I have dedicated the last 50 years of my life for the protection of biodiversity and it's always been a struggle against commodification and bringing economies and resources to the markets for me biodiversity is auto poetic creation making creation life making life biodiversity is life in self-organized complexity Collective agency evolutionary unfolding just like a Quantum is the understanding of life from living systems and living organisms has converged with my understanding of the quantum non-locality and Quantum currents as rooting appointed outs in his book what is life unlike machines life is not a machine life is not
a market unlike machines living systems create life's growth without entropy the negative entropy systems that's why over four billion years the microorganisms and the plants cool this planet and never left pollution because in nature there's nothing like waste and pollution from the molecule to this or to the cell to the organism to ecosystems and the entire planet Gaia life is based on non-separation and Quantum Concordance self-organization and symbiosis in resonance with other beings the ecological problem began with the colonial problem and so much is made of we need to grow the markets in order to
have the finances to save the planet well we know in India how every step of the colonial process created growth for England and tremendous poverty for India we used to be 25 percent of the world's economy before the British they invaded with one lime all the land of India was turned into a commodity and private property owned by the little island next to you 45 trillion dollars was extracted from India we were reduced to a two percent of the world economy 60 million people died of famine The Peasants who were generating this growth so growth
is always being an extraction system and for me I'm not going to pick it up now for me really watching what their growth extracts from what does it leave the systems in the ecological systems the natural systems the social systems the cultural systems because basically besides extracting and leaving us in poverty colonialism created the category of a dead nature separate from humans that's what bacon Stars was writing the masculine birth of Time new Atlantis Superman will tell us Brilliant Minds would tell us how to fix dear Lieutenant slaver and then there was lock who defined
property as a result of the spiritual labor of capital justifying the enclosures of the commons the Takeover of the lands of the people to talk about nature based as something new that's happening well colonialism was nature-based they took Indigo from India under slave conditions they took our cotton they destroyed our textiles they captured slaves in Africa to work on the Cotton Fields on the lands hijacked from the indigenous people of America that was nature based I don't think it's a word that clarifies something new it just talks about the continuity of a colonial relationship between
humans and nature and between colonizing centers and the rest of the world is you know East India Company was created in 1600 by 1610 lock who defined the creation of private property also redefined money and investment before that it used to be Exchange in local markets it now became investment to make money and the real currencies of Life were forgotten the word currency never meant money before colonialism the word currency means flow flow is What flows in life to make life the flow of the nutrition cycle the flow of the water cycle the flow of
the energy cycle the flow of breath from the trees to us that is currency growth of those currencies is what we have to grow but to do that we have to de-grow the currency of money that is extinguishing life biodiversity and the flow of life because life is a relationship life is not a thing it's not number biodiversity is not an asset class so you know I'm so happy that today Frederick and Clive are here because they wrote a brilliant paper on nature life and relations summarizing the dasgupta report and for me it was interesting
that 1992 the mentors had tried to talk about how money will save the world the same interests had talked about how we of the South had less value we were 1 15th of your value just because of the color of your skin that's natural human capital a natural Capital just described how every time part of an ecosystem is commodified the rest of the ecosystem is destroyed my first involvement in the ecology movement was 1970s with the chipko movement where the British created commercial forestry natural forests with their diversity started to be replaced with commercial species
buying in my region displacing the oak the rhododendron it supported the water system it's supported the soil system and my sisters of chipko came out and said you think these forests are timbermine for making money these forests are our life they give us water they give us soil they give us pure air and the economics shifted because we then were made to remember that economy is related to Oikos is related to our home and as Aristotle pointed out economia is the Art of Living what's being called the economy now he gave it a name chromatistics
the art of money making that's not a substitute for the economy of living on this planet with love those who've got so addicted to making money out of both theft enclosures financialization can't stop their addiction and besides the offsets about which we've heard a lot there is now an attempt to make nature disappear but it's not just nature that disappears if you think of the fact that 80 percent of the biodiversity on the planet is on 22 percent of the land that left with indigenous people shouldn't the First Response be how do they protect biodiversity
do they protect it by retreating it as a formality or do they protect it by knowing their part of an earth family all species are our relatives we are not the Masters of the Universe we are strand in the web of life it's time to turn the plants the microbes indigenous people women in our teachers and how to run a real economy of life [Applause] so just before the Glasgow cop Eller foundation in New York's Stock Exchange floated the new asset class of natural asset companies preserve and restore natural assets that are ultimately underpin the
ability to be there on life on Earth they called it a vehicle to allow formation of specialized corporations that hold the rights to the ecosystem which also means denying the rights of nature denying the rights of the ecosystem to its integrity to its intrinsic worth and denying the rights of the indigenous people who have protected that ecosystem to hold the rights of the ecosystem so it's produced on chronic of lands his mother earth everywhere services like carbon to Christian and clean water these nscs will then maintain manage and grow the natural assets they commodify with
the end goal of maximizing the aspects of the natural asset that are deemed by the company to be profitable that means every diverse ecosystem shrunk to be extracted this is continuing the illusions that have brought us to the brink it is continuing the illusion that money is the currency of life when life is the currency of life [Applause] North American indigenous people reminded us not till you have poisoned the last River kill the last fish cut the last tree will you realize you can't eat money four thousand trillion dollars of financial assets is what the
financial world is dreaming of with Dead Rivers disenfranchised people biodiversity Extinction accelerated and this biodiversity Extinction in my view is by Design both of the industrial system of farming as well as the financial system that constantly drives out that which the market doesn't value and the communities it is an extinction of the communities that have protected the Earth so far which is why financialization of nature is a false way to go recognizing respecting rights of Mother Earth her last species her last child is the way to go [Applause]
