Throw Money at the Problem
Which problem, you ask?
The crux of what makes Bank of Nature doable is that it works with what has, so far, put us in this climate mess as the way to get us out of this climate mess. Specifically, our species’ drive to be industrious, to be exceptional, to be rich. It’s fruitless to argue against that.
Climate inaction is not a moral failing or a lapse in compassion. Around the planet, more people than not care about climate as a threat1. Climate inaction is a function of our success narrative that, perversely, comes at the expense of the source of that success: Nature.
How that was ever a good idea speaks, probably, to the blindness created by our own sense of exceptionalism — blindness that is no longer an excuse to think nature is limitless.
Bank of Nature, in acknowledging the need to work with how humans are versus what they might be ideally, says without reservation:
“Let’s throw money at the problem.”
Isn’t that how we’ve always done it? Isn't that the diss for every politician who couldn't think of a less crass way to solve a problem?
We might argue that climate seems too costly — throwing good money after bad or a money pit of endless fixes. If that’s the case, then climate action is a function of our lack of ingenuity, and that doesn’t fit our brand, especially when there is money to throw.
(That’s our cue for you to think about vast pension funds and their unmet stewardship mission and the fiduciary duty to members that helps the pension live on in perpetuity, if done right….)
Humans are industrious. This idea, if it isn’t an outright fact with millennia of evidence, is a creative foothold to explore how we live in a modern world of society at odds with a planet of life-giving biogeochemical systems struggling with diminishing capacity, and all that means for climate and social crises.
Throughout history, we’ve developed a society of industry to express that industriousness purpose. It’s translated in seemingly infinite ways for good or for ill, but almost always for exchange, profit and wealth. Or love. Some of us are finding enrichment in labors of love.
There is, after all, a lot of industry in organizing climate protests.
The result of industry is money — the language of industry and reward for success, regardless of the negative externalities to reach that success. Regardless, too, of any colonial-style oppression of people or biology in pursuit of that empire building.
The most famous industrialists have the most money, regardless of the value of their compassion and strategic philanthropy. It’s a mystery why they are celebrated for their net worth — like they have greater wisdom as leaders because they have more money than 99% of the world.
Industry, after all, comes at the expense of natural and human capital.
We need raw materials and we need labor, the cheaper the better, to make industry. Efforts to make a social benefit of industry… well, that’s a mixed bag because it’s a cost item to industrial enrichment and a drain on shareholder value. It might have some PR value.
Not long after we created industry to maximize our basic survival needs — access to food, water, air, and shelter — we pointed industry at less critical priorities and products of dubious utility. Now, we have collectors, hoarders and amassers of material possessions — just because.
Humans don’t like to share. In the earliest Mesopotamian societies, sharing might have been strategic — sharing food, sharing security, and growing more Mesopotamians. But, the more we gave agency to government to police us and industry to feed us, the more we gave rise to an industrial ruling class. Sharing is a lesson at preschool. Sharing is an aspiration and certainly not a call to action.
My toys!
I’ll trade you for my toys. I’ll rent my toys. I’ll make sure my toys earn me more toys. I’ll penalize you for the damage done to my toys. Hey, you stole my toys! Good thing one of my toys is a private prison.
We play against type to say that industry is bad — even when it is. Bank of Nature is pointing industry at good that, with tweaks, could actually fulfill the promise that industry could, in a switcheroo, be the heroes of climate security.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Humans exist to make money. We might also make art and science and crime and punishment, but we make money. Good art makes lots of money and fame in that frustrating arbitrariness of value. Successful science might cure cancer or patent a soybean’s DNA or fly a billionaire into near-space — all of which needs labs and brains and hands and money to eventually make more money.
For many of us, money seems to be the problem — the source of injustice and misdeeds and generalized ugly behavior like privilege and entitlement. It’s fantasy, despite the TED talks, to imagine a world that doesn’t have money. A capitalistic society — driven by the pursuit of money — can be the target of protests and animus for globalization, poverty, systemic racism and environmental blight. Money can co-opt other systems like socialism — like, whatever it is that China is today and other forms of foreign investment imperialism. Our democracy, which is far less than the Greek ideal, allows freedoms that are made more free by money. Not everything needs money, of course, and often just plain effort will suffice, but better to have money than not, right?
Living off grid, without the systems of modern convenience that are made possible with the transaction of money, takes a very special person and someone who has chosen to live outside the money system. Then again, she might trade her excess potatoes at the the farmers market for hay for the goat.
So the problem, as I see it, is not that we make money — but how we choose to spend it. One of the Bank of Nature mantras is “Stewardship, not speculation.”
My creative colleague Tim MacDonald, a fierce financial theorist, explains it this way.
The problem isn’t money. It’s what we do with money. Is the money going where we need and want it to go? Who decides? Who decides who decides?
There are different social structures that are right for making different social decisions, but we do not right now have a social structure for making social decisions at atmospheric scales over geological times, about climate, about oceans, about Nature. And about our future. We will, once we create Bank of Nature, and constitute it properly
Government can’t invest in commerce, but it can direct a portion of the profits generated through commerce into social and environmental justice (through taxes, and borrowing against future taxes - and printing money against nothing)
Industry can invest in commerce, but it can’t direct profits into social and environmental justice, except as an afterthought through philanthropy for making amends for the damage done
Bank of Nature can do both, simultaneously, so that social and environmental justice is not about making amends; it’s about doing it right in the first place.
We'll have more on how the Bank of Nature will work, but it will involve throwing money at the problem. Help us identify the problem.
A look at how people around the world view climate change, Pew Research 2019