Capitalism? It’s only natural… aka “A Fable of the Bees for the Anthropobscene”

tl;dr We use “nature” to justify whatever we want to justify.

A couple of days ago Kevin Anderson (the climate professor, not the South African tennis player) tweeted about a new paper which shows just how rubbish the Dasgupta review was.

The Spash & Hache paper https://t.co/HknwsNYuzF dismantles the "financialisation of Nature" (i.e. the Dasgupta review) – seeing it as another business-as-usual approach to maintain the status quo & avoid the fundamental rethink necessary to address today's ecological challenges. pic.twitter.com/JhrNGqRhsw

— Kevin Anderson (@KevinClimate) May 27, 2021

[I could go on about how aggravating it is when people retweet bits of a conversation that enables them to be sententious bright-siders, rather than take responsibility for, you know, innovating… but that can be for another time.]

Right now, I wanna talk briefly about this advert below, from today’s Financial Times supplement “How to Spend It” (yes, they really have that. It’s a thing, not a spoof).

So, they’re trying to naturalise the accumulation of capital, and the current order of “pirate clients, asset management and technology”. They’re trying to soothe the rich, who might otherwise come to the realisation that the game is rigged, that they are doing/benefiting from the rigging and that their children will inherit a hellscape.

It’s the Fable of the Bees meets the Anthropobscene…

So glad I did not breed. As the kid tells Sarah Connor, “there’s a storm coming…”