Upsetting the Offset - Transnational Institute

Afterword
Time to Breathe
Zoe Young
So one element – carbon – has been transmuted from neglected-pricelessconnected
to exploited-tradeable-separate.
Underlying its newly invented ‘market’ in imaginary units seems to be the
continued lust for more growth in available ease and goodies, backs still turned
to other ripples of impact resulting. A fragile alchemy now quantifies certain
environmental value and defers responsibility for its transformation;
reproducing to some degree bankers’ shifting of responsibility for financial debt.
Symptoms of such beguiling and destructive practices have long been actively
countered by far-sighted social movements of intelligence and compassion. But
these patterns sustain nevertheless, partly due to suppression, and partly perhaps
to widespread ignorance/naivety of some environmental activists about geopolitics,
enclosure and/or the nature of complex corruption; plus some
preference among privileged greens for experiments in self-peasantification,
gesture politics and/or protest culture that simply reproduces impotence,
instead (for example) of moving strategically to cut off the most dangerous
flows of large-scale fear and finance at source.
In 1972, my father Wayland Young told a meeting for the UN Conference
on the Human Environment that our species ‘as a whole must now slightly alter
course. Industry everywhere must build pollution control measures into its
planning, both political and economic’. I was three years old back then, and
grew up with a kind of knowing, at some level, that something was wrong with
the rules of Western economies that fetishized the claims of ‘objectivity’ in
economics, but did not listen to many actual scientists, and pursued ‘growth’
always without awareness of maturity, decline and death. My parents argued that
democratic governments should adopt systemic preservation of what people
need and value – peace, beauty, fertile ecology, justice etc – and enforce the
principle of ‘polluter pays’ to prevent or clean up any mess or damage caused.
They also argued that governments should never pay people not to destroy
something that people need, because that would simply reward destructive
intent. But in the following decades of international ‘greed is good’ consensus,
such rewards often became the last resort of a marginalised and co-opted
conservation movement. The Yasuni proposal to pay Ecuador not to sell the oil
from under rich biodiversity has excited much interest but promises nothing
really new. Inter-governmental preparations for a new ‘financial mechanism’ for
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