ABSTRACT
Today, nature is big business: being green is sound economics. Green technology is a major development area. Environmental services are booming. Waste management is one of the largest growth areas. The ‘green’ revolution in high yield crops has transformed Third World agriculture. Environmental research is buoyant. Business, we can see, is taking the environment seriously. If the above examples are not sufficient, the new terms that combine the environment with markets unequivocally announce the unlikely marriage: the ‘green market’, ‘green globalism’, and the ‘global environmental market’ are just some of the conjunctures that indicate that money and economic considerations are inescapably tied to all matters environmental. What has happened then between this incorporation of the environment into the economic fold and the exploitation of nature as a resource, the recognition of damage to the environment, and the rejection of sustainable technology on the grounds that it is too expensive? Andrew Ross describes this shift in the following terms:
Once the source simply of raw materials to be extracted and transformed into commodities, nature is now a valuable origin of exchange value in its own right. In the age of environmental accounting, nature enters the market not just as source of property or mineral value, nor just for its capacity to sustain its soil, water, and air, but also for its own sake, as a desirable signifier with inherent worth and value to consumer markets.
