The obvious answer is to place a financial value on what used to be called nature, but has now been rebranded natural capital. There are some magnificent examples of how this could, in principle, spare us from perverse decisions. As The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity global initiative points out, if you turn a hectare of mangrove forest into shrimp farms you’ll make $1,220 per year. Leave it standing, and the benefits are worth 10 times that amount.

But the obvious answer isn’t necessarily the right answer. The issue which determines whether or not the living planet is protected is not a number with a dollar sign attached. It’s political will. That’s another way of saying that it’s about power.

Look at the European carbon market. Through the EU Emissions Trading System, it was supposed to have harnessed the magic of the markets to do what politics had failed to do: drastically reduce the consumption of fossil fuels. At the time of writing, the price of carbon is under €3 per tonne, a record low. For all the good that does, it might as well be zero.

Why is it so low? Because carbon-intensive industries lobbied politicians to raise the supply of permits until the mechanism became useless. The market has not solved the problem of power: It has simply given it another name. Whether governments attempt to address climate change the old way (through regulation) or through pricing makes not a jot of difference if they won’t stand up to industrial lobbyists.

In some respects the Emissions Trading System has made the problem worse, for it allows politicians and businesses to wash their hands of responsibility for climate change, arguing that the market will sort it all out. There is not a new airport or coal mine or power station being built in the European Union which has not cited the trading scheme as justification. This useless system has empowered polluting projects which might not otherwise have been approved.

Even if we didn’t have a number to slap on them, we’ve known for centuries that mangrove swamps are of great value for coastal protection and as breeding grounds for fish. But this has not stopped people from bullying and bribing politicians to let them turn these forests into shrimp farms. If a hectare of shrimp farms makes $1,200 for a rich and well-connected man, it can count for far more than the $12,000 per hectare of intact mangrove forest is worth to downtrodden coastal people. Knowing the price does not change this relationship. Again, it’s about power.

Natural capital accounting can exacerbate the underlying problem. By pricing and commodifying the natural world and then taking the obvious next step – establishing a market in “ecosystem services” – accounting has the unintended consequence of turning the biosphere into a subsidiary of the economy. Forests, fish stocks, biodiversity and hydrological cycles become owned, in effect, by the very interests – corporations, landlords, banks – whose excessive power is most threatening to them. In some cases, the costing of nature looks like a prelude to privatization.

Already the traders and speculators are moving in. In the U.K., our Ecosystem Markets Task Force talks of “harnessing City financial expertise to assess the ways that these blended revenue streams and securitizations enhance the return on investment of an environmental bond.” Nature is becoming the plaything of the financial markets. We know how well that tends to work out.

While natural capital accounting empowers the money men, it disempowers the rest of us. That’s one of the reasons why governments like it. Who needs all that messy democratic decision-making, those endless debates about intrinsic value and beauty and wonder, if you’ve already determined that the meaning of life is, say, 42? And who can gainsay the decision to pulp a forest or blast a coral reef, if the value of the destruction turns out to be worth several times 42? Once we have ceded nature to cost-benefit analysis, we can’t complain if we don’t like the results.

After more than a quarter of a century of environmental campaigning I’ve come to see that the only thing that really works is public mobilization: the electorate putting so much pressure on governments that they are obliged to take a stand against powerful interests. It doesn’t matter what weapons governments use to confront these interests: What counts is their willingness to use them. A system which undermines public involvement, boosts the power of the financial markets and reduces love and passion and delight to a column of figures is unlikely to enhance the protection of the natural world.

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After the collapse of the climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009, governments began quietly to shuffle away from their green commitments. In Canada, you won’t have noticed much difference, as the Harper government was fiercely opposed to environmental restraints long before Copenhagen. The same can be said for the United States. But in the United Kingdom, the green consensus to which all the major parties have subscribed has started to fragment. Our government is now gutting the English town planning system, which is the envy of nations blighted by urban sprawl. Even as it starves essential services of money, it’s launching a new road-building program.

