Trade in Environmental Services
“Environmental Services”, or “Ecosystem Services”, is an invented term developed within the capitalist economy by biologists and economists since the 1970s to indicate that nature provides a series of services important for humankind like water, biodiversity, fertile soils, etc. It is directly linked to the idea of putting a price on nature as the only way to be able to protect it in future against destruction. This would lead to a system of payment of “environmental services” and even trade in these “services”, through transforming them in financial assets, to be sold, traded and negotiated in financial markets, and therefore a further step in the mercantilization of nature. This way of thinking is opposite to the relation established with nature by forest-dependent communities. They protect forests which are their home and cannot be sold or bought, it is priceless.