Book Review: The Value of a Whale
Adrienne Buller's 2022 book is a powerful rejection of "green capitalism" as it has existed and as a potential future answer to climate change and environmental destruction.
The central conceit of The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism is found directly in its title, with the monetization of life itself as the framing device around the question ‘can the market effectively guide us through the climate devastation it is largely responsible for incepting?’ IMF researchers placed a monetary value on an individual whale at $2 million, with the entire current stock worth $1 trillion. While this valuation does factor in ecological as well as financial “worth” (considering whales as both a tourist attraction and a carbon sink), it is needlessly reductive and forces us to ask whether whales are in fact worth more than the price tag attached to them, and by extension, all life. This number is not and cannot be a sufficient reflection of the total value of any one lifeform, given that they are all interconnected within nature in terms of the food chain, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration. The same nihilistic accounting informs the relationship capitalist forces have historically maintained with humans, who are distinct from whales only in terms of our neurological development and our collective decision to endow some of us with a more robust package of rights which is meant to preclude certain mistreatments on the basis of financial concerns but is more commonly seen as only a guideline, an inconvenience to be swept under the rug when profit is on the line or when workers decide to organize. Even from a purely self-interested perspective, the market must periodically be forcefully reminded that human beings represent more than just their earning capacity, but this consideration is both narrow and inconsistently applied when dealing with intelligent beings and nonexistent in the world of nature, which has been seen as “open season,” and expendable to a point.
Where is that point, and can the inherent avarice and shortsighted perpetual growth dogma of capitalism be convinced on its own terms to place a higher price on the natural world and its biomass, before it is too late? The popular historic consideration of rights ends with the human race, outside of some largely token and wholly insufficient protections for endangered species and wild habitats. What The Value of a Whale seeks to ascertain is this: even generously assuming that the market applies a correct, functional, and enforced ecologically-minded value to wildlife, are its adherents up to the task of preserving what remains of our common inheritance, given its already-devastated condition in 2022 and the historical fact that this devastation was overwhelmingly administered by the market itself, the dominant hegemonic driving force of the last few centuries and especially of the postwar decades of the 20th century in which pollution greatly accelerated? Is it capable of “greening” itself and saving our civilization, or even greatly reducing the coming aggregate suffering? And in doing so, would it be more than simply efficient but also fair and redistributive in correcting these existing economic injustices?
The answer is “no.” Over the course of 300 well-research pages, Buller makes the case that the market’s own logic and contradictions preclude its ability to reconcile the profit motive with the more forward thinking yet immediately costly impetus to protect what is left of our natural world, despite the longer-term costs which will inevitably come to pass to all of us. Insofar as corporations and their allies in world government play at being “green,” their attitude can be summed up as “lip service,” a reflection of their actions thus far regarding their public support for human rights while doing only the bare minimum to keep the colonized nations from dying out or committing open rebellion, which would result in an immediate cost and public relations disaster if they were for some reason unable to utilize their vast fortunes to propagandize and pacify their constituents at home. Buller cites a vast number of examples of capitalist obfuscation and coverup which were by and large developed during a time of apparent prosperity and optimism; as nature breaks down further and already-inevitable tipping points are passed by, there is no reason to presume that market forces will change their behavior and adopt a genuine, heartfelt concern for either wildlife or the planet’s most vulnerable individuals, who already number in the billions.
Most symbolic of this misuse is the concept of the carbon market, revealed in the text to be little more than a questionably legal and certainly counterproductive non-solution to the problem of balancing increasing emissions with offsets which must also necessarily increase—typically intrusively into the environments of poorer nations, ruining subsistence farming by using the land for monoculture carbon sink forests or encroaching onto indigenous property to mine for lithium, in the service of a “green” balancing act which is meant to appear compensatory to the environment but is in reality dodged rather neatly by powerful monied interests. The forests planted as part of the offsets, Buller points out, are forests in name only; the trees need not even come of age or absorb any carbon to fulfill this particular requirement. There are other problems with these impostor offsets: any trees planted now are going to be far more vulnerable to fire, drought, heat stress, and infestation by the time they mature; there is also the fact there is not enough land on the planet to plant a sufficient amount of carbon-removing trees to satisfy current pledges:
Countries’ climate pledges rely on “unrealistic” and “extensive” amounts of land for carbon removal projects like tree planting schemes, a new report from the University of Melbourne said.
A landmass larger than the entire United States, about 1.2 billion hectares, would be needed for countries to deliver on those plans, which largely ignore who lives on and manages the lands at issue, including the rights of Indigenous peoples and other land-based communities living in rural areas that rely on land for survival and culture…
About 65 percent of the 1.2 billion hectares of land identified in the report would come from land currently being used for other purposes, such as agriculture, while the remainder would consist of degraded land identified for ecosystem restoration projects, such as the African “Great Green Wall” project aimed at planting trees, grasslands and plants across the continent’s Sahel region.
Countries’ climate plans rely on a mix of emission reductions from sources like power plants and automobiles, as well as carbon-removal schemes and ecosystem restoration projects that reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere by sequestering it in biomass like trees or by using new technologies to capture carbon and inject it into geological reservoirs.
Page 72: “Thus, the ‘solutions’ and lower-carbon alternatives that putting a price on carbon might engender have no guarantee of delivering outcomes that are effective—that is, which drive rapid and permanent decarbonisation.” Another compelling argument: the complexity of the natural world and the immediacy of its needs do not lend themselves to sluggish, corruptible, and by-design myopic logic of the marketplace. Pointedly asked on pages 31-2 about the marketization of emissions:
The enormity of the support for the concept’s elegance, its efficiency, and its supposed pragmatism raises the question: why is there not already a global price on carbon (or indeed ecosystem services)? Or, more modestly, why has no jurisdiction managed to enact a carbon price effective enough to bring their economy in line with the trajectory of a safe future?…Within the carbon price thus sit the twin logics of the green capitalist framework: first, the hypothetical and, as I argue throughout this book, impossible project of preserving the architecture and arrangements of wealth and power that define contemporary capitalism; and second, the identification and construction of new sites for accumulation within an economy and world that must change rapidly to secure climate and ecological stability.
(See also page 93 for a discussion about the claims of the market to be apolitical.)
The Value of a Whale is crucial reading in a world which can no longer ignore the immediacy of the environmental threat brought about by our actions. As previously noted on this Substack, being personally impacted by climate change is the most reliable predictor of our ability to recognize the reality of its presence in our lives, whether this is through the loss of personal livelihood or corporate profits:
Yet even this undeniable lesson is vulnerable to denialist propaganda, much like the many victims of Covid who clung to false narratives based in conspiracy theories and the efficacy of folk remedies even as they lie dying of the disease. If individuals who have suffered profound losses as a result of more frequent and more deadly weather events, food scarcity, or even climate-induced anxiety (which is a significant factor in many couples’ decision not to procreate) are still subject to powerful and well-financed propaganda, what of corporate “persons” who thrive on shady restructuring and limited liability (see chapter 3 of Buller’s book)? No one is directly responsible for damages if everyone is a middle manager who is just following orders and the only individuals with real decision-making power and culpability are effectively beyond reproach and know they are protected by a golden parachute in any case. This invalidation of the concept of personal responsibility within an organizational structure is a well-trodden one in 2022—this rationalization cut its teeth during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was marked by rampant malfeasance and costly fraud committed by a host of mercenary corporations (Blackwater and Halliburton alike) as well as the widespread, unpunished abuse of civilians and fellow soldiers by US military personnel. It is no accident that this war was also environmentally destructive on a scale heretofore unseen. The lesson learned by market forces was a valuable one: we are willing to tolerate even murder on a massive scale if the victim is sufficiently “othered” and we tell ourselves it was necessary to preserve our way of life.
The Value of a Whale is a comprehensive and compelling rejection “green capitalism” as a concept; the human race is now faced with the choice between the market-based colonial structure which has resulted in the current predicament or a wholly new green economy which is both equalizing in terms of human welfare and environmental justice and materially effective in reducing the coming impacts of climate change and environmental paucity. Buller rejects the concept of green capitalism outright, and in this rejection implies that a revolutionary system of command economy socialism, such as the one championed for instance in Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System by author and activist Ian Angus, is necessary to save what is left of our natural commons and avoid full collapse (of both our civilization and likely our species itself). “Green capitalism” is inextricably predatory because it is not fully green and cannot be—it will always work to maintain the fatally lopsided wealth inequalities between and within countries which have historically accelerated environmental destruction. It is not only lacking in its ability to force the issue of environmental stewardship within the corporate world, it is a self-evident contradiction which precludes the adoption of actually beneficial programs.
The market’s main driving force—short term profits—will always be adds with the more long-term outlook necessary to curb this greed in the service of taking only that which can be readily replaced with “enough and as good” for others (and the regeneration of nature itself), and the capitalist central government, which is the putative regulator meant to reign in corporate voraciousness, is now captured by those rich corporations and donors and remains a twisted version of itself, underwriting their rapacious behavior with public funds and excusing the unequal relationship by denoting these businesses as “too big to fail.” Soon, all companies will be “too big to fail”—they will inevitably take us all with them after they suffer horrifying losses at the hands of climate-driven scarcity, drought, extreme weather, and other unforeseen and unforeseeable calamities which their shortsightedness brought into being and rendered them unable to survive. The recent COP27 climate summit is instructive here: little was achieved at the meeting, which maintained the goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius but did nothing to alter the current path which points toward a 3 degrees or more rise in temperature and catastrophic resultant losses. However, a system of payments to poorer nations already hit harder by climate change was tentatively agreed upon by 200 nations’ representatives. This system is tantamount to hush money, however, and dodges the issue of economic predation which resulted in the original impoverishment of these vulnerable nations, by shirking responsibility for being the main polluters and abstracting the problem of ecological devastation to an act of god—it is the vagaries of the climate which is the culprit, not the economic system which originally drove its deleterious changes and made these populations vulnerable to begin with. Worse, these kinds of “charitable” payments and loans are typically fraught with conditions which Butler correctly notes overwhelmingly benefit private creditors at the expense of both the lender and borrower governments. Even without a steep interest rate or sinister World Bank strings attached, these payments will be just enough to keep colonial communities alive, so that we can continue our unchecked growth and ensure that there will always be a place to dump our physical garbage and other externalities. Any payments beyond those which are necessary to keep these populations alive and subservient would be illogical from the standpoint of the market, and as always even this token act of magnanimity will be vocally opposed by the right wing, precluding any kind further redistributive justice (see page 184-5 and 209-19 for Buller’s perceptive take on reparations and responsibility).
Also instructive here is the case of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. His EV company Tesla produces notoriously unreliable, dangerous cars (which are mostly emissions-free once constructed and fully charged), and exists mostly to make money by trading carbon credits to other automobile manufacturers:
Another company of his (Boring) exists mainly to lead municipalities on with promises of “green” underground transportation infrastructure which never materialize, delaying the construction of actually green infrastructure:
Officials had started planning for a street-level rail connection between booming Ontario International Airport and a commuter train station 4 miles away, with an estimated cost north of $1 billion. For just $45 million, Mr. Musk’s Boring Co. offered to instead build an underground tunnel through which travelers could zip back and forth in autonomous electric vehicles.
Dazzled by Boring’s boasts that it had revolutionized tunneling, and the cachet of working with the billionaire head of EV maker Tesla Inc., the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority dumped plans for a traditional light rail and embraced the futuristic tunnel.
