Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee: a political ecology of change

A corporation that scrapes the ocean floor for shrimp, for example, will "see" the shrimp as it is harvested and therefore appears as an asset on the balance sheet. The thousands of square miles of destroyed habitat, displaced species, crippled ecological resilience and the cascade of downstream impacts do not appear as costs or liabilities however. These unrecorded costs include the elimination of entire ecosystems and the dumping of millions of tons of "by-catch", the fish, sea turtles, marine mammals, coral reefs and plant life that are killed in the process (an estimated third of the annual global catch) and ejected back into the water. In short, the marketable wealth of the ocean system is extracted and transformed into profit while the costs of doing business are "externalized."

These costs do not go away. They are absorbed by the inhabitants, human and otherwise, of the natural world. The term "regulation," which we hear so often in the news, simply refers to attempts by civil society to force some of these costs onto the balance sheets of the corporations that generate them. The cost of environmental destruction or of keeping their workforce alive (labor costs) are burdens that corporations go to great lengths to avoid.

This is the dirty little secret of capitalism: it's based on bad math. If the real costs of doing business had to be accounted for on the balance sheet the capitalist enterprise as a whole would not be profitable.

Exxon Mobil, Chiquita, Coca Cola, Massey Energy, Intel and the rest of their specie are quite right when they claim that too much regulation would kill them. They have to get those costs off the ledger by forcing them down the throats of millions of people--Guatemalan banana workers, Somali fishing villagers and Mexican maquila workers-- who do not share in the profits. There is an unlimited supply of bayonets, battleships and unmanned drones to make sure that they swallow. Only in this way can the system reward its "owners" with unlimited riches.

Try convincing your cat to stop hunting birds. It would certainly be in her interest to leave enough birds to reproduce so that there will be birds in the future. You have identified a problem--the decimation of the bird population--which you assume your cat will have an interest in. The cat can immediately see the problem but defines it differently: it's that you're bugging her. The solution is obvious to her: she must get you to go away so she can get back to killing birds. In a similar way the destruction of biodiversity, melting of glaciers and increasing infant mortality do not register on the corporate radar because they are not relevant to next quarter's profit statement. There is no mechanism to account for them. What does register, however, is that people are upset and that could lead to. Chronic hunger only registered as a "crisis" in 2008 when it found expression in riots and demonstrations, a development that threatens the stability most corporate planners value. Once the unrest was brought under control it disappeared as a "crisis" even though the hunger persisted. The corporate response, therefore, is to do what is necessary to address the threat (the threat being that people are making a fuss). They can increase campaign contributions, deploy lobbyists, manipulate public perception, sponsor amenable scientists, offer funding to environmental groups and paint their corporate jets green.

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