Senior ministers hint that they want to drop the U.K.’s carbon targets. They talk of using shale gas as a “bridge” to a low-carbon economy, which is like using chocolate fudge cake as a bridge to a low-calorie diet.

Is this because environmentalists have messed up? Have we alienated the public? Have we supported the wrong policies, promoted the wrong causes?

Plenty of people say so. One of our most prominent critics is the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. In an interview with The Economist earlier this year, Khosla maintained that we “get in the way with silly stuff like asking people to walk more, drive less.… Environmentalists use artificial rates of return, buried assumptions and ‘what if’ assumptions about behaviour changes. It’s useless crap.” Instead, he suggests, only new, “black swan” technologies will deliver us from disaster.

There is truth in some of this. We have tended to overestimate both people’s willingness to change the way they live and the effectiveness of these changes when they do occur. We have been better at explaining what we don’t want than at explaining what we do want. We have engaged in magical thinking, particularly about energy technologies. We’ve supported useless projects we like the look of (solar power at high latitudes, for example), while rejecting useful sources (such as atomic energy) on unscientific grounds.

But in other respects it seems to me that we are being blamed for circumstances over which we have no control. One of them, of course, is the financial crisis, and the way in which it has blotted other issues out of public consciousness. Another is the power of the counter-movement. A paper published in the journal Environmental Politics in 2008 notes that “U.S. environmental organizations have continued to grow in both memberships and revenues.… Nonetheless, U.S. commitments to domestic and international environmental protection have declined.”

What has happened, it says, is that from the early 1990s, conservative movements directed their fire at environmentalism. Their backers, interests such as Exxon- Mobil and the Koch brothers, “launched a full-scale counter-movement in response to the perceived success of the environmental movement and its supporters.” This, the paper says, “has been central to the reversal of U.S. support for environmental protection, both domestically and internationally.”

Even in favourable political circumstances, many of the goals of environmentalism are inherently difficult to achieve. The truth few people wish to acknowledge is that environmental aims run counter to the primary goal of governments and business, which is to enhance economic growth. However many black swans take flight, more economic activity is likely to exert greater pressure on planetary systems. Yet achieving a steady-state economy of the kind proposed by the thinkers Herman Daly and Tim Jackson is a goal shared by no one outside the environmental movement, even though it could spare us from the catastrophic ebb and flow of the growth-based system.

Those who criticize us on the grounds of irrationality are just as prone to it themselves. For example, to use his blunt terms, there are plenty of buried assumptions and useless crap in Vinod Khosla’s prescriptions. Six of the projects Khosla Ventures is currently funding attempt to turn biological material into fuels and feedstocks of different kinds. But where will the materials come from? The world’s entire stock of biomass has now been pledged to half a dozen different suitors: it will, various enterprises promise, become the primary source of our heating fuel, electricity, road transport fuel, aviation fuel, chemical feedstock and biochar for soil fertility. The plantations required to meet a significant proportion of global demand in any one of these sectors would set up a disastrous conflict with both food security and the protection of ecosystems.

Both greens and venture capitalists need to recognize that miracle solutions to the environmental crisis are likely to be as disappointing as miracle cures, miracle crops and miracle financial instruments. The constraints imposed by the laws of economics, biology and thermodynamics mean that our choices are more limited than we often choose to believe. This is why, for example, we can no longer fudge the question of nuclear power. Abandoning it when we have no clear idea of what we will put in its place, and when lowcarbon sources of energy are scarce enough already, amounts to a guarantee that we will increase our use of fossil fuel, as Germany is now discovering.

The way the greens have explained the environmental crisis and the solutions they’ve favoured may be part of the problem, but it is a minor part. Compared to the people we confront—the fossil fuel and other primary industries, their lobby groups and counter-movements, a political class reliant on industrial funding, a business class just as prone to magical thinking as we are, a population which tends to put immediate self-interest above long-term concerns—we are a small force and a weak one.

We have a duty to base our campaigns on the best available information, and explain them to the public as clearly and persuasively as possible. But even if our analysis and prescriptions were flawless, we’d still be struggling.

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