When it came time to formalize the partnership and get to work, Boring itself went underground—just as it has done in Maryland, Chicago and Los Angeles. Boring didn’t submit a bid for Ontario by the January 2022 deadline.
The six-year-old company has repeatedly teased cities with a pledge to “solve soul-destroying traffic,” only to pull out when confronted with the realities of building public infrastructure, according to former executives and local, state and federal government officials who have worked with Mr. Musk’s Boring. The company has struggled with common bureaucratic hurdles like securing permits and conducting environmental reviews, the people said.
Musk’s preferred solution to the looming death of the planet? Two pipe dreams: move everyone to Mars eventually, but in the meantime solve the demographic problem on this one by encouraging reproduction (a large strain on the planet’s resources is, of course, overpopulation). A pollutant-induced worldwide sperm count drop has already resulted in a dramatic reduction in overall biological fertility; further, Covid infection has been revealed to reduce sperm count as well, by as much as one third. Microplastics and PFAS have proliferated on our planet to the extent that rainwater is now considered unsafe to drink; as humans with the power of discernment we can simply avoid consuming dangerous substances, but animals are not so lucky. The already-teetering biosphere (which has seen a startling 70% reduction in stock since the 1950s) will surely be further strained by its consequent poisoning and inability to replicate itself. The angst brought about by a falling birthrate and the impoverishment and consequent desperation of this looming ecological crisis has already fueled a nascent fascist backlash against sexual freedom and reproductive rights in the form of homophobia, hate-fueled mass killings, and anti-abortion laws, which are already harming women in the most prosperous nation on the planet:
But sometimes, evidence is an expression of grief or even rage. A recent journal article, “Maternal Morbidity and Fetal Outcomes Among Pregnant Women at 22 Weeks’ Gestation or Less with Complications in 2 Texas Hospitals After Legislation on Abortion,” contains such evidence.
To understand this article, you need to know that any number of complications can threaten a pregnancy, such as rupture of the bag of water around the baby, preterm labor, or heavy bleeding. When those complications arise before 22 weeks of gestation— before the age of viability when a fetus can live outside of a uterus—the standard of medical care is to offer a patient termination of pregnancy as an option. Women who continue pregnancy in these situations take on significant risks to their own health, and because of the early gestation, the chance for a healthy baby is very, very low.
However, in September 2021, Texas adopted two measures, S.B. 4 and S.B. 8, which instituted punitive actions against anyone providing abortion. These laws took effect before the Supreme Court decision ended Roe v. Wade. And all of a sudden, termination of pregnancy became impossible in Texas unless and until there was an “immediate threat to maternal life.”
The journal article, published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, describes the experience of two large Texas hospitals over a period of eight months following that legislation. The authors, who care for patients at those hospitals, describe how their hospitals managed 28 women who presented at less than 22 weeks’ gestation with serious complications following the ban on abortion.
Without the ability to offer abortion to their patients, all 28 women were managed expectantly. This is a medical way of saying that they waited for something terrible to happen. That wait lasted, on average, nine days.
During that nine days of waiting, here is what was achieved for the babies: 27 of the patients had loss of the fetus in utero or the death of the infant shortly after delivery. Of the entire cohort, one baby remained alive, still in the NICU at time of the journal article’s publication, with a long list of complications from extreme prematurity, including bleeding in the brain, brain swelling, damage to intestines, chronic lung disease. and liver dysfunction. If a baby survives these complications, they often result in permanent, lifelong illnesses.
During those nine days of waiting for an immediate threat to maternal life, here is what happened to the women of that cohort: Most of them went into labor, or had a stillbirth, which meant the medical team could then legally intervene and empty the uterus. Fifty-seven percent of those pregnant women had some sort of complication, and for about a third of them, it was serious enough to require intensive-care admission, surgery, or a second admission to the hospital. One of the 28 patients ended up with a hysterectomy, which means she will never carry a pregnancy again. The authors of the article estimate, based on their pre-September practice, that about half of those maternal complications would have been avoided if immediate abortion had been offered as a choice. But of course, post-September in Texas, these women didn’t get a choice.
