answer is the one we’re already exploring: we as humans are simply not in right relationship with our ecosystems.

And the truth is that we all know this - even if some people pretend not to. Even people who “don’t believe in climate change” are, by and large, supportive of land and resource conservation. Despite the issues with Carbon credits, we believe they can help reduce harm in the short term by keeping forests standing that would otherwise be cut. Transitions tend to be imperfect.

Carbon credits are a first step towards attaching a cost to the damage caused to our world by emissions. They’re also a source of revenue that we can make available to land owners and others who want to keep forests standing: a financial benefit externality, if you will, as a balance for an ecological cost placed on our environment and its inhabitants.

They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse. They compel her to produce out of season, and when sterile she is made to take medicine in order to produce again. All this is sacrilege.” - Sitting Bull

If you want to go far, go together

To think that modern society will decide as whole to suddenly, willingly ditch the extractive models of capitalism and go back to an Indigenous mindset that prioritizes reciprocal ecology isn’t realistic. We live in a capitalist system, and there are no quick fixes for broad systemic change - even revolutions take time.

And we don’t have time. Our agriculture is already failing.

This brings us to principles of planned systemic change, which is to say working in partnership within existing systems to improve them and their outcomes. With that mindset, our goal is to take collaborative action to tackle things that can be fixed. The land is our best partner here, which is why we’re helping people preserve it.

Carbon credits aren’t perfect by any measure, but as a Cooperative our members voted to offer them in order to help people preserve large parcels of land and keep forests intact. Not everyone has the financial or physical resources to do so otherwise, and we’ve received inquiries from people wondering whether we can help them find a way to keep their land.

The brutal truth is that capitalizing intact land is the surest way to protect it. We’ve seen this scenario play out before, in Bristol Bay, Alaska: the fishing industry, with the help of conservationists, won out over the gold mining industry.

And so it’s simple, if not easy: when we live in a world wherein a cut tree’s market value outweighs a standing tree’s natural value, we need to find solutions - and they’re not always the most graceful.

"Modernity's colonization of our unconscious means that most people will gravitate toward what is easier, most comfortable, and most familiar, toward what will fulfill their modern desires and temporarily address their sense of depletion. The possibility of emptying ourselves of these desires, of letting both our securities and insecurities go, is only viable when everything else fails, or when we grow bored with our own delusions." - Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity