Nature as Waste
The contradiction of private property and flourishing nature
Introduction
As we move further into the 2020s, targets to halt and reverse biodiversity loss continue to slip out of reach. Instead of sinking into apathy, we need to ask: why have we not turned the tide on the ecological crisis? Despite grand promises of a deus ex machina of private investment to shore up nature, and create new markets trading in biodiversity is not delivering. However, the flaws of this approach run deeper than it first appears. At its root is a fundamental contradiction between our system of private property and nature restoration. This is nothing new, in fact we can trace this contradiction back to influential works of liberal philosophy that set out to justify the morality of both the emergence of private property and its maintenance hundreds of years ago. Modern ecological science over the past few decades has made it clear that land considered to be waste by these frameworks of thought are actually complex ecosystems that provide the foundation for society in the form of public goods. Unless we begin to unpick these deeply held assumptions about the role of nature and property, our collapse into ecological dysfunction will only accelerate.
Failures to date
It has been clear for decades that global biodiversity is in freefall due to the intersecting and mutually reinforcing impacts of land use and climate change (Cowie, Bouchet, & Fontaine, 2022). This is evident in the UK which has an extremely ecologically impoverished landscape despite a relatively well resourced and rhetorically well intentioned effort to halt the decline (Hayhow et al, 2019). In light of these failures of policy, a new paradigm centering private investment has emerged (Fletcher, 2023). This has materialised as carbon offset markets, biodiversity net gain requirements, and philanthropic donations. Despite these investments, and the media excitement they generate, a genuine shift towards biodiversity restoration has simply failed to happen. Instead, biodiversity continues to decline, as mounting evidence reveals systemic dysfunction in the mechanisms of privately financed conservation. A particularly striking example of this was reported in January 2023 when an investigation by the Guardian revealed that over 90 percent of carbon offsets accredited by Verra did not constitute real reductions in atmospheric carbon dioxide. This was shocking in its scale, even to those who have been critical of the system of voluntary carbon offsets for some time, and is emblematic of the wholesale failure of private finance to deliver effective nature based solutions at scale. We must resist dismissing this as an isolated incident that can be solved by reform within the current system. Instead we need to ask why this offset market failed so spectacularly, and whether it signals a deeper issue lying at the heart of privatised nature restoration.
The deeper origins
Underlying why private nature restoration has failed is a fundamental contradiction between a private property regime and nature as a provider of public goods. This is by no means a new inconsistency and strong traces of its current manifestation can be found hundreds of years ago in two key justificatory theories of the private ownership of land: natural rights and positive rights. The first of these theories posits that private property exists outside of the realm of lawmaking and the state and arises from the natural rights inherent to all individuals. Perhaps the most famous thinker in this vein is John Locke who laid out his theory of how private property came to be in his work Two Treatises of Government in 1689. Locke is interested in justifying the process by which individuals could lay claim to land and exclude others, thereby making it their property. He suggests that in the process of working the land to improve it since a person's labour is a result of the work of their body which they own, the mixing of their labour with the land brings it into their possession.
The key assumption that we are interested in here from the perspective of nature restoration is what he means by improving the land. Locke explains that “land that is left wholly to nature, that hath no improvement of pasturage, tillage, or planting, is called, as indeed it is, waste; and we shall find the benefit of it amount to little more than nothing.” Locke views land “left wholly to nature” as being fundamentally without worth, and therefore waste since it is not being used productively. In fact, Locke is so convinced that labour is the overwhelming source of value for land that he judges that “if we will rightly estimate things as they come to our use, and cast up the several expenses about them—what in them is purely owing to Nature and what to labour—we shall find that in most of them ninety-nine hundredths are wholly to be put on the account of labour”. This reveals something crucial, here Locke is interested in exchange value: in other words, the profit that can be made from the land by the person holding it in exclusive possession. Any value that cannot be captured as such is waste.
The other strand of theory seeking to justify private property attempts to answer a slightly different question, that of why we should continue to have a system of private property once all land has been claimed. A key voice in this debate was Jeremy Bentham, who detailed his view in Principles of the Civil Code (1830). Bentham was fundamentally opposed to the kind of thinking extolled by John Locke in his argument based on natural rights, describing them as “simple nonsense” (Bentham, 1843). Instead he proposed a utilitarian theory of property, seeing it as a right emerging from the guarantees of the law to achieve a wider social objective (Panesar, 2000). In other words, he believed that private property does not exist without a legal system administered by a state to enforce a claim to a particular parcel of land. What Bentham argues is that a system of private property is the best way to maximise the total wellbeing in society. While he doesn’t detail exactly why this may be the case, he does lay out a series of examples of what goes wrong when the regime of private property is transgressed, that he labels as “evils”.
This is where we can link the two opposed justificatory theories of property in an interesting way. The first evil that Bentham proposed is the evil of non-possession. He explains that “if the acquisition of a portion of riches be a good, the non-possession of it must be an evil; though a negative evil, and nothing more”. If we pay close attention this bears a striking resemblance to the logic of John Locke when he is discussing the waste of ‘unimproved’ land. In fact, in describing the colonial project in North America, Bentham makes this similarity even more evident. “One could almost believe that one saw, at one view, the two empires of good and evil. The forests have given place to cultivated fields; the morass is dried up; the land has become solid—is covered with meadows, pastures, domestic animals, smiling and healthy habitations”. To be clear, the empire of good in Bentham's view is the agricultural colonial society that is displacing the indigenous “empire of evil” that he perceives as wasting the land. This idea of waste that is common to both Locke and Bentham is intimately linked to the justification of colonial dispossession of indigenous communities in North America. The same logic would go on to form the basic ideology underlying the enclosures that dispossessed rural communities in the UK.
Waste in the light of ecology
It is important to clarify at this stage that we cannot disregard the willful ignorance of both Locke and Bentham about indigenous communities' relationships with their landscapes. However, the logic that they articulate still undergirds the way that we think about property and has shaped the histories of land rights around the world. It is in this context that modern ecological science gives us a lens to reexamine those areas of ‘waste’ that were treated with such disregard.
The story of anthropocentric ecology and conservation over the last few decades can perhaps be summarised as the gradual accumulation of knowledge showing how dependent we are on complex resilient ecosystems. We now understand that healthy ecosystems are dynamic, complex, and susceptible to change. We also know that many ecosystem processes directly and indirectly benefit us. These benefits are frequently referred to as ecosystem services and categorised as provisioning, regulating, supporting, or cultural.
Seen through the lens of ecosystem services the ‘waste’ identified by Locke and Bentham was likely to have been land dominated by non-agricultural ecosystems that were focussed on more than just provisioning. Locke's vision of 'improvement' leading to agriculture, and the rolling pastures celebrated by Bentham, in practice represent the collapse of wide-ranging ecosystem services into a narrow band of provisioning services. These interventions represented not a net increase in the 'value' of ecosystems, but the maximisation of exchange value. With our current understanding it is clear that these areas of ‘waste’ do in fact have value, but that value is non-excludable in nature and is therefore a public or community good.
Viewed in this way, nature restoration projects could be said to be undoing the very process that John Locke saw as justifying the original possession of land. In effect, restoration is the ‘unworking’ of land to establish a functioning complex ecosystem that can provide the public goods that are incompatible with enclosed land. In effect the range of ecosystem services expands to include those that benefit us all such as enhanced carbon sequestration, a regulating service.
In fact Locke suggests that even once land is enclosed, if its productive use is not maximised then it is morally justified for the land to be repossessed by someone that is willing to make use of it in a way that Locke deems worthwhile. He argues that if “either the grass of his enclosure rotted on the ground, or the fruit of his planting perished without gathering and laying up, this part of the earth, notwithstanding his enclosure, was still to be looked on as waste, and might be the possession of any other”. This raises the interesting possibility under this framework of thought that the provision of public goods by healthy ecosystems undermines any moral claim of private ownership and enclosure. In other words, Locke is suggesting that an individual seeking to restore ecosystem functioning cannot protest the repossession of their land by someone else. In these circumstances, admittedly anachronistic and contrived, it can only be through other forms of ownership that land in a state of restoration could be morally defended.
This idea of nature as wasted potential is powerfully articulated by Goldstein (2013) as Terra Economica in their exploration of English enclosures. Terra Economica is described most succinctly as land “available to become capital—or otherwise wasted”. This roots the philosophical ideas articulated by Locke and Bentham in a material account of how land came to be privately owned in England. The Board of Agriculture was created in 1793 to oversee land reform in England and abroad, in each case this entailed the subjugation of those already living on and using the land. Goldstein quotes the Board’s first director John Sinclair writing:
“We have begun another campaign against the foreign enemies of the country...why should we not attempt a campaign against our great domestic foe; I mean the hitherto unconquered sterility of so large a proportion of the surface of the kingdom?...Let us not be satisfied with the liberation of Egypt, or the subjugation of Malta, but let us subdue Finchley Common; let us conquer Hounslow Heath, let us compel Epping Forest to submit to the yoke of improvement (1837:111).”
Goldstein argues that there is transition during the enclosures to seeing common land, both cultivated and uncultivated, as being of not just of no value, but as having negative value as they are not maximising production for a capitalist class. In other words there is an unexploited potential contained in the natural landscapes. This led to the traditional harvests from natural ecosystems managed in common being enclosed and inaccessible to those that used them as a safety net of provisioning. This played out across rural England and abroad in the colonies such as Canada and India, directly dispossessing and impoverishing those who previously accessed the land as commons.
However, this analysis is still focussed only on the transition of provisioning services from common to private hands. For example a piece of common land previously used by a community to harvest firewood might be cleared in favour of grazing sheep. Alongside this, we need to also recognise that there was a transition in the access to, and decision making power over less tangible public goods that would fall into the other three categories of ecosystem service: supporting, regulating, and cultural. These may not have been as evidently important or understood hundreds of years ago through the lens of western science, although indigenous knowledge was articulating a very similar message. Today we can see that control over these vital processes was also captured by enclosure. This makes calls for the right to roam increasingly vital as we appreciate that nature promotes our physical and mental wellbeing and is inaccessible to many people. The transfer of control of these processes has materialised as a failure of private owners to mobilise enclosed land for the establishment of nature and the resultant public goods it could provide. In our current crisis of ecological and climate breakdown, the power over these processes is existential. The enclosure of the land and the resulting concentration of governance has serious implications for our efforts towards mitigation and adaptation.
This process of enclosure is not just consigned to history; public sector ownership peaked in the 1970s in the UK at around 20% of all land in the UK (Christophers, 2018). Following the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 there has been a firesale of public lands under a wave of neoliberal policy. This was ushered in under a broader narrative about a wasteful and inefficient public sector. In particular it was argued that surplus land in the public sector should be sold to unlock the superior economic efficiency of the private sector in providing housing, jobs, and growth. The nuances of these assertions have been forensically dismantled by Christophers, who summarises that “it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the decades-long public-land-disposal project pursued by successive British neoliberal administrations has been not merely the (inevitably flawed) enactment of that flawed logic but, but, at least partly, also a function of ideology, politics and private-sector lobbying.”
There is a widespread culture in government and surrounding influential institutions that regardless of the evidence, public ownership is intrinsically undesirable. This has a clear parallel with the idea of Terra Economica, in that the very existence of land in public hands, and not in private production, is seen to have negative consequences. As part of a 2012 report into economic growth Michael Heseltine wrote that “Alongside inefficiencies in the planning system, derelict and unused properties are a major drag on our local economies”. Christophers suggests this reflects an attitude that the very existence of publicly owned land is not just of no value, but that it diminishes value.
The key link to make here is that the moralising discourse surrounding land ownership is deeply entangled in its economic and ecological implications. If the current paradigm continues to avoid discussion of land ownership, this is directly linked to the taboo-like moral panic that is instigated when it comes to collective ownership.
Privatising the provision of public goods
In a recent paper Kedward et al (2022) set out an economic argument for why the current focus on treating nature as an asset class to be invested in for financial returns may not be the best way to address the ecological crisis. They argue that in order to render healthy ecosystems viable as financial investments, there is a huge amount of money needed to monitor and check the effectiveness of restoration efforts. This is because a private investor is fundamentally indifferent about whether ecosystem restoration is successful. Instead, investors generally prioritise proxy measurements, such as area conserved, over better measurements of restoration quality, such as species diversity and abundance. Furthermore, they argue that for the state taking the role of de-risking private investment in nature, often known as blended finance, is fundamentally inefficient and costly when compared to direct public investment in providing public goods.
What is identified in this paper is that the contradiction between private property and public goods results in the construction of an inefficient, costly, and precarious structure of voluntary and codified markets in nature.
The implications of this are that where private efforts are incentivised they can become singularly focussed on one service at the expense of others. As reported by ZDF, REDD-Monitor, found that the supermarket chain Aldi had purchased carbon offsets in order to market its products as ‘carbon neutral’. The records of the specific project can be found in Verra’s database and show that it involves planting forests consisting “of Eucalyptus grandis, Eucalyptus globulus, Eucalyptus dunnii, Eucalyptus maidenii, and Pinus taeda” in Uruguay (Carbosur 2012). These species are not native to Uruguay and are planted in homogeneous stands, actively blocking the growth of complex biodiverse indigenous ecosystems. This is just one of countless examples of the consequences of private “nature restoration”. Instead of developing resilient ecosystems that provide a variety of benefits, economic incentives prioritise maximisation of a one-dimensional return on investment.
Solutions
The contradiction that we have explored can only be addressed if we stop trying to pretend that it doesn't exist. Nature provides public goods, these are not excludable, and therefore not profitable in a traditional sense. Instead of building elaborate, flimsy, and inefficient markets that avoid asking any serious questions about the nature of ownership, we need to conceptualise the benefits we derive from nature as public and therefore treat them as such. There is a role here for the state as it can front the investment costs, coordinate landscape scale restoration, and provide access to expertise (Kedward et al, 2023). However, there must also be room for communities in this new structure of governance. Ecosystem services operate at a wide variety of spatial scales, for example flood water regulation by restored land cover is a benefit felt locally unlike carbon dioxide sequestration which has global implications. Cultural ecosystem services are also often more locally rooted. There is accumulating evidence that exposure to nature provides physical and psychological benefits that make us happier and healthier. The need for contact with nature through access to ecologically functional spaces is in direct conflict with the exclusionary rights that come with private land ownership. This strengthens the argument for community-based models of ownership that prioritise the ability of local people to access the land around them.
A 2020 report by the Scottish Land Commission looked into the “International Experience of Community, Communal and Municipal Ownership of Land” ( Mc Morran et al 2020). They detailed a range of governance models from around the world that varied in the security of tenure and the extent to which the local community holds control of the land being governed. This highlighted: “the relatively low intensity of management on many common land areas, which has led to these areas being designated and maintained in the long term. This provides a range of ecosystem services and protects cultural systems. This presents an interesting counterpoint to the prevailing emphasis on agricultural productivity and economic growth.”
The report suggests that the loss of these types of systems “combined with an over-emphasis on productivity and private tenure, can therefore result in the loss of public goods”. However, this combination of private tenure and an overemphasis on extractive productivity is not simply an unfortunate coincidence. It is, rather, an inevitable outcome. The apparent ecological benefits of commoning land offer hope. If we are able to prioritise and expand locally appropriate forms of collective ownership of land, that balance the needs of local communities with broader national and international priorities, it is possible to move away from ecological degradation.
Conclusion
A refusal to address the benefits we receive from nature as public goods has led to either an unworkable system of private nature restoration or no restoration at all. This is rooted in the understanding that private property will always fundamentally view healthy ecosystems as wasted spaces that could be ‘improved’ to provide more exclusive value for their owners. To address the ecological crisis we cannot simply try to incentivise private land managers to restore their land, as their inherent perception of nature as waste will derail an effective and scaled solution. Instead, we need to reframe who owns and governs land in order that we can have a democratic say in prioritising public and community goods that support us all. This means seeking forms of ownership that do not contradict nature restoration, that can support a plurality of interests, and that benefit biological diversity.
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