As ecological breakdown accelerates, expediency, population concerns, and the “protection” of those close to us at the expense of others will increasingly be cited as justification for the abandonment of propriety, proportionality, and human rights in general. Market forces have no answer to the problems they directly create, let alone the rising fascism which will actually benefit them, at least at first. As so-called stewards of the environment, these forces will in due time reveal themselves to be insufficient (despite their claims of fostering market-based freedoms and therefore the wise protection of the common good via a process of free and open competition), easily-corrupted (even at this relatively early stage, the assumed rationality of market ideology is being used to greenwash environmentally-destructive programs by dishonest corporations and governments) and unjust (unchecked international capitalism initially resulted in the widespread inequalities and grossly unsustainable consumption by elites which would still exist even in the fantasy world in which market forces somehow solve the climate problem). In this way, capitalism is neither equalizing nor “green,” and in forgiving developing nations their own pollution and consumption out of some notion of fairness and equal opportunity, it only offers them a chance to become the oppressors and polluters in turn (these excuses are also easily exploited by already-developed nations to justify their own emissions, as if “developing” justifies the destruction of the biosphere for them, it should apply to our own developmental past as well). This is largely a lie, and these communities will be allowed to survive only as colonial dumping grounds to be used and abused in the service of artificially extending the west’s gluttonous lifestyles.
As Butler notes, in the last 50 years these market forces have largely disappeared behind a veil of secrecy by decentralizing and distancing themselves from direct participation in the capitalist economy, effectively “privatizing” their otherwise public presence. In the same way that legal segregation was officially ended but allowed to continue to an even greater extent through economic exploitation and unfair hiring practices, racist gerrymandering and racist barriers to voting, the modern corporation has offices in the Cayman Islands. They are prepared to continue shirking responsibility and acting behind the scenes, beholden to no one and justifying their predatory new policies by citing environmental expediency. “We need to pay these workers pennies on the dollar because paying them a living wage would drive up prices” becomes “We need to pay these workers pennies on the dollar because otherwise it is too expensive to plant these trees.” By the time a sufficient number of us realize what has happened, the culprits are long gone, with an impossible-to-follow money trail behind them. Worse, we will be in no physical condition to worry about trying to follow it as we will be more concerned with surviving in the parched, flooded, or burning wastelands of our future.
The plain lack of evident progress toward a sustainable world and the shameless coopting of the language of ecological concern by corporations (as they previously cynically misused the language of inclusiveness, fairness and representation when those concepts became in vogue) proves that their concern is neither genuine nor materially effective. Despite the hegemonic place free market ideologies occupy in the major polluting nations, emissions, and consequently the inevitable rise in temperature and further strain on the natural world, continues unabated. This is the impetus for suspicion about the claims of the “green capitalist”: absent some compelling reason to adjust our thinking, the undeniably destructive history of international capitalism cannot be considered short-lived or malleable. Instead it will adapt as it always has, profiting already from the unthinkable time and again (wars, disease, natural disasters) at the expense of the victims. Under this system of “green capitalism,” the same lopsided arrangement will persist and indeed become more lopsided as increasing breakdown and scarcity is cited to justify increasingly predatory behavior in the self-interested capitalist mindset. The same impulse to disregard the suffering of others in favor of taking care of ourselves, our families, or our nation which informed the profoundly unequal current arrangement will only be stronger in the coming decades. Desperation makes monsters of us all in the absence of a countervailing force, a force which will be worse than destroyed by capitalism, it will be corrupted and misused by it. The history of our current century can be summarized in this way: the profit-driven, by corollary necessary, abandonment of moral responsibility in the service of maintaining the perpetual growth machine of late stage capitalism which now manifests itself as more than just the enslavement and impoverishment of human communities, but now the diffuse and therefore authorless enslavement and impoverishment of the entirety of the natural world.